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, 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?

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.

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.

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, an old fa­vorite of mine. Sim­i­lar­ly, I re­placed Fire­fox 3 with 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 to provide some prim­i­tive desk­top icons.

Here’s a screen­shot of my awe­some new Lin­ux desk­top in ac­tion:

Screen­shot of IceWM with iDesk, xfce4-ter­mi­nal, and the GIMP

It is rather prim­i­tive, as you can see. Note the, uh, shame­less­ly ripped-off ti­tle­bar graph­ics. One prob­lem re­mains, how­ev­er: the com­put­er takes far, far too long to boot up. It seems to me that, de­spite Xubun­tu be­ing rel­a­tive­ly stripped-down com­pared to reg­u­lar Ubun­tu, it’s still too bloat­ed for my old com­put­er. That is why this is on­ly “part 1”: my next plan is to see if I can build a su­per-lightweight Gen­too-based sys­tem for my old lap­top, hope­ful­ly with some­thing like soft­ware sus­pend (now Tux­On­Ice) to im­prove re­spon­se times. At the same time, I might take a leaf from gOS (1.0)’s book and use the En­light­en­ment win­dow man­ager.