An Upgrade Path Special Report - Big Power, Tight Fit.
A lot has been happening in the world of computer technology lately, and I mean a hell of a lot. Dual-core AMD CPU's are affordable for the common geek, Intel has decided not to suck anymore, and graphics card performance is going through the roof while the prices drop to not far above lunch money. And I, of course, have been taking advantage of all of it.
But that's not quite the topic of this post; just a little intro.
As you all know, I build and upgrade computers. For myself. And everybody else. I love doing so. And I take special projects that are designed to fit particular needs within particular budgets. Sometimes those budgets are approximately zero, which limits me to whatever spare parts I have leftover or inherit from someone else. And other times somebody has some money and asks, "Given X amount of dollars, can you make Y happen?"
Yes. I can.
My brother-in-law doesn't have an online handle that differs from his real name, but if he did it would probably be FrisbeeNinja because he is one; thus I so dub him. He was creaking along last year with a dinky little turn-of-the-century era eMachine with a Celeron 667, crappy integrated graphics and a hard drive with roughly four times the storage capacity of a spiral-bound notebook, on a motherboard that was incapable of addressing more than 256 megs of RAM, in a case whose form factor could be called micro-ATX only if you feel the generosity that comes of severe intoxication. I promptly whipped up a 1 GHZ Pentium III machine with half-a-gig of RAM, a 60 gig hard drive and a Radeon 9000; hardly a powerhouse, but it was still far more useful than his nanotower and actually runs Halo quite well and Far Cry surprisingly decently - albeit on low settings.
That covered him for a while, but since being introduced to Far Cry, Total Annihilation, Halo and other gameplay goodies of graphical greatness he was interested in being able to do more. So I granted FrisbeeNinja dibs on my Athlon 64 3000 CPU when I upgraded, along with a larger hard drive that I had laying around and my Radeon 9700 Pro when it was time for that to go. I had a notion of getting him the same mainboard I use...
But FrisbeeNinja had a different idea. He wanted me to build a modern powerhouse of machine that he could use as both a media PC and a gaming rig... inside the shoebox-like confines of his old eMachine.
And I am soooo not kidding when I say "shoebox". This thing isn't merely small, it's tiny. Of course, therein lies the appeal for FrisbeeNinja; it will be unobtrusive next to the TV and ridiculously easy to haul around to LAN parties. And I rather liked the idea of a fairly modern powerhouse of a machine hidden in the shell of an ancient paperweight. So... I looked at what I could do to make it happen for the least money possible.
It turned out that the only micro-atx mainboards still on the market with AGP slots were all Socket 754. Which meant using my soon-to-be-retired Radeon 9700 Pro was out, unless we also wanted to buy a Socket 754 CPU and forgoe the use of my already available Socket 939 Athlon 64 3000. Since Socket 754, while still offering good performance, severely limits your future upgrade options (single-channel RAM and no dual-core CPU's!) we went with dropping my Athlon 64 3000 into a more modern board. I picked a nice micro-ATX board from Foxconn based on the Nvidia 6100 chipset that I had used this past summer to build a system for the younger son of my friends Kemaris and Illiante; it's a solid board with good performance. When the board arrived along with my eagerly awaited Athlon 64 X2 4800, I got busy. First, I pulled my existing CPU and dropped in my new dual-core chip; my computer threw back its head and roared in approval. Next, I collected the eMachine from FrisbeeNinja and FrisbeeSpouse's home when TempleViper and I went there on a late-October Saturday for a dinner party. While there, FrisbeeNinja and I settled on precisely what graphics card to install; I had narrowed the choices to a GeForce 6600 for about 50 bucks, or a GeForce 7600 GS for a hundred. The 6600 was cheapest but the 7600 GS, besides being about twice as powerful, also had a huge fanless heatpipe for silent cooling. And FrisbeeNinja's single biggest requirement was that the machine be as quiet as possible. So, the 7600 GS it was and is.
While I waited for the video card to arrive I gutted his old PC down to the bare shell of the case and fitted the new mobo into it... or tried to, anyway. It didn't fit! The new board was just about an inch longer than old Socket 370 board, and that was just enough to make it jam up against the lower drive cage that the floppy drive was mounted in. Removing the floppy made no difference at all, so I sat there and stared and thought... and then had an idea.
I picked up the phone and called my brother-in-law and asked him, "Do you anticipate needing a floppy drive in your new gaming rig?"
"Hm... I don't think so... do you think I'll need one?"
"Nope!" I cheerfully replied. "And that's good, 'cause to fit the new mainboard I need to... alter something."
"Something? Is it bad?"
"Nope! It'll never be visible!"
"Okay."
