Railworks America

A fan on the side? Near the videocard? That one is supposed to blow cool air over the videocard. So I consider it normal to blow in. If there is a grill over it, make sure to keep this free from lint and dust.

Yes, it is quite normal for a powerful PC to start up with its fans spinning at full rpm. They do settle down after a while?
Otherwise you should look into the BIOS settings. There usually are entries about the fans in the power section. Please supply make and model of you computer's motherboard if you are unsure.

What brand and model case your dealer used? Was it a custom build? We can peruse the manual just to make sure about the fan arrangements.

I have a 120mm fan blowing directly on the video cards on the side of my computer. It is quite normal. You may have others in other places that are blowing in or sucking air out of the machine. These fans can kick on or rev up depending on the temps the motherboard is sensing in the system. As far as heating up, yes it will get quite warm, sometimes warm enough to heat a room if you leave it on for a bit. When running normal apps, my rig hovers around 90-95F. When I kick Raikworks in, the video cards themselves will hit betweem 150-170F. No worries.

Normal airflow thru a case (well, normal for me anyways yes, that is what my hair looks like today) is in from the front, out thru the back. I prefer negative pressure, meaning more air being exhausted by fans than pumped in by fans. My Cooler Master HAF 922 case has one huge front intake, a nice size rear exhaust, and a really huge top exhaust. Board temp will never get above 50c. CPU runs maybe 65c with all four cores running Folding @ Home 100%. Cooler Master Hyper 212 cooler. The side fan deal, if I had one (I only have a mesh grill on the side) it would be pulling air in like Jerry and Kanawha said, pointed at the video card.

Video cards are are a different subject. If you have an Nvidia card, get the EVGA Precision Tool http://majorgeeks.com/EVGA_Precision_d6209.html It will let you see the card temps and also you can increase the fan speed. I run my fan about 85%, kinda noisy but Folding runs the card at 99% usage. That's pretty brutal, so I gotta cool it down somehow.

I also have all the fans in the case and on the CPU running at 100%, nothing is temperature controlled. But that gets into where and how the fans are connected, and also some motherboard BIOS settings, which you may not be ready for, young Padawan.

Oh, and with all three of my PC's running Folding 24/7, I don't need a room heater at night.

The fan on my card absolutely hums when I load Railworks. 5 hours/day of route building... I just hope it burns out before the warranty expires and not just after.

You know most of the energy consumed by comptures is wasted as heat? I was surprised to learn that less than 5% of the power consumption is used for the actual computing.
My advice it to keep all fans and grilles free from lint and dust, also tobacco smoke is as bad for your computer as it is for yourself.

On topic, I am not so much concerned about case and chip temperatures but rather about hard drive temperatures. Chips can be replaced, at a price, but the contents of your hard drives can be priceless and irreplacable.
Therefor, apart from a simple backup stragegy you should adhere to, I like to keep the number of drives per case to a minimum. I also prefer to mount them up front, as low as possible or directly behind an intake fan with adequate circulation around them.
Those professional cases with 120 mm fans in the front allow them to be mounted crosswise in the airflow, which is excellent. Ideally, the drives should be kept at max 10C above ambient room temperature and never exceed 50C. So if you live in a particular hot part of the earth, or have your hobby den up in the attic, or in a southside room with full height windows and no shutters or conditioner, you should pay extra attention to hard drive temperatures. Insufficient circulation inside your computer's case can lead to heat build-up and the relatively solid metal housing of hard drives collects and stores this heat. The platters that rotate inside the hard drive housing are made of glass, and glass is actually a highly viscous liquid that does loose its shape over time under heat and stress.

In my second floor game room, facing south, under a gently sloping roof, it easily gets close to 40C on humid summer days here in The Netherlands with the windows closed and curtains drawn. The hard drives get close to 50C and I have to take it easy and keep the an eye on the S.M.A.R.T. monitor so as not risking their lifespan.

Be especially careful with any SSD's, they aren't that S.M.A.R.T. and die on you without warning.

I haven't heard anything on the thermal specs for an SSD. Love the speed, but the darn thing puts out a high pitched whine like a dog whistle when it's accessing data. As far as data backup, because of the limited space, I write the data to a regular large platter drive, and then back up to an external. Only Railworks amd the OS are on the SSD.

Love the HAF cases. Nothing ventilates like a 932.

You'd be surprised how tough computers can be, even though they are portrayed as very delicate. I ran one in an un-ac'd room for 3 years about six hours a day with a Pentium 4. 103F in the summer, 20F in the winter. It was still running fine after six years of use before retirement. A lot also depends on how well you maintain them. Regular cleanings help a lot.

Funny that solid silicon can makes noises, perhaps some microscopic piezo-electric resonation? One of my rigs makes exactly that kind of sound when it boots and does the memory check.

I have only one small SSD, on which I keep a few testing installs of RW3. I can mount it through eSata to my various computers and compare hardware and software configurations.
I cannot break it in case I drop it, since they are so small. Them SSD's are fast, but still RW3 stutters upon entering well populated tiles with a very long train.
Not that this makes real difference with RW3, it runs almost as good on my 2.4 Ghz Dual Cores as on my 4 Ghz Octo Core Bulldozer.

What irrititates me most about this SSD it that is has no "is removable" register nor any S.M.A.R.T capability. Without that particular register I cannot unmount it live from the AHCI controller. Have to shut down and restart, defeating the purpose of eSata, obviously. Any old notebook HDD will mount and unmount like I expect but these click and rattle like mad under the strain of RW3.

Be careful not to void any warranty if you bought a ready made brand name computer. HD contents are never covered in the first place.

Yes, that case fan low up front is a very good solution. Make sure it draws cool air in and blows it over the hard drives. There usually is a direction/flow arrow on the fan housing but you need to look very good to find it. Never tinker with cables, connectors, etc on a live and powered on computer. Current power supplies are very powerful and easily melt any cables or worse if you short something while fumbling around in a cramped case. Happened to me once, and I was not happy!

You have found the fan speed/temperature control options in your computer's BIOS?
I think it is best to leave that front fan on at full speed all the time, in that case get an extra quiet one. More expensive but it'll be easy on your ears and nerves during long repainting/hacking/driving/gaming sessions.