Hot Vs Cool,
Noisy Vs Quiet.

The story begins, all is quiet
  
Paddington station attacks Sarah's foot quite painfully, some time later she gets some money and promptly spends most of it on a motorbike for herself.
But she does give me five hundred quid which I use to replace a large unwhildey P200. 
I manage to get the following (in bits) ...
box (with basic PSU)
motherboard [KinetiZ 7E]
AMD thunderbird 1.4
512mb v.cheap
20gig
basic CDrom drive
floppy
soundblaster PCI
Nvidia GeForce 2 AGP
basic NIC cheap
 
I cobble the beast together and it is not noisy but it is HOT!
  
Motherboard utils allowed boot screen to be modified so as soon as windows was loaded and I had Gimped myself a nice background which came up on power on,
 
Got 120mm fan and modded case with air holes and mounted it on side (also 80mm on front)
Not good enough, had standard desk fan constantly blowing into case.
Cut out area of holes to increase air flow, got t-shirt caught in fan and BANG it disintegrated (fan not t-shirt).
  
Got nice coolermaster heatsink and fan combo, removed front fan as it was doing little/nothing.
machine was now cool enough to run by itself (most of the time)
got cheap CDRW
Cut out window of side panel (photo of modded case)
added neons (two blue, one red) 
drilled "bluenuht" holes (very difficult to get right with a hand drill)
added perspex and reduced noise substantially
added cheap 30gig drive
got Kensington video cam (only works with win98, fine)
 
wiped machine and installed linux (my linux endevors)
  
Kensington webcam is unsupported as I had flashed the ROM previously :(
got NISIS digital cam, doubles as digital videocam, stills cam and web cam (very cheap, has very small non upgradable memory) works in windows.
can not get it to work in Linux, even took it apart and noted all the chips.
got silent PSU
and Zalman flower (very quiet CPU cooler)
 
Things start to heat up as I try and quieten things.
  
got silent drives 
modded far side to allow CDR external as silent drives took up two of three 5 1/4 bays
removed unused floppy drive
CDR would not fit so removed
 
Things cool down as I add equipment that substantially makes it noisier :(
  
got rounded IDE cables 90cm
got HDD Andtech super cooler
got 80mm silent fan
hung on outside until i can find room for it.
Uh oh, bargains ho !
  
got HDD caddy (thought it was external bay and was cheap)
got 80gig cheap
rounded cables reached through modded CDR holes and rounded cables long enough.
mounted HDD caddy with 80gig drive in on top of case.
got CDRW+DVD  and replaced current CDRW
got logitech quickcam express v.cheap (no box etc)
cut out front of case for air flow (was sealed)
moved 80mm fan to old front pos of 80mm fan connected to main PSU
AGHHhhhhhh to noisy !
  
external bay fans VERY noisy, will use only for backup and specifics, so not on most of the time.
reconnected to super cooler and now only comes on when super coolers sensors are tripped.
Also hooked silent fan to cooler and only comes on when tripped.
found drivers for webcam , installed and have webcam.
Water cooling
  
Get water cooling setup Asetek L20
Take ages planing out where all the pipes will go
Try and remove previous CPU cooler (Zalman Flower)
 Try a little bit of pressure
 Try some more
 Give it some
 Give it all I have and eventualy the CPU is free
Spend time getting water cooling block on PCU and GFX card,
Spend time filling system up with special water.
Find system will not boot
Buy new AMD 2200 CPU
Boots but crashes almost straight away, even booting knoppix
Buy new motherboard (making sure compatable with existing memory SIMMs)
Find that AMD 2200 is only 1.2Ghz
[time passes]
Buy new CPU AMD Sempron 1.83Ghz 
Spend time draining and removing water cooling system
Add CPU and refill etc
BIOS notes the machine is now running at 1Ghz AGHHHhhh...!
Find setting on mother board to change FSB
BIOS now sees it as 1.5Ghz hmmmmm.....
Play in BIOS until machine will not boot.
Reset CMOS and have to set everything up again.
PCI LAN card refuses to work and previous on board LAN card starts working, weird
Find that ASRock K7VT2 does not support Sempron GRrrrrr.... !
10 steps forward 9 steps back.
and Linux keeps reporting APIC errors which is renound for badly matched CPUs and motherboards, but it does not crash !
Things start to fall a part
  
The water cooler pump stopped and everything turned off, the BIOS seems to have that as a safty mechinism.
So I goto PC World to get a GPU cooler but they only have ATI coolers GRRrrr!
So I have to buy a new GFX card, but I wont dual head, only have PCI dual head NVidia so I opt for that very good price.
Installed it and worked first time, no changes to any settings !!
But things in Gish are a little bit slower, but xscreensaver does not crash.
Well the machine 'seemed' stable with the unsurported Sempron but even though Linux ran without a hitch any reboots were frought with danger, so I switched back in the 1.2 Ghz AMD (using the heat sink/fan for the new 1.83ghz).
so I am now on a slower CPU 1.2Ghz and my GPU performance has dropped, (but non game stuff is fine).  
A new begining
  
Some months later with a loud grinding sound the harddrive failes luckery hdup was running nightly and I lost no files.
But I think it is time for a new system, the mods are messy and everything just reaks of old.
New system is ;
AMD 64 3500 (2200mhz)
Nvidia N6600 GT PCIeX
200gb SATA HDD
2x DVD RW
1x CD RW
and the case is the rather sexy CMStacker
and installed Gentoo
Present day
  
As with the universe I am trying to keep an eternal balance, noise Vs cool running.
The stock AMD CPU cooler is very loud and the CMStaker has 4 fans so is quite loud but I have my eye on some of the new water cooling systems, but no money at the mo :(

email history[*S*P*a*m*]ofmymachine@jumpstation.co.uk

root




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