Rebuilt my PC a bit

[Taosaur]

Back in November/December I decided to snag a 240GB SSD during the holiday sales. I did a fresh install of Windows 7 and reinstalled or updated all of my drivers and yea, my boot was bequickened and Chrome opened instantaneously and a variety of things were made a bit faster. But. Either the new drive configuration or the newer drivers for onboard audio or some damn other thing introduced an audio hiss into my surround sound. Boooooooooooooooo. I put up with it for a while, but eventually snagged an ASUS sound card for $27 to fix the problem and hopefully upgrade my sound a bit. Okay, cool. But. While installing the sound card my screwdriver slipped and bounced off my GPU's heatsink. Ever since, anything GPU intensive (mainly games, not video) would lock up my system. Boooooooooooooooo. I put up with the new glitch for a couple of days, then boned up on the last couple generations of vid cards and hopped on Ebay. I was trying for a HD 5870 or GTX560, but ended up with a decent deal on a HD 6870 (paradoxically a scoonch less powerful than the 5870). When it arrived today, however, I discovered that it was practically bigger than my PC (ATX mid-tower). It didn't look like there was any way it would fit. Boooooooooooooooo. I ended up disassembling half the PC, but I found a way to make everything fit. I had to pull out the bottom drive bay, pull all the RAM sticks so I could slide my hard drive into the middle drive bay, rearrange all the wires, and screw my SSD (or its 3.5" adapter tray, anyway) directly to the bottom of the case because there was nowhere else to put it (there's a card reader in the other slot of the middle drive bay). So now my PC is finally back in full working order and then some. The SSD brought my overall Windows Experience Index up to 7.1, and the new GPU took my vid scores from 7.3 to 7.8 (0.1 shy of the max score for a Windows 7 machine).

[reci]

Just curious; how much better does having a sound card make the audio quality, as compared to a ~$100 motherboard's onboard audio? As reference, what's the average bitrate of your audio collection?

[Taosaur]

I can't say I've put the sound card through its paces much, but I was pretty satisfied with my onboard audio (the ubiquitous Realtek HD Audio) before it developed the hiss. A bit of searching revealed that it's a fairly common issue. Aside from my sound now working properly, I don't notice a huge difference. Sometimes it sounds a little better than my onboard used to, and sometimes it sounds about the same. Most of the music I listen to on my PC is actually streaming--I use a Pandora Client called Elpis streaming AAC-Plus with the Bass Audio Engine, which usually sounds great, or Songza which is probably 128kbps mp3 and sounds mediocre, or sometimes random techno from pumpyouup.com when I'm gaming. I listen to my local collection almost every day, but only on my phone or tablet. In my last PC, a sound card helped a lot, but with modern onboard audio my approach is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. In my case, it was broke, so I grabbed the cheapest decent option that would work with my 5.1 speakers (the DG runs $27 on both Newegg and Amazon, w/ free shipping on Amazon).

[Taosaur]

So I really was going to stop mucking around, but storage was getting tight and I saw a good deal on a 3TB drive I had an idea for that drive cage I yanked out last time: a not-so-hot swap bay in the wasted space of my quintuple 5.25" cage (the big enclosure on top in the OP, completely empty except for a dead optical drive and some cables). So, yesterday I tore down the whole PC, pulling off both side panels and all of the front 5.25" bay covers. I got a ton of dust out of the front panel and around the drive cages. The GPU and RAM came out again so I could yank and wiggle the 500GB HDD out of the floppy/card reader cage I'd jammed it in, and I finally yanked the years-dead optical drive. I seated the loose drive cage inside the larger enclosure, but no screw holes lined up, so I ended up tying it down with heavy-duty twist-ties and wedging the main trunk line from the PSU into the gap. My drives slid in through the front and I put an 80mm fan w/ blue LEDs in front of them to pull in air (the whole box is 5*C cooler now), put two grill pieces in front of that and replaced all but one of the bay covers. The fan and grills are just kind of jammed in place, not screwed down at all, so I might refine that a bit, but now I have a cooler case, more accessible hard drives, and a light up grill in front. I left the SDD where it was in the original pic, because it looks cool That's foil jammed on either side of the grill to close the gaps against dust.