hello,
I'm a new member on this forum, and i have studied carefully especially SDS2000X Plus articles. This forum is very good and informative, it has helped me in my decision to order one SDS2104X Plus oscilloscope with bundled options package. I got the scope about week ago, I'm impressed of the device. Now I have a lot to learn how to use it efficiently.
Be thankful you couldn't afford a lecroy Waverunner 9054 or you'd be spending the next 12 months familiarising yourself with its rather fulsome and complex feature set. I'd thought the "20GSa/s" in Martin72's post must have been a typo until I did a search on "lecroy Waverunner 9054" and found LeCroy's specifications list. I spent a good 15 minutes alone just trawling through its impressively long feature set!
Then I spotted this item;
Nominal Power Consumption 285 W / 285 VA
Max. Power Consumption 375 W / 375 VA (with all PC peripherals and active probes connected to 4 channels)
And, to think I used to feel a bit miffed over the 54W my SDS2
1504X+ was burning up! Strange how all it takes for an attitude adjustment to kick in, is to look at just how much greater an issue this is in kit that's at least an order of magnitude higher in spec.
One thing I noticed about that power requirements spec, was the implied 1.0 PF rating which made me think that the only way to achieve such a rating with most smpsus is to power them directly from a DC source which, strangely isn't a listed option (possibly simply due to it effectively disabling the AC line trigger input option).
After few days I also noticed a faint ticking noise on the scope fan. I opened the torx10 screws on scope's backside near the fan some amount. Believe or not but the faint ticking noise disappeared from my device. In my case the screws were originally very tight, maybe the fan were slightly compressed.
If you're testing a collection of fans taken from scrapped desktop PCs, all it takes to quieten any 'ticky' ones is to gently twist their frames or conversely, to make them 'ticky' when checking a prospective replacement for the possibility of a silent fan turning into a noisy one after being mounted in place a faulty fan, The clearances are so small that it doesn't take much distortion of their frames to turn a perfectly quiet fan into a 'ticky' fan, so I rather think you've found 'the cure' in this case.
A lot of this kit is assembled with powered screwdrivers set to a dangerously close to the limit torque setting. Managing to loosen those torx10 screws without the extra stress of this action being the final straw that strips out the insert (or threads in the case of self tappers straight into the plastic) and tightening them back up to a more sane torque level is a good thing to have done regardless, It reduces the chance of such extraction damage years later, possibly even the chance that the overstressed thread inserts or plastic finally give way before you ever get round to undoing those screws.
I can't say I noticed any ticking sounds when I first tested mine just over a year ago (and I did make a point of closely auditioning the fan, mainly listening for the level of wind rush rather than for any out of place ticking noises).
Admittedly, my hearing isn't as good as it used to be just 5 years ago but I can still hear any higher pitched noises such as the 495Hz PWM from an Arduino Nano that's controlling the speed of an 19 volted 12v CPU fan cooler bolted to the baseplate of an LPRO 101 I've been running on my test bench for the past two or three months.
I've just powered the SDS2000X+ back up to check and placing my ear close to the fan provides no hint of any such noise, just the faintest perception of wind rush noise, so I guess I'm one of the lucky ones in this regard.
Perhaps the torque settings had been spot on when mine was being made and they've since drifted higher with the more recent production batches?
This observation of noisy fans seems to be associated with more recent purchases, so this is a reasonable guess at a likely cause for this detriment. Anyone else who has experienced this particular annoyance could well benefit by following your example, even if it's just to check whether these torx screws have been over tightened and to remedy the situation to save any problems in the future.