And with that, I dug through the toolbox and found a metal snips and a big-ass pliers. And performed the most ham-fisted piece of electronic surgery to ever fall short of just using a big hammer. I cut, bent, tore and mangled most of the floppy drive bay out of the machine (no, it wasn't removable and yes, that was the first thing I checked for) and swathed the remaining edges with tape to cover the jaggies. It wasn't pretty, but the motherboard now slid in with no fuss and plenty of clearance. I then mounted the CPU along with the very nicely redesigned heatpipe-swathed cooler that came with my new X2-4800 (I had previously replaced the old stock cooler with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro) onto the board and fastened everything down.
My leftover hard drive mounted vertically into a separate cage on the inside front of the case, and a DVD burner replaced his previous CD burner in the remaining bay above. One gig of dual-channel RAM snapped comfortably into place awaiting games to run. That left the power supply. The one that came in the original case had a peak output of 120 watts. Use that to power the new hardware? Riiiiiiiiight... it didn't even have a separate 4-pin 12 volt connector for the CPU - even if it did, it would no doubt power the machine for about ninety seconds before going up in white-hot flames. I replaced it with a 350-watt micro-atx power supply and, using the integrated graphics on the mainboard, gave the machine its first POST. No problems, so I went about installing Windows and adding lotsa neat stuff - chipset drivers, updates, multimedia software, security and antivirus, you know the drill...
And then the video card arrived. It was the same as one I had previously recommended to Illiante for his machine, except that it was the GS version rather than the GT (the differences are - the GS is clocked slower than the GT, uses DDR2 RAM instead of DDR3, and has a rendering speed of 500 million polygons per second as opposed to the GT's 700 million. Both are 12-pipeline, Shader Model 3.0-capable cards, and both therefore rawk on the cheap). I mounted it, powered on the computer and installed the latest Nvidia drivers - and gave this bad boy some games to chew on.
The results were interesting, and not altogether unexpected: Even though the processor was considerably slower than my new one, games ran faster at higher resolutions and even looked somewhat better. That's because an Athlon 64 3000 is no slouch despite its pedigree as an entry-level CPU, and because nearly all games are limited more by the capabilities of the graphics card than anything else - and a 7600 GS, between its rendering speed and its modern architecture, is roughly twice as powerful as my Radeon 9700 Pro.
And then I noticed a couple of things. The first was temperature - though the CPU ran at a temp only slightly higher than normal human body temperature, the video card pushed 65 degrees Celsius under load. That was within its rated tolerance, but I didn't like it; I was worried about the lack of airflow once I closed up the case. ConradZero previously installed this exact same card - also at my recommendation - in his new rig and had serious overheating issues due to lack of airflow. We fixed it with a simple exhaust blower in the adjoining PCI slot, so I decided to try the same solution here... and it didn't work to my satisfaction. It lowered the temps slightly, but it was rather loud (which anticipates my comments about the second thing I noticed - but I'm getting ahead of myself...) so I tried something else.
I grabbed an 80 mm case fan out of my parts bin, plugged it into the extra fan power connector on the mainboard, and started experimenting with the best place to postion it relative to the video card. I ended up placing it standing upright on the bottom inside of the case, blowing across the video card's oversized heatsink at roughly a 45 degree angle. That lowered the video card temps to within a couple degrees of the CPU, and that made me a very happy Saveau. There was no actual place to officially mount where I wanted it to be, so I got creative with a pre-existing intake vent and a couple of zip-ties, and, after leaving off the backplate cover for the PCI slot right next to the video card to use it as an exhaust port, all was well. And although the 80 mm fan wasn't quite silent, it was extremely quiet, which brings us to...
...the second issue I noticed. Noise. Though the machine was fairly quiet, there was a high-pitched whining sound that I knew wasn't coming from the CPU fan or my improvised video card cooler. That left only one culprit: The power supply.
I unscrewed it from the case and studied how the fan was attached. Removing the fan's intake mount from the bottom of the power supply proved simple, but the fan's power leads disappeared into the trunk of wires that led out into the case to feed power to all the components of the computer itself. So, to swap the fan I would have to cut the wires and splice them into a different fan - and that's exactly what I did. I tested a few other fans for their noise levels, found one suitable, cut and spliced, tested it to make sure that it worked and that I had it oriented correctly, and then mounted it back into the power supply in place of the previous fan and remounted the power supply in the case. Powered everything on, and it sounded quite nice.
Then I closed up the case and put it through its paces once more. Not a hitch. FrisbeeNinja now has a machine that screams through Far Cry and F.E.A.R. Combat, and will handle Supreme Commander with ease once he gets the beta installed. For dirt cheap. And it looks unchanged on the outside - it dares you to underestimate it.
