Project: Whisper - build log

[JCLW]

You can see it clears the caps on the motherboard by a comfortable distance.

[JCLW]

Well, my 2.5" adapter kit came in.

It is made up of one plastic bracket, one 44pin <-> 40pin adapter, a bag of screws, and an instruction sheet:

Installation is pretty straightforward - plug'er in and let her rip:

[JCLW]

Well, I've installed Windows (2000 SP4) and a few applications. I'm still waiting on the Tualatin slocket so I'm using an old Celeron-433 at the moment.

Using the Celeron-433 isn't really that bad. Installing things is slow, but once it gets up and going most its fine. But the Celeron-1200 should be roughly 10x faster (due to processor speed increase, general processor improvements like L2 cache data pre-fetch, and FSB speed increase). So I'll be happy when the slocket gets here.

I was curious to see what temperature it was running with the passive heatsink, but unfortunately the Celeron-433 doesn't have an internal temp diode. Using my infrared thermometer, the hotest point on the heatsink that I can find under load is 28C, with a 20 room temperature. So an 8C difference.

The Celeron-433 makes 24.1W of heat, at 433mhz and 2.0vCore.

The Celeron-1200 makes 32.3W of heat, at 1200mhz and 1.5vCore.

But at 1200mhz and 1.3vCore, the Celeron should only make 24.2W of heat, the same as the Celeron-433.

So hopefully it'll run fine at 1.3vCore. If not, at 1.4vCore it should make 28.1W of heat so I should still be fine passively cooling it.

edit: equations I use can be found here: http://www.heatsink-guide.com/calcpower.htm

[JCLW]

And as for sound, it is completely inaudible. There are only two moving parts - the 2.5" HDD, and the power supply fan.

With the case lid on, neither my girlfriend nor my other friend can tell if the system is on or off from 1m away.

:thumleft:

[Tyreal]

Sweet. Good job. Looks like your project is pretty much finished.

Got anything else up your sleeve?

[fps justin]

nice. Silent is Excellence

[JCLW]

I've also:
- Removed the two 60mm fans at the back of the case
- Stuck some tape on the back of the memory stick that sits really close to the heatsink

Things I still have to do:
- Swap in the new processor when I get the slocket.

Things I might do:
- Pick up a Radeon 9250 to replace the Rage Pro. Right now it is pretty laggy when browsing web pages, and jumping when playing back AVIs.
- Construct a little air baffle so that all the air that the power supply fan sucks comes past the CPU heatsink
- Tape up the internal vents on the power supply, so that it sucks all its air from inside, and pushes it all out the back (instead of dumping ~1/2 of it back into the case).



Besides stuff with this computer, I'm working on two other projects (still in the design phase).

The first is a little hard drive silencing bracket. This would involve two plates of aluminium that the drive would be sandwiched between (for heat dissipation), and acoustic foam around the sides. The whole thing would sit on a peice of soft rubber/foam atop a bracket that would fit in a 5-1/4" drive bay.

The second is a rack-mount water-cooling setup. Basically a 4U rack-mount case that would contain radiator(s), pump(s), a reservoir, and associated wiring.

[fps justin]

how much ram do you have? i'd get more ram before i'd change video card.

[Tyreal]

Ouch. Rage Pro man... :( Get that changed. I think the ram he has now is fine. The videocard need some replacing.

[JCLW]

Originally Posted by JCLW

I dug up another two 128MB sticks of SDRAM, so I'm up to 384MB now, which should be fine.

It seems to be fine with 384MB - it's only going to be playing MP3s via Winamp 2.95 and browsing the web. The computer is definitely not swapping to the hard drive so I'm not really worried about memory now.

The Rage Pro isn't that bad, but it is a little annoying when scolling. And movie playback. It's still the most popular video on server boards, but I might go for a $45 9250 (since its one of the few cards around that'll stick work with 3.3v AGP 1.0). If I do get a new video card I'll get one with DVI, since it'll be used with a 17" digital LCD (BenQ 737).

That points me towards this one: http://canadacomputers.com/index.php...86&cid=999.821

edit: although I would prefer one with a 128bit memory bus...

/me starts googling...