Modding Xaser III

Ah yeah one other thing- Arch, I"ve seen you describe several times to people how to make a spacer for your heatsink fan out of an old gutted fan. I'd like to try this, but I don't have any other 92mm fans lying around. Know of a place I can get a super el-cheapo fan that I can just rip up?

Finally!
I've got my new rig up & running! I'm VERY pleased so far! A BIG THANK YOU To archilochus & EVERYBODY here for all the helpful ideas & advice that I've used on both my wife's & my new rigs.
My new case is a Coolermaster Praetorian with a few minor mods. This case came stock with dual 80mm front intake fans, 1 80mm rear exhaust fan & 1 80mm top blowhole fan. The front fanswere replaced by a couple of 92mm Panaflo H1Bs mounted with some home made brackets & some new holes drilled in the case. Mounting bracets have been cleaned up some from time I took pics:




Top fan was replaced with a 120mm Panaflo with some black expanded metal mesh for a grille:



Mobo is an Asus P4C800E-dlx with VDIMM & VDroop mods done outside, plus a couple of my own mods for better cooling.
My wife found an old Pentium 100 or 200 Heatsink & fan at a local thrift store for <$1. It's mounted on the Northbridge with a couple of pieces of brass 1/4" angle stock from a local hobby shop & some 10-24 machine screws with heads cut off & bent, using the stock Asus mounting loops. The stock Asus NB cooler is now on the Southbridge. It's stuck on with a couple of smal dabs of super glue. CPU cooling is by Thermalright SP94 with a Delta FFB0912HHE 92x38mm fan. (grabbed a couple before Sidewinder ran out )





CPU is a P4 2.8C Northwood. Ram is 1GB of Mushkin BH5 from FACTION95Si here at O/C. ATI Radeon9600XT vid card. Western Digital 74GB Raptor HDD. Asus DVD-Rw & LiteOn DVD-ROM. I spent most of yesterday assembling everything & tidying up all the wiring using zip-ties & some plastic wiring harness conduit from a local auto parts store:



Got it up & running this morning & ran Prime95 & SiSoft Sandra Burn In Wizard for a couple of hours to stress it out & see how it does. System temp peaked at 25°C & CPU temp at 35°C.
It looks like archilochus' ideas on cooling are valid.
Now for some Daemon Tweaks!!!
-Dave

Looks great! I love how you adapted that old P1 heatsink to act as your NB cooler Nice adaptation of the 80mm-92mm case fans too. I thought about doing that, but I'm too attached to my 80mm led fans hehe.

Thanks Chaos,
Just start looking for some 92mm LED fans!
-Dave

Quite a handsome rig Baltoos...and the cooling sounds top-notch.

Tell me...are those the stock feet on the Praetorian?

clocker,
Yep, those are the stock feet. Also ThanX!
-Dave

I forgot to add in my earlier post that I have the Asus Q-Fan enabled & the AsusProbe utility is telling me the Delta is only doing 1875 RPM! Looks like I've got a bit of headroom for a little bit of overclocking!
-Dave

Good luck! Today I've been testing to see if my improved cooling would give me more overclocking room, so far all of my tests have failed though I was pretty sure it was my crummy stock NB cooler that was hindering me, but maybe not. At least everything is cooler, and quieter

Edit: yep it still won't even do 276 fsb, totally stable at 275 though. Oh well.

Looking good chaos and baltoo's.

Just want to add, dont leave your compnents on the antistatic bags...put them on that foam they come packaged or in the bag itself. Static dosent go into the bag but it does cling to the outside.



Also i should* be ordering all my things tomorrow, and start sometime next week. Wish me luck

Looking good there Baltoos.. Nice temps..

CB (Chaos Being) , I found you a fan for $2.99 at Directron, but they have a $10.00 min. order requirement.. They do have some other things you could use..Like molex pins and connector housings..See their under a Dollar page..
Or you can find a computer recycle outfit close by.. Below is the link to the fan..Which happens to be the exact same fan I used for my spacer..They were only $1.00 then, though..

http://www.directron.com/9cm.html

Thanks for the link Arch Bummer about the $10 order limit though. I'm not sure if there is a computer recycling place nearby or not- I"ll have to check.

Oh yeah I tested another thing out last night. I sped up the Enermax 120mm adjustable fan I'm using as a top exhaust, from its minimum speed to its maximum speed, and let my pc sit at load all night long again. The temps are the same, except my case dropped on degree on average from 27 to 26. It was pretty cold last night though, so it may not have been all the fan's work. I do have to say one thing about this fan though. They say that it runs at 24.6 dB at low speed, and only 30.1 dB at high speed. I have to cry BS on that one, putting it up to high speed made my system twice as loud It drowned out the 36 dB fan on my heatsink, and it makes a really annoying "ziiiiip!" sort of noise at high speed. Its nice and quiet at low speed though, and still pushes tons of air.