I also, during this time, was able to build a machine for a Macintosh-using (Heh - formerly Macintosh using) co-worker, and threw together a rig for a friend of FrisbeeNinja and FrisbeeSpouse to be used as a general-purpose/low-end media PC - I handed that over at our family Thanksgiving gathering.
I love being me.
But that's not quite the topic of this post; just a little intro.
As you all know, I build and upgrade computers. For myself. And everybody else. I love doing so. And I take special projects that are designed to fit particular needs within particular budgets. Sometimes those budgets are approximately zero, which limits me to whatever spare parts I have leftover or inherit from someone else. And other times somebody has some money and asks, "Given X amount of dollars, can you make Y happen?"
Yes. I can.
My brother-in-law doesn't have an online handle that differs from his real name, but if he did it would probably be FrisbeeNinja because he is one; thus I so dub him. He was creaking along last year with a dinky little turn-of-the-century era eMachine with a Celeron 667, crappy integrated graphics and a hard drive with roughly four times the storage capacity of a spiral-bound notebook, on a motherboard that was incapable of addressing more than 256 megs of RAM, in a case whose form factor could be called micro-ATX only if you feel the generosity that comes of severe intoxication. I promptly whipped up a 1 GHZ Pentium III machine with half-a-gig of RAM, a 60 gig hard drive and a Radeon 9000; hardly a powerhouse, but it was still far more useful than his nanotower and actually runs Halo quite well and Far Cry surprisingly decently - albeit on low settings.
That covered him for a while, but since being introduced to Far Cry, Total Annihilation, Halo and other gameplay goodies of graphical greatness he was interested in being able to do more. So I granted FrisbeeNinja dibs on my Athlon 64 3000 CPU when I upgraded, along with a larger hard drive that I had laying around and my Radeon 9700 Pro when it was time for that to go. I had a notion of getting him the same mainboard I use...
But FrisbeeNinja had a different idea. He wanted me to build a modern powerhouse of machine that he could use as both a media PC and a gaming rig... inside the shoebox-like confines of his old eMachine.
And I am soooo not kidding when I say "shoebox". This thing isn't merely small, it's tiny. Of course, therein lies the appeal for FrisbeeNinja; it will be unobtrusive next to the TV and ridiculously easy to haul around to LAN parties. And I rather liked the idea of a fairly modern powerhouse of a machine hidden in the shell of an ancient paperweight. So... I looked at what I could do to make it happen for the least money possible.
It turned out that the only micro-atx mainboards still on the market with AGP slots were all Socket 754. Which meant using my soon-to-be-retired Radeon 9700 Pro was out, unless we also wanted to buy a Socket 754 CPU and forgoe the use of my already available Socket 939 Athlon 64 3000. Since Socket 754, while still offering good performance, severely limits your future upgrade options (single-channel RAM and no dual-core CPU's!) we went with dropping my Athlon 64 3000 into a more modern board. I picked a nice micro-ATX board from Foxconn based on the Nvidia 6100 chipset that I had used this past summer to build a system for the younger son of my friends Kemaris and Illiante; it's a solid board with good performance. When the board arrived along with my eagerly awaited Athlon 64 X2 4800, I got busy. First, I pulled my existing CPU and dropped in my new dual-core chip; my computer threw back its head and roared in approval. Next, I collected the eMachine from FrisbeeNinja and FrisbeeSpouse's home when TempleViper and I went there on a late-October Saturday for a dinner party. While there, FrisbeeNinja and I settled on precisely what graphics card to install; I had narrowed the choices to a GeForce 6600 for about 50 bucks, or a GeForce 7600 GS for a hundred. The 6600 was cheapest but the 7600 GS, besides being about twice as powerful, also had a huge fanless heatpipe for silent cooling. And FrisbeeNinja's single biggest requirement was that the machine be as quiet as possible. So, the 7600 GS it was and is.
While I waited for the video card to arrive I gutted his old PC down to the bare shell of the case and fitted the new mobo into it... or tried to, anyway. It didn't fit! The new board was just about an inch longer than old Socket 370 board, and that was just enough to make it jam up against the lower drive cage that the floppy drive was mounted in. Removing the floppy made no difference at all, so I sat there and stared and thought... and then had an idea.
I picked up the phone and called my brother-in-law and asked him, "Do you anticipate needing a floppy drive in your new gaming rig?"
"Hm... I don't think so... do you think I'll need one?"
"Nope!" I cheerfully replied. "And that's good, 'cause to fit the new mainboard I need to... alter something."
"Something? Is it bad?"
"Nope! It'll never be visible!"
"Okay."
