white noise

For the past couple weeks I’ve been on vacation and then sick, so the box building has certainly slowed down, but I’ve some progress over the past couple days.

First off, I picked up a couple final parts. After doing better in Vegas than I expected, I picked up a 300GB 10k rpm Velociraptor hard drive. I benchmarked it against the 80GB 7200rpm Barracuda drive that I already had installed and the Velociraptor is about twice as fast in every metric. It doesn’t really get that warm either. It’s a pretty awesome drive in a tiny package. I also got my wireless card and installed it. I went with the Linksys WMP300N PCI card – roughly the same as the Belkin wireless N card that I had been using, but a little beefier antenna and a bit cheaper. It took some getting used to the management of wireless networks in Vista, but so far performance is looking great.

And then there’s the continual wiring work that I’ve been doing. Most recently I installed my old 3.5″ device for front panel USB and audio ports. The USB lines got bundled and sheathed. Unfortunately, the audio cable was a few inches too short to make it to my sound card, however. So for that I spliced a piece of outdoor sprinkler wire (it had more than enough conductors at approximately the right gauge). Then I mounted a switch next to the 3.5″ device for controlling the fan speeds on the PSU / HDD side of the case. After a little soldering I can now switch those two 120mm fans between a low setting of 5 volts to a high of 12 volts. One last project will be mounting a second switch to control the case lighting.

Now, about this green circuit board on the network card…hmmm

A quick update after a bunch of work last weekend.

I spent about five hours on Saturday working on the box. I started with putting the mobo tray back in the case before continuing with any wiring. Well, that didn’t go so well. It may not be apparent from the previous pics, but the CPU cooler stands higher than everything else, and as I (un)lucked out, it was about 1/4 inch too tall from making it back into the case. So I had to remove the motherboard and the expansion cards from the tray, insert the tray, and remount everything inside the case. That was a better option in my book than taking off the cooler and cleaning and reapplying fresh thermal compound.

After all that was done I went back to wiring. I shortened the wires of four of the case fans and added new connectors. I also spent quite a while soldering up a couple Y-adpaters which let you connect two fans to a single motherboard header (except only using the rpm wire of one of them). I also sheathed the main front panel wires (power switch, power led, reset switch, HDD led). With all that done, the motherboard side of the case is looking decent; the psu side is still a big mess.

Sunday I decided I needed a break from wiring and started with some other stuff. First I pulled the DVD drive from my old machine to move to the new comp. But the greyish drive enclosure just didn’t look right, so I masked it up and painted the case black. It’s about this time that I realized things had gotten completely silly. Then once the drive was dry I put it in and started….finally…loading the OS. After a couple hours I had 64-bit Vista and the basic drivers installed. After another couple I had a second partition set up, anti-virus loaded, and all the OS and driver updates installed. And don’t be hatin’ on Vista, after all, check out the available RAM 🙂

Since then I’ve only been loading system apps/utilities. I have to move another hard drive into it before I can load the major stuff, and only after that will I worry about system tweaking and overclocking. Not to mention there’s still a bunch of wiring work left.

After a couple days away, tonight I pulled out the motherboard tray and mounted the mobo and the graphics card. To be honest up until a couple days ago I wasn’t even sure the tray could easily come out, then I noticed that five thumbscrews is all it takes to yank it from the case. Currently I’m planning on using the lower PCI express slot for the video card. This should allow the southbridge to keep cooler. You can also see the Creative audio card that came with the motherboard.

The IO panel fits in with the appearance really well – even if it is on the back and will be covered with plugs.

Installed the CPU cooler last night. You can see how it’s a tight fit and that my cooler options were limited.

Just a quick update on the last couple days of building. A few peeps have been wanting photos along every step to vicariously live the geek thrill ride. So photos, you shall have…

At this point the fans and PSU have been installed. Pay no mind to the wires, they haven’t been dealt with yet. All the fans are from Enermax and rated around 18dBA.

I used mesh fan grills on the front which also work somewhat as filters, and basic wire grills on the back. For the first time I’m trying to dampen any noise between the fan and the case. I used the included rubber mounts for the rear fans, but to keep the front sleeker I used a combination of pan head screws and rubber washers (inside and out).

The new CPU came yesterday so I started prepping it. The black fins on the heatsink are sick, but the fan includes two bright green LEDs. That wouldn’t fly with this whole red and black scheme, so I had to get in there and disable them. I thought about subbing in red LEDs, but finding the right type (size, voltage, and current) was a little more bite than I wanted to chew. I’ve also added a shot of the mobo with the mounting hardware added (plus another look at the RAM and northbridge coolers).

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.