I’m getting ready for an orgy of upgrades and improvements on my computer. Read about it here.
I’ve ordered a new hard drive to replace the 40Gb one that fried the other day. But of course I had to buy something a tiny bit bigger. Like 140Gb bigger. While I’m waiting for it, I bought the following stuff from FrozenCPU:
- 3 case fans. One will replace the one that dug that hunk out of my finger tip, and the other two will go on the front and back of the case. That makes two sucking at the front, and three blowing out the back (if you count the power supply fan).
- 2 GIGANTIC copper CPU heat sinks. These puppies weigh about a pound each.
- 2 fans to go on the heat sinks. Now if only I could figure out wether the fans should be set up to suck or blow.
- Rounded cables: IDE, floppy and SCSI. Not much point getting all that air flow if there are big flat cables blocking it. I’ve heard the performance isn’t as good, because of more cross talk, but at this point I’m more worried about cooling.
- A hard drive cooler. All my problems seem to happen when I stack one big drive right on top of another (I never had this problem with 10Gb drives). I don’t have room to get one of those full drive coolers that takes a 5 1/4″ bay, because all my 5 1/4″ bays are pretty much taken up by the tape drive. Hopefully by driving some more air past the drives, I’m not going to have any trouble with two big fast drives.
When all this stuff is installed, there is going to be so much air flow that I’m going to have to nail the computer down to keep it from blowing away. I’m also going to have to wear my aviation headset because of the noise.
Hopefully after everything is installed and been running for a while so I know that everything is staying cool, I can start running SETI@home again. I stopped because the computer froze up about once a day when I was running it, and stayed up for months at a time when I wasn’t. I’m 90% sure it was a cooling problem – when you’re running SETI@home, the CPU never gets those nifty sub-second HALTs that let it keep cool.
I made enquiries and they’re supposed to blow. If they suck, dust builds up on the heat sink. (Can you smell burning?)
To stop the computer blowing across the room use a deflector plate to redirect the airflow upwards. Two caveats: (1) Check your ceiling bracing. (2) Check your floor bracing.
Steve (running 50% signal to noise today)