And with that, I dug through the toolbox and found a metal snips and a big-ass pliers. And performed the most ham-fisted piece of electronic surgery to ever fall short of just using a big hammer. I cut, bent, tore and mangled most of the floppy drive bay out of the machine (no, it wasn't removable and yes, that was the first thing I checked for) and swathed the remaining edges with tape to cover the jaggies. It wasn't pretty, but the motherboard now slid in with no fuss and plenty of clearance. I then mounted the CPU along with the very nicely redesigned heatpipe-swathed cooler that came with my new X2-4800 (I had previously replaced the old stock cooler with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro) onto the board and fastened everything down.
My leftover hard drive mounted vertically into a separate cage on the inside front of the case, and a DVD burner replaced his previous CD burner in the remaining bay above. One gig of dual-channel RAM snapped comfortably into place awaiting games to run. That left the power supply. The one that came in the original case had a peak output of 120 watts. Use that to power the new hardware? Riiiiiiiiight... it didn't even have a separate 4-pin 12 volt connector for the CPU - even if it did, it would no doubt power the machine for about ninety seconds before going up in white-hot flames. I replaced it with a 350-watt micro-atx power supply and, using the integrated graphics on the mainboard, gave the machine its first POST. No problems, so I went about installing Windows and adding lotsa neat stuff - chipset drivers, updates, multimedia software, security and antivirus, you know the drill...
And then the video card arrived. It was the same as one I had previously recommended to Illiante for his machine, except that it was the GS version rather than the GT (the differences are - the GS is clocked slower than the GT, uses DDR2 RAM instead of DDR3, and has a rendering speed of 500 million polygons per second as opposed to the GT's 700 million. Both are 12-pipeline, Shader Model 3.0-capable cards, and both therefore rawk on the cheap). I mounted it, powered on the computer and installed the latest Nvidia drivers - and gave this bad boy some games to chew on.
The results were interesting, and not altogether unexpected: Even though the processor was considerably slower than my new one, games ran faster at higher resolutions and even looked somewhat better. That's because an Athlon 64 3000 is no slouch despite its pedigree as an entry-level CPU, and because nearly all games are limited more by the capabilities of the graphics card than anything else - and a 7600 GS, between its rendering speed and its modern architecture, is roughly twice as powerful as my Radeon 9700 Pro.
And then I noticed a couple of things. The first was temperature - though the CPU ran at a temp only slightly higher than normal human body temperature, the video card pushed 65 degrees Celsius under load. That was within its rated tolerance, but I didn't like it; I was worried about the lack of airflow once I closed up the case. ConradZero previously installed this exact same card - also at my recommendation - in his new rig and had serious overheating issues due to lack of airflow. We fixed it with a simple exhaust blower in the adjoining PCI slot, so I decided to try the same solution here... and it didn't work to my satisfaction. It lowered the temps slightly, but it was rather loud (which anticipates my comments about the second thing I noticed - but I'm getting ahead of myself...) so I tried something else.
I grabbed an 80 mm case fan out of my parts bin, plugged it into the extra fan power connector on the mainboard, and started experimenting with the best place to postion it relative to the video card. I ended up placing it standing upright on the bottom inside of the case, blowing across the video card's oversized heatsink at roughly a 45 degree angle. That lowered the video card temps to within a couple degrees of the CPU, and that made me a very happy Saveau. There was no actual place to officially mount where I wanted it to be, so I got creative with a pre-existing intake vent and a couple of zip-ties, and, after leaving off the backplate cover for the PCI slot right next to the video card to use it as an exhaust port, all was well. And although the 80 mm fan wasn't quite silent, it was extremely quiet, which brings us to...
...the second issue I noticed. Noise. Though the machine was fairly quiet, there was a high-pitched whining sound that I knew wasn't coming from the CPU fan or my improvised video card cooler. That left only one culprit: The power supply.
I unscrewed it from the case and studied how the fan was attached. Removing the fan's intake mount from the bottom of the power supply proved simple, but the fan's power leads disappeared into the trunk of wires that led out into the case to feed power to all the components of the computer itself. So, to swap the fan I would have to cut the wires and splice them into a different fan - and that's exactly what I did. I tested a few other fans for their noise levels, found one suitable, cut and spliced, tested it to make sure that it worked and that I had it oriented correctly, and then mounted it back into the power supply in place of the previous fan and remounted the power supply in the case. Powered everything on, and it sounded quite nice.
Then I closed up the case and put it through its paces once more. Not a hitch. FrisbeeNinja now has a machine that screams through Far Cry and F.E.A.R. Combat, and will handle Supreme Commander with ease once he gets the beta installed. For dirt cheap. And it looks unchanged on the outside - it dares you to underestimate it.
I also, during this time, was able to build a machine for a Macintosh-using (Heh - formerly Macintosh using) co-worker, and threw together a rig for a friend of FrisbeeNinja and FrisbeeSpouse to be used as a general-purpose/low-end media PC - I handed that over at our family Thanksgiving gathering.
I love being me.