white noise

I upgraded the CPU cooler in my machine this past weekend. I went with the Zalman cnps9500led. It’s 530 grams of copper love with a 92mm led fan. It’s cetainly the largest cooler I could have added – just a few millimeters of clearance.

I removed the AMD stock heatsink and fan (which didn’t feel any lighter to me) and cleaned up the old thermal compound with Artic Clean remover and purifier solutions. After appling a new bed of Artic Silver 5, installation was a breeze – probably even easier than the stock heatsink I’d say – just two screws hold it down to the mb retension bracket. From looking at the instructions, installing the cooler on other CPUs would involve siginificantly more effort.

I wasn’t thrilled with the two blue leds built into the fan, so before installing I set off to replace them with a couple red leds. I stripped the fan down as far as I wanted to risk and still couldn’t get to where I could unsolder the existing leds. Deciding not to press my luck with prying anything more apart I decided to leave it as is. Luckily the blue leds are not the usual super bright variety and don’t actually look too bad. The result is a nice purplish glow over the cpu.

So how’s it perform? A bit better – but maybe not drastically different. While encoding/burning DVD with Nero, both cores go to 100% for several minutes (at least a half hour). With the stock cooler the CPU temp rose to 54 degrees celcius. The typical idle temp before the upgrade was 47 degrees depending on ambient. With the new cooler, idle hovers around 42 although the CPU still briefly hits 54 degrees when encoding a DVD at full tilt. I have to say I’m shocked not to see any imporvement on the high end, however I did notice the CPU very quickly cooled to 44 degrees after the load easied off. I also have to keep in mind that (a) the processor is overclocked by 10% and (b) the thermal layer hasn’t really had enough time to optimumly bond yet. Another aspect I must mention is that the new cooler is MUCH quieter. So when you add up the lower temps (at low to moderate usage), the faster thermal recovery (after high usage), and the lower noise I’m still very happy with the upgrade.

So with my Roadrunner connection and my computer at opposite ends of the house and a floor apart, I haven’t been getting the best wireless throughput. After fiddling endlessly with antenna positioning, channel selection, and so on I decided I just needed MORE POWER (cue Tim Allen’s monkey grunt).

So I took down my (damn unique!) Sony router and access point and popped for a brand-freakin-new Belkin N1 router. That’s right N1, baby – none of that pre-N stuff for me. It wasn’t cheap, but nothing I buy is (hey, I’m lamenting here, not bragging!). It’s a slick little unit I must say. I spent nearly a full day hooking it all back up, reconfiguring everything to WPA instead of my previous WEP (that was long overdue), and positioning antennas and such. Netstumbler was a big help in optimizing the setup and in knowing which channels the neighbors are on so I could avoid them.

I went from a “good”, occasional 48/36/24bps to a pretty constant “excellent”, 54bps connection. The lag in online games isn’t entirely gone, but really damn good. My in-game pings are back down to sub-50 for the most part. All this and I didn’t even upgrade the cheap usb wireless adapter on the desktop to a new one with MIMO. Nice to know there’s more room for improvement (if I ever want to spend another $100 that is).

Plus if you want to pop some corn, you only need to hold the bag in the air.

So with Million Man Lan (MML5) fast approaching and figuring I’ll be having case window envy, I thought I’d try making a new transparent top lid to my case. My requirements were (1) it had to be cheap, (2) couldn’t involve modding any of the original case pieces, and most importantly (3) it couldn’t actually make the already sweet case look any worse.

I went to Home Depot and picked up a piece of Lexan (polycarbonate) and some aluminum angle (1″ and .5″). Total cost of materials was about $35. I debated going with something cheaper than Lexan, like arylic, but since my monitor will sit on this, I opted for strength and durabilty. Constuction took about 3 hours with the majoirty of that just for figuring out how to piece it together. A jig saw with a fine metal blade worked very good in cutting both the aluminum and the polycarbonate. I won’t go into gory details of the construction, but the Lexan slides perfectly until the top lip of the front face and it’s held in place with two thumb screws in the back (just like the stock lid).

Meanwhile I do still have the original solid aluminum top in the event I ever want to swtich back (like when it’s eventually rack mounted).

Another case tweak. After seeing my lit case, Mark B had a great suggestion of putting a photo of the case internals on the small LCD. After a few shots with different focal lengths and lighting I had one I liked. Yes, I actually set my camera inside the case, set the auto-timer, and quickly placed the lid on to get the shots. Nvidia’s desktop management feature lets you assign different wallpapers per display, so that was key in keeping my main monitor set to something different. At the right angle and from a couple feet away you can believe you’re actually looking through a case window.

