Category: Builds

I fi­nal­ly re­ceived my new moth­er­board and in­stalled it in­to my com­put­er. It runs quite well, quite cool, and very qui­et. Here’s the fi­nal de­tails on the qui­et cool­ing sys­tem:

**Fans/air­flow:**

* 2 x qui­et 60mm fans be­hind the CPU cool­er
* 1 x SilenX 60mm fan next to video card, dou­bles as case ex­haust
* 1 x 120mm fan in PSU, helps move air through CPU cool­er
* 1 x Arc­tic Cool­ing 90mm PWM fan on other side of CPU cool­er

**Heatsinks:**

* Ther­mal­take Big Ty­phoon (mod­i­fied) on CPU (re­moved fan and fan mount)
* Arc­tic Cool­ing Ac­celero S2 on video card
* Tu­niq Sanc­tum hard drive si­lencer/cool­er

Ef­fec­tive­ness? CPU tem­per­a­tures at 37-40 de­grees C at idle. Not too shab­by, I sup­pose. I’m plan­ning to use (and al­ready us­ing) this ma­chine for some se­ri­ous com­put­er work, in­clud­ing 3D pro­gram­ming and graph­ics. I’ve ac­tu­al­ly re­cent­ly in­stalled Vi­su­al C# 2008 Ex­press Edi­tion, and I’m find­ing C# (and Mi­crosoft’s IDE) to be an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful and in­tu­itive lan­guage. I think I might switch to us­ing C# in­def­i­nite­ly, un­til some­one writes a de­cent­ly sim­ple and pow­er­ful IDE for [D][dsite], my cross-plat­form lan­guage of choice. Oh, and fix X11 and give us *one* win­dow­ing toolk­it that works and has amaz­ing graph­i­cal tools while you’re at it, please?

[dsite]: http://www.dig­i­tal­mars.com/d/

I’m al­so run­ning VMware server (and hav­ing lots of prob­lems with that…) with an Ubun­tu 8.04 Server guest, to han­dle my req­ui­site Apache and MySQL stuff, and al­so to keep up with the very few Lin­ux-on­ly soft­wares I use.

What you see here is a com­put­er I just built for my­self, which was to be qui­et as pos­si­ble, while still keep­ing the ther­mal per­for­mance un­der con­trol. All of this, of course, in a ma­chine with more-than-ad­e­quate per­for­mance for gam­ing, 3D ren­der­ing, Pho­to­shop work, and video en­cod­ing. Here’s a pho­to of the fi­nal build:

uATX si­lent gam­ing build

I used a Ther­mal­take Lan­box Lite case to house this com­put­er. The ma­jor com­po­nents I se­lect­ed for this build were an In­tel Core 2 Quad, 2 GB of RAM, and an nVidia 9600 GT video card. The 9600 GT is cooled al­most-pas­sive­ly with an Arc­tic Cool­ing Ac­celero S2 cool­er, and the CPU is cooled al­most-pas­sive­ly with a Ther­mal­take Big Ty­phoon. Air ex­hausts from the sys­tem with one low-speed 60mm fan be­hind the CPU and one low-speed 60mm fan beside the video card. A 90mm PWM fan push­es air through the CPU cool­er. The thing you see in the top 5.25” slot is a Tu­niq hard drive si­lencer: it sur­rounds the hard drive with sound-block­ing but ther­mal­ly con­duc­tive foam.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, due to a stupid mis­take I made, I need to re­place the moth­er­board I orig­i­nal­ly pur­chased, so I can run the sys­tem right now… when my new one ar­rives hope­ful­ly I’ll post some screen­shots and bench­marks.

I re­cent­ly ac­quired a re­al­ly old, Celeron-class lap­top with some­thing like 128 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive. It came with Win­dows ME, but I want­ed to in­stall some form of Lin­ux on it and make it at least marginal­ly use­ful, as sort of a lightweight fam­i­ly PC. I have but few goals for this ma­chine: it should be able to surf the web (no Flash nec­es­sary; would even sac­ri­fice JavaScript), it should be able to pro­cess Word doc­u­ments, and if at all pos­si­ble it should be able to run some old­er Win­dows apps us­ing [Wine][wine­hq].

[wine­hq]: http://www.wine­hq.org/

My first at­tempt at cre­at­ing such a thing came with Xubun­tu 8.04. At first I tried to use the bun­dled Fire­fox 3 and Xfce desk­top en­vi­ron­ment… but as it turned out, that was too much for the slow hard drive and pro­ces­sor of my old com­put­er. I de­cid­ed to re­place Xfce with [IceWM][icewm], an old fa­vorite of mine. Sim­i­lar­ly, I re­placed Fire­fox 3 with [Mi­dori][mi­dori], a much lighter-weight web browser based on We­bKit. I kept the Xfce ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor though, be­cause I much prefer it to `xterm` and don’t want to in­stall `gnome-ter­mi­nal`. I al­so in­stalled [iDesk][idesk] to provide some prim­i­tive desk­top icons.

[icewm]: http://www.icewm.org/
[mi­dori]: http://www.twotoasts.de/in­dex.php?/pages/mi­dori_sum­ma­ry.html
[idesk]: http://idesk.source­forge.net/wiki/in­dex.php/Main_Page
Read more…