UGH: The pops, crackles, buzz gremlins are back again...

[JoseC]

I recently was having noise problems with my computer, and changing my wireless mouse and keyboard for others cabled made a great deal of a difference. A Behringer HD400 hum destroyer box between the returns of my Tascam interface to the mixer made the rest.

[Sean Michael Robinson]

Hello everyone!

Okay, this appears to be solved for now...

While trying to diagnose this Friday night, I popped up a diagnostic tool that displayed, among other things, CPU temp... and my CPU cores were at almost 100 Celcius! Quickly shut down and took a look at the fan assembly, which was badly sagging. Since the bracket was broken, and the other side of the motherboard inaccessible with this particular casing, took it down to a local repair shop today, where they replaced the entire fan/heat sink for me.

So my intuition that this might be some kind of broader electrical or mechanical problem was correct. All seems well now!

Thank you everyone very much for your help! I've learned a ton here and I'm going to continue checking out these diagnostic processes to see how much I can continue to improve performance going forward.

Best,

Sean

[Promidi]

You are so lucky you didn't burn out your CPU.  Thank goodness for Intel's thermal protection - otherwise you'd be looking at a new CPU and possibly motherboard.

Glad it appears you you got it sorted.

[Sean Michael Robinson]

I'm indeed really greatful! Most likely I had a gradual sag/gradually less and less effective cooling unit through this whole process, hence part of the reason why I kept "solving" things for shorts amount of time-- cooling down while I ran diagnostics, shut things down/reset, etc. I had checked the temp a few times but apparently not often enough! Going to look into performance differences w/ more ventilation too...