So, put the little beast together. Fast, even with a little i3 7100. Got Windows 10 installed and activated pretty quick (once again a Windows 7 key works just fine). Haven't got the accompanying HiFi set up yet but decided to plug in the Cyrus DAC anyway. That involved picking up the tiny PC.

Ooh err, as characters in the Beano often say. As soon as I moved it, the fan noise changed from near silent to helicopter. Checked HWInfo and the temps were OK and the fan speed was steady(ish). Was there a cable interfering with the fan blades? Pretty sure not (there aren't exactly many cables in there) but powered down and checked. No stray cables and the fan was mounted firmly and square on. Mobo nice and tight too; case likewise. Best guess is that the fan bearing is dodgy. Have tried again loads of times with the same result.

Bought the case, fan and power supply from Scan. Haven't used them for years and their customer service has varied from not bad to dreadful and back. About to find out what it's like now.

That's pretty unusual, but I haven't faced a defective fan out of the box. Usually the bearings die in fits and starts after years of hard service (even the cheap ones). Do you know if it's sleeve or ball bearings?

As with Smiffy, it's never happened to me straight out of the box, but of course it's possible. Can you swap it out to another connector, either on the same mobo or in another machine? Just on the off-chance that it's power-related.

It's a sleeve type and there's a basic description at anandtech. 

Yes, it's odd. I've had a fan that didn't get on with a motherboard and case and caused the whole thing to hum with harmonics. I did have a supposedly silent-fan that was noisy out of the box, but it had clearly been used for some kind of extreme sport in transit as the packaging was badly damaged. Apart from that they generally do what they're supposed to.

This one is impressively quiet from start up. It also looks nicely made with a copper insert for the core. It uses the same split-pin mounting system as stock Intel coolers and loads of others. I've read some complaints about it being difficult to install and the design of the components and possibly material used doesn't give as positive a feel as some, but once it was in I could see it was square with the pegs locked in place and it was perfectly solidly positioned. It just goes ballistic if it's moved - even to the extent of removing a USB stick.

I've had a chance to look a bit closer and I'm convinced it's the bearing. I've left it running for 15 minutes and it does a steady and very quiet 1800 rpm. It keeps the CPU at around 32C which is fine. As soon the PC is moved it complains. A few times it even stopped completely for a split second as I could see the logo on the blades.

@Manthorp: yes, I wondered whether it might be a dodgy power thing, especially as the bios on the teeny weeny motherboard has some fancy fan management stuff that I hadn't seen before. It's one of those 'dual view' bios setups, with what's supposed to be an easy view as an alternative to a more traditional page by page, function by function setup. The easy view has 4 fan settings from quiet up to maximum. It also has some snazzy functions that allow you to fiddle with a graph of what the fan does as temperature increases. I left that alone. Yes, I could swap it into another PC, but do I really want to spend more hours ripping out fans and cleaning off thermal compound?

Scan asked for a video of it happening. I replied (rather snottily) that I could do that, but under the Consumer Contracts Regulations I'm entitled to a refund whatever the case. They immediately issued an RMA number and reply label. I have done a quick vid and sent them a copy. It's here if you're interested: linky to my noisy vid
It does look a bit as though the noise is because of how it's perched, but I left a bit of case overhanging so I could pick it up - and it does the same wherever I put it.

I read a long time ago to avoid sleeves, only do balls (nj). On the few occasions I did have sleeves (prior to following this advice), they seemed to wear out 2-3x faster than balls.

True that. However, leaving aside my fun with this cooler, balls are usually noisier.

Well, well, well. This is turning into the project that goes on giving and reminding me why I gave up building PCs. So, I took the fan off and cleaned off the thermal paste. Then I turned to the CPU and started to clean that too. Little bit of paste down the side, so rather than poke it further in with my tissue, I decided to pop the CPU out to be on the safe side. I never really looked hard at the socket, but blow me down if there aren't half a dozen bent pins - some really bent ones. I'm somebody who inserts a CPU as if I was nursing a lump of C4 wrapped in hot nitoglycerine, so I'm damn sure I didn't bend them. Everything booted OK so now I'm wondering whether to bother with a repair. 

Just as an example of what I often get with USB 3.0.
This is going...

• MicroSD card (decent V30 standard)
• Cheapo USB 3.0 card reader
• PC - Win10
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Server - Ubuntu 14.04
• 6TB drive USB 3.0

Transferring some 4GB files straight from the card to the network drive.



Obviously for what you want internal is the right option, but for when appearance/space isn't so much of an issue they easily compete with internal drives these days. Which is nice since many externals are sold cheaper for some reason.

Precious little difference between that and hdd to hdd over ethernet. In fact it's as good as I see ssd to ssd over ethernet (sata). 

Maybe my usb3 card, circa 4 years old, isn't as good as I thought it was.

Straightened out all the bent CPU socket pins. Ran Intel processor diagnostics a bit. All works. Scary stuff.

