I had once a dream about multiple fading LEDs, which is now postponed to distant future. Grey stuff is thermal insulator (bad, bad) acting as noise suppressor.
I originally painted the intake black to spice up front panel's general looks.
This was my previous workhorse and it is now a googler in my hobby room. I have made few minute modifications, which includes LEDs, noise killing and cooling improvements.
In my Celeron era I acquired 3 hard drives and 3 CD-ROM drives,
so my BX440 based mobo ran out of the IDE connectors. To solve the
problem and gain more speed, I bought Abit HotRod66
UDMA-66 controller. Which turned out to be an another problem ...
HR66 has its own header for HDD LED, so I needed an extra LED. I decided
to connect the original Power LED to HR66 and add the new one somewhere else.
Because my new maxi-tower had stylish curvy air intake with fancy holes I
came with an idea about stars in the night sky.
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Blue LED and the pale shade of green I had once a dream about multiple fading LEDs, which is now postponed to distant future. Grey stuff is thermal insulator (bad, bad) acting as noise suppressor. |
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The sky full of stars I originally painted the intake black to spice up front panel's general looks. |
I overclocked my Celeron 300A to 450 MHz and to prevent heat problems I added HSF with double 40 mm fans. Soon I became bored fans high pitch whining and added self-adhesive thermal insulator to every bare surface. Thermal insulator removed that high pitch noise and also attenuated resonances and hollow echoes. This led to increased case temperature, so I installed cheap 80 mm case fan, which of course increased noise. The result: the noise was in the same level as in the beginning, but its tone was much more comfortable.
Later I changed my hard drives to silent 5400 rpm Maxtors and upgraded my Slot1 mobo to FC-PGA mobo. New orientation of CPU enabled more options for more silent cooling (read: Papst fan).
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Sound of Silence Notice the hand-made ventilation holes to thermal insulator. PSU posing here is the original one that came with the case. It is now replaced by Zalman (medium) Noiseless PSU. |
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HDD cradle To reduce crackle from HDDs' head movement, I separated them from the case with slices of fiber strengthened industrial rubber. As a side effect, HDDs got more free air between them. |
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Radeon The bearings of the Radeon's HSF were giving up and it was making annoying rumble. I detached the GPU fan and repositioned the case fan (Papst 19dB) to compensate loss of active cooling. |
When I switched my mobo from Abit (BX440) to MSI (i815EPT) I got option to use FSBs higher than 100 MHz. Obviously I had to test how my P3-650/100 would perform at 866/133MHz. It worked without a hiccup even after several hours of VirtualDubbing. Except the CPU temp was near 60'C and I had doubts about what could happen in a long run.
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Recycling In thermal insulated case the CPU fan was just circulating hot air. Inspired by some hardcore OCs, I cut a hole for a 80 mm case fan just over the CPU. That lowered the temperature, but with (cheap) fan, the noise was unacceptable. I found a passive solution from the trashcan - a dedicated fresh air tube. This gave me temps idle 33'C and under load 53'C. |
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Peephole My previous HSF, Titan Majesty aka ThermalTake Golden Orb, exposing itself. Nowadays beneath is copper Miprocool II with Papst 12 dB fan (see previous pic) and the hole has also a dust filter. |
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Power Update My maxi-tower was just an extended version of basic midi-tower. The PSU was in the middle next to CPU preventing efficient air circulation. It also made IDE cable connecting more difficult. When I upgraded my 230W PSU to more powerful Zalman, CPU started to send STOP:MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTIONs (hw failures) after few hours of virtualdubbing (!?). A great mystery. Docs said that possible causes were overheating and/or unstable/overloaded PSU. I could not believe to latter one, so I decided to take care of the heat. The case had some unoccupied space at the top. I took the metal sheet scissors and made a new cutout for PSU about 5 cm above the original. This solved my problem and new temps were idle 32'C, load 43'C. I wonder why I have not made this before, because it would have made my life much easier with cables. |