Just made some tweaks to my case. I replaced the stock case fans with a couple quieter chrome ones and cleaned up the wiring a bit. The new fans have 3pin connectors that can be plugged into the mobo for rpm monitoring/control.

I also added two 4″ red cold cathodes to light things up. That makes for a really nice effect.

Even with the lid on, redish-orange light pours from the side grills and leaks from the front slots.

No worries, I mounted a switch for the lights in a PCI blank so it doesn’t need to look like a 16 year-old’s box all the time (I can just hear Lesko commenting on that now).

So, I guess it’s time I add it all up.

All in all that’s a little more than my goal of $2k, but this does include a new monitor and a copy of windows. This post will be updated with any additional purchases.

I’m in the OC now. No, not California, overclocking-land. Since getting the machine together I’ve been researching and tweaking, researching and tweaking. My first 3DMark06 score was 4656. Since then I’ve oc’d the graphics card (gpu from 475 to 525, mem 1360 to 1500), tuned the ram timings to the rated values instead of SPD (now at 2-3-3-6-1T from 3-3-3-8), and last night I started overclocking the cpu and fsb (actually htt for AMD).

I was sad to (re)discover that the cpu multiplier for the X2 cant be changed in the BIOS – it’s stuck at 11. Oddly enough though it can change itself – at one point I had the fsb cranked way up and the multiplier dropped itself to 9. I’m currently at my conservative goal of 2.42GHz (fsb at 220 and multiplier at 11). The is with the RAM still at 2-3-3-6-1T with a speed divider of 12, making the run at 201.7MHz – which isn’t really oc’d, but the timings are tight. The best part right now, is that everything is still at default voltages (1.39 core, 2.6 ram). I know I can take things a little higher with overvolting, but I don’t want to go too much higher (especially while all my cooling is still stock). Now that I’ve matched a stock 4800+ I’m pretty happy.

Latest 3DMark06: 5100 (will post more detailed stats later). I still need to run it through a prime95 test for stability, but gaming is working great.

So after about two months of piecing it together how does it do? It do good, real good. My first test was BF2 since that’s my game of choice lately. I decided to give it a good test right from the start by maxing out all the video settings at 1280×1024. As expected, my machine crushed the game. Frame rates were as high as 90 and rarely dropped below 60 fps even in the highest points of action. Silky smooth and hyper detailed.

The first step in putting the beast together was taking apart the case (removing the drive cages). Then I added the standoffs and screwed down the motherboard. It took some work to get the cover plate over the rear ports and into the back of the case, but in the end I’m glad it was a snug fit. After that I dropped in the power supply and connected the 24pin power to the board. It was at this point I realized just how much room was in the case…lots!

Check out that reflection in the chrome power supply. Too bad it will be tougher to see once everything is installed.

Next, I installed the processor which was a piece of cake with its ZIF socket.

Then I put a dab of Artic Silver on the cpu and I attached the stock heatsink.

Next to be installed was the RAM and the graphics card. I kept the BFG card in the PCI-E slot away from the power supply mostly to separate the two heat sources. Otherwise, not much note here. Everything slid into place just fine. Same with the DVD and SATA drives. Then a game port with a couple USB ports in the back. And lastly a lot of wires to connect everything up(front controls, fans, power to drives, DVD IDE cable, touchscreen USB and power conenctions, etc.). The only real surprise was that my 2 pin P4 power connector was almost too short to reach the far side of the motherboard. I’ll get en extender when I have the chance to clean things up, but it’s fine for now. Here’s a look at everything hooked up.

Saturday I loaded the OS, updates, drivers, and…ah crap, the DVD drive turned out to be on it’s last legs. It must’ve shaken out of alignment in shipping. It managed to load a few things (including BF2, thank you!), but the reads kept stalling and failing on many disks. So that’s going back to newegg for a swap. In the meantime, I’ve popped in my very old CD burner (which is actually in the pics above).

Today the last two key components arrived: the graphics card and the OS. For the graphics card I went with the BFG 7900 GT OC. It’s a 256MB, 256 bit, PCI Express x16 card which uses Nvidia’s latest chip (24 pixel pipelines). It comes out of the box slightly overclocked, but I might end up taking it higher. And of course I might eventually pick up another one to run them in SLI.

As far as the OS, I went with XP Media Center. Pretty easy choice here – cheaper than XP Pro and added media playback features that will work great with the small touchscreen on the case.

Now let the build begin!