(of course, after I put this all together I found the 120mm "Thermaltake Thunderblade" fan online, which pushes more air and is quieter than my Enermax at low speed, and has blue LED's to boot. Kinda wish I had found that one earlier, its like a big version of the TT BlueEyes that I"m using as my rear exhausts. Oh well.)

Of course, I could always get one of these to put in my empty floppy bay:

http://www.directron.com/uca3fatr2.html

I've wanted a thermal readout on my case anyways...hmm... The only thing that trips me up is Directron claims it only reads between 40 and 80c, although the screenshots of the readout shows it reading at 27c, so I think the description is screwed up.

Edit: Success! It turns out one of my old P3 Dells that isn't in use (the other one is a file/print server) has a 92mm as an exhaust. Out it came Of course, I still eventually want to give this machine away to one of my older relatives for 'net surfing, but I bet I can scrounge another 92mm fan by then, or just mod one of my 80mm's to fit. Going to go cut it out now.

Ok I installed the spacer, it took a little creativity with zip ties and electrical tape but it works (and it isn't nearly as ghetto looking as that may sound ) So far it doesn't seem to have done much though, the average idle is still 36c, I am load testing now. One thing I did notice though is that it took a little longer for the temperature to climb. The noise level wasn't really increased or decreased.

Well at least you won't have a dark impression of the fans hub on the HS fins...

Ok I let it load test overnight, no changes at all in temps I was hoping for at least a degree or two. I'm not sure if I want to leave it on there or not, but I might as well since its not really hurting anything. Maybe my fan is not powerful enough to take advantage of the spacer- who knows! I'm glad I found a free fan to cut up at least

Edit: actually I think I did notice a change- just like I noticed that my load temps climbed slower than before, it reached an idle temp much faster than before, or at least it seems to have. That's sort of an arbitrary thing because I never really measured how long it took to heat up and cool down before, but there does *seem* to be a noticiable improvement both ways.

Edit 2: I did a little real world testing to see what sort of load temps I will normally experience. Time to break out the games! So far I have tried Morrowind and City of Heroes. Morrowind used to get my cpu up to 51c, City of Heroes would get it up to 52 or 53c (interesting sidenote, I have heard of people complaining that CoH would overheat their computers causing shut-downs.) The results now- with either game, my load temp averages between 44 and 45c. Nice

By George you've got it... Nice temps, CB..

I've been playing around with my BIOS settings , just to see what my new rig would do. So far I'm really pleased!

Specs: Intel P4 2.8C; Asus P4C800-E Dlx. w/ V-DIMM & V Droop mods; 1GB(2x512) Mushkin Lvl 2 w/ Winbond BH5 chips; WD 74GB Raptor HDD; Powercolor ATI Radeon 9600XT; DVD-RW; & DVD-ROM all in a modded Coolermaster Praetorian case. (Look Here)
System is currently running @ 275FSB (3.85GHz) with Memory set at 5:4. V-Core is set at 1.7V in BIOS but reads 1.536V in Asus Probe & hardware settings in BIOS. V-DIMM is at 2.85 in BIOS & ~3.15V with V-Dimm mod. Timings are at 2-2-2-6. Video card is still set at stock (1 thing at a time )

I just ran a couple of tests just to see if it would crash with some stress. CPU temp peaked at 43°C during 3D Mark 2001. Mobo temp stayed at 26°-27°C with room temp of 24°C. I'll just have to see if any problems develop at these settings & I'll be running some stress tests over the next few days. I'm very happy with how this new rig turned out.

Thanx a bunch to archilochus & everybody here at O/C for all the helpful information!
-Dave

Coming along nicely, Baltoos....Great OC and temps too!

Edit: actually I think I did notice a change- just like I noticed that my load temps climbed slower than before, it reached an idle temp much faster than before, or at least it seems to have. That's sort of an arbitrary thing because I never really measured how long it took to heat up and cool down before, but there does *seem* to be a noticiable improvement both ways.

Click to expand...

I found the spacer to be more positive in results, than negative also..

hey.. whats new? well i will go first then

my dad (who i am bulidin the computer for) finly called the isp around here and got this extream cable intetnet (5kbps.. mine is 1.5 ..i am soo jelllous ) but anyways we are could make a custem bench in the closet for the computer and the spekers.

after that we are gona start modding the case to the extream.. i few ideas and stuff i taked to my dad about were upgradeing the low speed stock fans with some higher speed ones ... maybe if i need to get a rheoshat on the conneters if its to loud of a fan . getting a sp-97 putting a fan in the top of the case ..

also is there anykind of smoke (not harmful) that i can use to see what my fans are working and were air is sitting