Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Tales from the Front

Dear Raed - blog of Salam Pax.

posted by Wuphon's at 2:35 PM

CPU Temp (round 2)

Wheee, got my parts in. I took the system apart, wiped the old heatsink compound off with a paper towel and applied a small dab of Arctic Silver III heat compound (less then pea sized, rubbing it into the chip core using the nozzle of the tube). I then put the copper heatsink back on, added a 60mm to 80mm fan adapter, topped with a quiet 80mm fan that pushes 37cfm at 2900rpm while producing only 30dBA of noise (almost twice as quiet as the old 6800rpm delta fan). The old "at rest" tempurature was 40C CPU and 29C motherboard, new "at rest" temperature is 40C CPU and 30C motherboard. I did also add some rounded cables into the mix, and I have not put the cover on the CPU yet.

Granted, that's not a big change (okay, no change) in at-rest temperature - but then really the only change was the heatsink compound (or the re-application of compound). The cfm being moved around is still roughly the same as before. Under load temperature shows a 2-4C improvement (44-46C CPU 32C motherboard). But the big change is in the ambient temperature center that is taped to the motherboard between the north bridge chip, the CPU and the memory slots. That temp has dropped from 44-46C down to 37C - probably due to the installation of rounded cables (it was a rats nest of flat ribbon cables before). That may be enough to stabilize the system.

I've also attached a second temperature sensor to one of the rounded cables that goes over the video card so that I can get ambient temperatures over in that section. That sensor is currently reading 34C.

posted by Wuphon's at 10:05 AM

Monday, March 24, 2003

CPU Temp

Still fighting CPU temp, currently running at 50-52C under load (30C motherboard, 46C ambient) with the copper heatsink and AMD fan. I've got 2 possible replacement fans, one is a 60mm with lower airflow then the highspeed fan (the noisy one) and an 80mm one that requires an adapter to hook up to the heatsink. (Larger fans can push a higher volume of air without being as noisy.) I'm also going to switch the heatsink compound to Arctic III, which is supposedly one of the highest efficiency heat-transfer compounds out there. One more thing, I'm going to switch over to rounded floppy and IDE drive cables.

posted by Wuphon's at 11:05 AM

Movie Cliches

A very large collection of movie cliches may prove to be an amusing read later.

posted by Wuphon's at 10:59 AM