3XS Black Widow Extreme (watercooled)

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi Perfectionist

We have received the video and its hard to tell due to the quality what the fan noise is and if it is the fan or the noise of the water in the radiator

Please use the query you used when purchasing the system for any future correspondance this is constantly monitored by the 3xs support team, attachments can be sent to systemsupport@scan.co.uk

As the fan is turning I would suggest powering the system on and testing it out, the noise you are hearing may be due to the water flow, as the system has been in transit they can sometimes become unsettled and need running for a bit to get the water circulating.

Please test the system and unless the fan actually stops it will be fine

Regards

Ben

[Perfectionist]

Ok will do now... It really does sound like it's coming from the fan though especially when it suddenly started getting progressively louder after a while, I'll see if it does that again or if it calms down then

[Perfectionist]

Ok replied like you said (no change still, and found it stops if push the radiator closer to the case but back again after you let go, and sent another video)

Thanks

[Perfectionist]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=88pcULqgEfw (turn sound up because the microphone is crap, and make big or full screen) hopefully you see what I mean, it's like something's come loose or something, pressing the the pump+radiator+fan closer to the case stops the noise, but when you let go the noise comes back.

If any non-scan people know a quick fix feel free to butt in since I'm going to be waiting til tomorrow otherwise I think :/ I'm going to leave it on anyway overnight but it's not getting any better and from what I've done it would make sense for it to be the fan (I know it's just bloody bad luck)

[Pete the Painter]

Hi Perfectionist,

Had a few minutes to kill before a game of L4D thought I'd check the forums

The video was difficult to hear at work in the systembuild environment but now that I'm home and can wack up the 5.1 I'd probably hesitate a guess and say that it may appear that one of the bearings in the fan may be on its way out. If this is the case it's a real shock as they are the dogs

I'll speak with the guys in support tomorrow to see whats the best course of action.

I'll arrange to get somebody to call or email you tomorrow.

Regards,


Pete

[Perfectionist]

Thanks a lot, you are awesome. I'm surprised you don't have headphones there, that's what I do when I need to hear something precise

Yeah I think it's just one that came with the case, not a Gentle Typhoon one (it has no label on the middle bit and there's no black outline around the middle bit, the other 3 on the top which seem fine have Gentle Typhoon written on that bit with a black border and "SERVO Nidec Servo Corporation", googling apparently they are the manufacturers of Scythe fans and Scythe are just the EU redistributors or something, not that I mind it just confused me), it's the one on the very back.

It looks like the inner grey plastic circle of the fan is pressed right up so it's touching the case, I tried touching it and you can see it move in with the case metal when it bends slightly - though that doesn't make sense why it would stop making the noise when its pushed further up against it rather than grinding more so you're probably right, or maybe it's something like both...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nlohHHNB190

[Perfectionist]

Hey, got back the PC this morning, but it seems to be missing all the paperwork now? Original QA, receipt etc were still enclosed when I sent it back with the RMA number attached... I can't see anything in the box at all :/

Also, I just looked back on my videos out of curiosity and was thinking about removing em since it's all fixed now and saw that my Youtube account has been "suspended" and the videos I posted above have been deleted "due to terms of use violation" (on both) - did you have anything to do with this (I was not contacted by you at all about it), since it was my first account and I had only uploaded two videos which I posted to this thread? I really hope not and it's been for some other reason, though I can't think of anything I could've actually done wrong as they were very harmless videos mostly of a computer case...

[Philipp]

Hello Perfectionist,

I will chase up the paper work now for you, we would not have contacted Youtube what reason do we have?

Cheers

[Perfectionist]

Ah cool thanks.

I don't know, I figured someone from PR or something might have thought it would be a smart idea if they didn't think of that I would probably check back on them later. You say we wouldn't have contacted Youtube but are you able to say that no one has? Because it's quite serious, I looked through youtube's terms and if you have a suspended account you're not actually allowed to create another youtube account ever...

[Philipp]

Well I cannot answer for every single person in the company but I can assure you that no one from system build has contacted Youtube, further more no one would have any reason to contact Youtube.

I would fire a email across to youtube asking them why?

Best Regards

[Perfectionist]

I already have but I'm still waiting for a reply, they nor parent company Google have no phone support at all it seems. Yeah, I wouldn't have expected anyone in the customer-facing part of the company to do it don't worry, I'm not accusing you of anything, just I don't know much about the company as a whole and I've seen stuff happen like this before with other companies. Thanks guess I'll just have to wait, I hope you're right and something's just gone wrong or something.

