after many failing bits, dodgy RAM, corrupt data and general lack of anything decent in terms of FPS during so of the even least intensive games it was decided that it had to go…well not quite it will get farmed downstream for something else, but definietly without the dodge bits…

so let me start from the beginning..or close there of…

got donated a Abit NF7-S from a mate, hence decided need a new case and obviuosly at that point matching processor and RAM, if I remember correctly it was a AMD athlon 3000XP or thereabouts…

Nice setup in the case, multiple HDD’s buy cooling was a bitch and the northbridge fan screamed fromtime to time…something after this minor upgrade was the additon of a decent (at that time anyways..) videocard. NVIDIA 5700 ultra – was never particularly impressed by it, ran loud and heated up my case!

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Next came the cooling upgrade, quite a whule after the video card came out, so a tracked down a dirt cheap cooler for the vid card from www.pccasegear.com.au, on special for $9 or something silly. Also picked up a stack of nice quiet nexus 80mm fans…..so what about that northbridge..yep fixed that screamer with a passive cooler..looks funky too.

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so this setup ran nice and quiet and had reasonble performance….could run CSS on its defaulted selected values (no HDR etc) and get about 35fps in the benchmark…nothing to write home about…but hey its worked!

decent cooling and a fairly stable system resulted in some overclocking, mainly on the video card…

using rivatuner (excellent program by the way) I bumped the 5700 ultra up to a core speed of 580 and memclock speed of 1100. With these setting I was getting a nice 48-50fps in the CSS bench, cooling was no issue barely even noticed it.

typically 23-25 degrees during idle and up to 50 degrees during stress.

So finally the 2008 upgrade, here are the specs. Note made the switch from AMD to Intel for the Proc on this occasion.

Proc: Intel E8500 (runs dual 3.16Ghz)

RAM 4gb Geil (nothing really special just 5 stuff)

Mobo: MSI P45-NEO2

Video Card: Gigabyte ATI/AMD HD4850

Power Supply: Corsair HX620

new 500gb seagate 7200.11

existing 500gb seagate 7200.11

existing 320gb seagate 7200.9?

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SO… if you live in a dust bowl like I do you probably experience the pleasure of remove caked on dust from inlets, outlets, grilles boards…basically everything! From time to time I get a seized fan, depending on the cost and quality they can be given a new lease on life or it can be worth just chucking it and getting a new one. PSU fans are potentially the most under-rated fans in the system, with one of these stopping things can get very, very interesting.

I tend to get decent quality PSU where possible, these are typically, but not limited too, Antec and Silverstone. These usually have a single large fan or two slower fans, these fans can be hard to get, even though they are not soldered in. Here is an example of a Antec fan that seized and was repaired with a good clean and a few drops of machine oil. Any sewing machine oil is suitable, as long as it is light Machine oil.

Obviously do at your own risk since this can potentially void your warranty – Note the “No user-serviceable parts” decal!

Remove the cover of the PSU – note voiding warranty now!

Problem fan!

Fan mounted…

Remove the plastic sticker and clear plastic cover on the DC motor….there is a little plastic cir-clip which needs to be removed, this holds the fan into the assembly, without it, the fan will take off when started!

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There comes a time when have ALL your junk on one box is just not on…..Over the years I have slowly converted my hardcopy multimedia to a more useable format on my desktop, this however becomes cumbersome when others on the network require access and you want to keep some sort of respectable performance and temperature on your desktop.

So theres only one obvious answer 🙂 get another box……

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Slowing starting to get tired of a flaky extremely cheap duron piece of crap as the proxy server, firewall and gateway…with that said I am still using the machine 🙂

Nontheless, and for the sake of a play with a 1RU server, I picked one of these older whitebox style machines off ebay for 40 odd dollars. The bloody thing sound very sick when I first fired it up so there was nothing to do but pull it apart for a look 🙂

These 1RU machines use very fast 40mm fans which kinda suck from the silent point of view and this machien used very cheap thin 40mm fans. Out with those and in with some old semi decent 40mm x 20mm guys running at a reduced voltage and things started to sound a bit better, the loudest item is the PSU now.

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