white noise

Last week the case for the build arrived. I went with a pretty unique cube design. For a while I considered fab’ing my own case out of acrylic, but I really wanted an Aluminum frame with acrylic panels. Knowing that decent metal work is a little beyond my facilities, I went with a semi-custom case from Mountains Mods. They are a small shop in Oregon who makes Aluminum cases that are both well designed and well made. You can start with their stock designs and add custom powder coat paint and choose specifics like rivets and thumbscrews, or they can even take your custom designs and make aluminum panels and laser etch acrylic.

My case is a pretty standard “Twice7″ model except with three 120mm fan holes up front – that’s in addition to the single 120mm and two 80mm fans in back. It’s basically split into two cooling zones, the motherboard/expansion card area on the left and the PSU and drives on the right. It measures 14” in each dimension and weighs about 10 pounds empty, a bunch lighter than other cases. I went with a glossy, deep coat of red paint which will tie in fantastically with the other components. More build pics coming soon.

Several other parts showed up this week: the motherboard, the ram, and the graphics card. It was a very exciting day in the neighborhood. I finally could do a quick hook up to make sure nothing was DOA. So far, everything works like a charm.

A quick rundown on the latest parts for the few people who care:

• Foxconn Bloodrage motherboard:
  1366 socket, 3 triple channel DDR3 slots, heat pipe coolers for north and south bridge, 8 channel audio breakout board, dual Gb LAN, lots of overclocking potential.
• EVGA GTX 260 core 216:
  896MB, 448-bit, 55nm GPU, factory overclocked with room for more, plus a free game!
• OCZ Reaper DDR3:
  3 x 2GB, 1866, cas9, extended heat pipe coolers

Can’t wait to get the last few pieces and get crackin!

Part number two has come in: the power supply unit. I went with a Corsair model (HX620W) rated for a continuous 620 Watts. Although there are lots of supplies available with larger rated capacities, this PSU has a the build to actually exceed the rated capacity by over 100 Watts if necessary. While researching PSUs I learned that using much less than the rated capacity is inefficient (usually even less efficient than toward the top of the rated range), so having a bunch of power “headroom” is going to cost you – up front and over time. It seems the sweet spot tends to be in the 40-70% range. While I’ll be pushing the top end of that range, at least I’m saving some money up front on the cost of the supply (which was $120).

The PSU is rated as a “80 Plus” energy efficient supply but in reviews it usually runs in the high 80s. It’s also reported to have exceptionally good stability and low noise in all of its different voltage lines. This model also features a 50 Amp three rail design, modular cabling, temperature dependent fan control, and excellent overload protection. It doesn’t quite have the bling of my last PSU, but it should be solid for years to come.

How quickly time flies and how yesterday’s monster computer becomes just good enough to get by. This year I’m finally sending my previous computer build down to the basement as a full-time HTPC, and I’ll be building a new machine to take it’s place as my main rig. My current motherboard/ram/cpu is a couple generations old and the graphics card is three generations back. I could probably squeeze another year or so of decent use from it, but it’s regularly stressed now and having a little trouble keeping up with the 24″ monitor I’m using these days. Seeing the RAM and both cores maxed like this is becoming fairly common:

This weekend I just picked up my first component, the i7 920 processor. This is the low-end model in Intel’s new 1366 socket line of chips. The chip is a quad core, with an integrated, triple channel memory controller (Intel finally joins AMD’s thinking here), 8MB of shared L3 cache and a stock clock of 2.66GHz. Apparently it overclocks very well, too, making it much more popular than the other two higher priced chips in this line.

By the way, it’s interesting to see that my first post of my previous computer build was three years ago to the day.

Yeah, that’s right…we made another one. Joe, Cassie, Rob, Alex, and I all pitched in to get this beast ready just in time for MillionManLan 7. See how all the bits came together at DuctTapeServer.com.

News has been creeping along the internet since, including another spot on Engadget.

Another little mod to the gaming system this week. I picked up a nice Zalman video cooler on sale for about 25 bucks. I haven’t installed a GPU cooler before so I thought it’d be interesting to see what kind of impact it’d make. Here’s a look at my aging, but able, BFG 7900GT with the stock fan/heat sink.

Installation was simple. Just took the stock cooler off, cleaned off the old thermal compound, attached the new heat sinks to the ram chips and then mounted the new cooler. With everything back up and running I was first surprised at how much quieter the new one is. I have it running on 5V “quiet mode” (which is still ~2500 rpm) and it’s barely audible over the other fans in the case. Temperature-wise it’s equally impressive. Between idle and load the GPU temp ranged between the low 40’s to the mid 50’s, which is consistently 10 degrees cooler than with the stock cooler. Even though I’ve got the GPU overclocked by about 24%, I never saw it break 58C while gaming. Ready for this summer’s four day frag-fest!

I got home last night excited to find my replacement power supply had arrived.

• It’s the same model – yay! all my modular power cords will still work with this unit.
• It’s reconditioned – ok, fair enough, these are out of production and mine was over 2 years old.
• It’s blue.

WTF? While I’m super glad to have a fully functional PSU again, and it only set me back about $15 in shipping, I wasn’t expecting this aesthetic twist. I had this whole silver / red theme going and boom, they send me a blue replacement for my chrome original. Since only the unit was replaced and not all the modular cables, I’m now stuck with red braided cables coming from the blue PSU. The icing on this monstrosity is it has fans with blue LEDs which can’t be turned off.

Oh well, it looks like I’m perfectly prepared now for MillionManLan which falls over July 4th!

My computer has been out of commission for seven days. The power supply died in very unceremonious fashion. Luckily it was only 2 years and 2 months into a 3 year warranty so I was able to send it back for a replacement. Unluckily it will be another week before I can expect that replacement to show up.

In the meantime I’ve been able to catch up on some things around the house (and help Slick with a project of his own). Being gameless for a while sucks, but I’m so happy that it didn’t happen during this Summer’s MillionManLan!

UPDATE – I’m continuing to update this list as time goes on. It seems the news is still spreading!

Duct Tape Server had a nice rush of popularity over the weekend. News of the server and the site quickly spread to a number of news feeds and blogs, including:

• NEW – Nokytech (French)
• NEW – PC-Feber (Swedish)
• [H]ard|OCP
• Engadget
• MacMod
• Make
• Fractalspin blog
• Techzi
• Uneasysilence
• Blues News (Link of the Morning for June 21)
• Gamestar (German version)
• NeatoRama’s blog and Ultimate Case Mod List
• TechRepublic
• Liz Revision
• L33t G33k
• Geekman
• VideoSift
• StumbleUpon

There were also a couple posts on Digg and the YouTube video has over 4500 views now. OK, so maybe it never went “viral”, but it had its 15 minutes of online fame.

Yes that’s right…a server made from duct tape. We just completed this server which we plan to take to Million Man LAN 6 later this week. DTS is the brainchild of Blackbane and I as we decided that Team Boom Tape needed to send a message to our Duct Tape Wars competitors that nobody pwns duct tape like we do. Besides the computer components it’s completely made from TAPE!

We’ll have this thing on server row at MML, and it will run our Ventrilo (VOIP) server and as well as an Armagetron tournament we’re organizing.

For more details and pictures, check out its very own website.