[Chris P]

Perfectionist

I havn't seen these videos but can assure you we have to reason to report such videos even they showed issues with SCAN machines, it would not only be wrong but contradictory when we have a live support issues available to raise issues.

In addition hypothetically if we had reported such video's this doesnt automatically remove thems this would only flag them up with YouTube for them to investigate. YouTube has removed the content and suspended your account for reasons unknown at the moment but it would be interesting to know why as if this happens again a customer could come to the conclusion the issue happened here and this could wrongly reflect badly on SCAN.

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi Perfectionist

I have located the paperwork and it was an oversight by us that the paperwork never went back with the system we will post this out to you

Please accept our applogies

Regards

Ben

[Perfectionist]

Thanks Ben, no probs!

Chris: Still waiting for reply from Google/Youtube on circumstances of video removal ban/"suspension"/"termination" (used interchangeably on their site even though the words usually mean different things), though they have restored the account happily.

[Perfectionist]

Just to followup: Never got a reply back from Google/Youtube, they seem to be ignoring any mail when asking for details of alleged "hijack" (hack) of the account that they are claiming there was (despite nothing seeming to have been done to the videos just a ban for no apparent reason), no response whatsoever completely stonewalled. If it happened I don't see why they are so reluctant to provide any information or even reply back saying they've passed it on to the relevant authorities in the US if they won't here, seeing as a criminal offence has been committed by somebody - likely someone from these forums since the video was not posted anywhere else (and hadn't made an account for anything else). And as mentioned before (the link) they've deliberately set up things so that users have no way to contact them other than emails or webforms whatsoever, so yeah...

Of course it could be all BS and easy to blame bad policies/report(?) handling on "those nasty hackers". If so they picked the wrong person to try that excuse on, I have dealt with this kind of stuff before and I am not the kind of person who has EVER fell for a phishing attempt and it seems very unlikely that the password would have been able to be bruteforced...

[Perfectionist]

Anyway, since I doubt the incident is ever going to be resolved (unless maybe they paid attention if Scan contacted them, I don't know) moving on the reason I am back is I have some problems with the PC, figured here's probably the best place to post to keep context, system specs etc all together (I'm not in a huge rush I've been avoiding the issues on purpose for a while) but feel free to move this post to the support forum if necessary:

Been putting up with what seem to be problems with the USB ports/internal hubs for about a month, but just didn't want to mess around with possibly sending things back again (a) It's a lot of hassle especially that you can't set a time for them to pick it up and that they don't do weekends, you have to give up a whole day, and b) I am well aware that it's no good for the PC especially with how City Link seem to handle packages, I remember when they took the PC back to you last time their response to "Do you want a hand carrying it?" was nah that they were fine it's easier going down (and then pushing several £k of computer equipment down the stairs thumping down on each step, no joke), but I really thought I should bring it up now since I also got a couple more serious weird errors:
> the other day I got a "Overclocking failed" message upon booting the PC up (weird cos I don't think it is even overclocked at least the bios didn't say beforehand, I remember looking) and freeze there until I went to bios and resetted it all to defaults, bit worrying, not sure if it means there's anything wrong or not. Nothing was changed, came from nowhere.

> Also I have had 2 concurrent freezes of the whole PC (repeating a kind of "rrrrrrrrrrr" sound loudly) whilst watching Flash videos, seems to be reproducable, no idea what causes this. The whole PC actually freezes not just Firefox, CTRL+ALT+DEL can't even be used have to manually turn the power off.

>On the USB problems: When I boot my PC up it's like a lottery at the moment seemingly completely random whether it detects my keyboard and mouse, some times it seems to take forever before anything is usuable PC completely inaccessible and at other times it's workable as soon as Windows is loaded. The times when it's not usable there's nothing to do but wait about 10 minutes to see if anything happens, if not I usually have to reboot it again or try plugging the mouse and keyboard into different USB slots, which sometimes fixes it and at other times has no effect.
Later when it's apparently working my mouse seems to weirdly stop responding a lot of times (usually at least once per session) in a strange way, you can actually move the pointer but pressing buttons has no effect

Thanks for any help, I remember reading something about USB before on the forums a while ago but I think that was about problems with Vista (this is Win7 64-bit Pro)