Huh? Isn't there a hole for each pin, so being bent would stop it connecting? I'm confused by the photo, there's only one bit that looks like the pins might be flattened, but several that don't seem in the right position, except where the two halves meet and they all look flat. Far too Eschery for my tired brain. :(

The machine was running with them bent, right? So are unconnected pins like bad sectors on a disk and the processor just ignores them and runs a bit slower?

Apparently there's a lot of redundancy in 'some of' the pins, whereas others are crucial. The photo is very difficult to make sense of without being able to look really clearly at the pins - I bought a jewellers magnifying glass to help with the straightening. They look pretty Eschery in real life and there's a bizarre perspective thing when you turn the board around and realise that the half that looked like dimples when the other half was little metal clips now look like little metal clips because they're bent in a different direction.

I decided to bend them straight because although I'm 99% certain I didn't do the damage - I'm really paranoid and careful when I move CPUs around and I've done it dozens of times - there's still that 1% telling me that I did it all and the processor won't work otherwise.

When I first examined the bent pins there were loads of straight fibres and bits of fluff in there that I blew away. I got the impression that some arse had maybe had a go with a cotton bud or microfibre cloth before discovering the Intel Velcro. 

"the Intel Velcro "

WTF is that?

LGA sockets (as opposed to a PGA on the processor itself). It seems that when Intel first adopted LGA sockets for their CPUs, a number of hobbyists and system rebuilders were caught out. They were used to preparing a motherboard for a new CPU by giving it a quick clean with an air-spray cleaner and then running over the board with a cotton bud and some isopropyl alcohol or similar. Quick and easy when the socket has loads of holes for a PGA processor (pins on the CPU, holes on the motherboard). But with an LGA socket you have hundreds of miniscule bent over very sharp copper contacts in the socket on the board, exactly like copper Velcro. Bye bye motherboard when you give an LGA socket a good clean with a cotton bud.

I did the same after bending a small cluster of pins in a corner pushing a CPU into its socket. Worked fine.

It's a relief, isn't it.

As I said, I'm 99% certain it wasn't me. I managed to break the 'near-field' connector on my other half's phone when fitting a new battery - tiny little metal springy thing about a millimetre all round. She has never missed it but ever since then I've been absolutely paranoid about messing around near little metal springy bits and fit CPUs etc with enormous care. Even so, when I looked at the socket there was that nagging doubt in my mind. ZIF sockets are so much easier and I've never bent a CPU pin. I can see the reasoning: mobo with an average cost of say £75 vs CPU with an average cost of £250, so put the pins on the mobo (also 'not my problem' for Intel).

Scan are being slow over my CPU cooler refund. I assume they're relying on insurance to cover costs so have to wait to get it back. When I've returned stuff to the evil-empire of Amazon, I've had the ping of a text notifying my refund seconds after the pick-up point has scanned my returns parcel.

So now the little beast is up and running (silently), I'm starting the lengthy process of ripping a few hundred CDs to .flac format, oh, and picking a music player. I say a few hundred, but I don't really know how many. It may be 1000 or more. I always assumed that the software choices would be easy, after all there are dozens of rippers capable of churning out FLAC and dozens of media players to choose from. Not so.

The first thing I found is that Windows 10/Explorer/WMP etc. aren't really compatible with FLAC. Yep, you can make WMP play FLAC with the appropriate codec and then Windows and Explorer will recognise them as music files. Problem is that Windows doesn't handle the metadata tags in FLAC properly. It's a bug that's been there for years and MS have no obvious interest in fixing it. Most obvious symptom is that all things Windows will truncate the displayed track/song title to 26 characters. Nor can you correct this by editing in Explorer via the properties dialog as you can with most basic metadata. What you can do is royally screw the existing metadata. Top tip: if you try to correct this with another tag editor then Windows is quite likely to deny that the file has any metadata at all. It's all there. If you use WMP as a ripper then it rips just fine and even downloads and inserts metadata just fine (some of the genre decisions are a bit weird but MS isn't alone in that). Well, I say 'just fine' but that's if you know to turn off autoplay and autorip. Otherwise it has a habit of missing all info for the track it started to play. Oh, and sometimes it ignores your decision not to autoplay and autplays anyway, unless you manually add a registry DWORD just for CDs. Oh, and WMP totally relies on metadata as a player, so that's a bit sad for FLAC. WMP will take a squint at the library it happily ripped, and organise it for you. Only it will miss a few tracks from an album. It will give you odd un-named albums from unknown artists (made up of the missing tracks). And it will sometimes decided not to play a track, but the next one instead. So, all in all, best to stay clear of WMP as a ripper and player if you're interested in using FLAC.

I know that many will say that's an obvious decision even without experimenting. But then there's the fun I've had since with some other highly regarded software...
 

You really are taking advantage of all the extra time you have with retired life!
I'd obviously recommend some sort of command line based Linux thing (if I knew of one), but I doubt that really helps you right now.

I've had a quick search and I think I may have used CDex in the past for MP3s. I also remember Exact audio copy being popular.

I always use dbPowerAmp for ripping and VLC for playback.

I've a feeling I did OK with something called Media Monkey last time I wanted to batch a load of music ripping. Something like that, anyway!