My computer upgrade

[JayM]

...and my dust filter arrived from China already! I wasn't expecting it until the end of this week or early next week and I certainly didn't expect delivery on a Sunday. Now that I've learned that my rear case fan is exhaust, not intake, I put the filter over the front intake fan instead of where I'd intended to put it on the back.

I still want to see if I can reroute the power and SATA data cables but I just don't feel like messing with it today. Besides, I don't have anything for dinner unless I cook something today, so I'll be busy peeling veggies and cutting up meat and won't have time for computer work.

[m_pav]

Your 80mm fan at the back of the case is in the wrong location for the case design when only 1 fan is used, it's drawing cool air from the lower side vent and pushing it out the back of the machine, and in doing so, lowering the efficiency of the ATX case design. You could also just get another fan, but do your research, not all fans are created equal. Heat rises and is traped between the power supply and the CPU with the existing setup. The power supply likes to get cool air too, so move the 80mm fan up to the highest place so it can push air out the back of the case if nothing else. Here's my fav 80mm fan, note the irregular blades, nice and quiet, but powerful if needed. It's 4-pin, but will run on 3-pin headers. https://www.silverstonetek.com/product. ... 13&area=en

You mentioned cleaning up the birds nest of cables, look up some vids on how to do it properly, take your time, think it through and do it, it will assist the airflow if done correctly and make the internals look great.

Next, get yourself a decent CPU Heatsink and fan combo. Here's a pic of a setup I built back in 2012, installed into a standard ATX case and run antiX on for a while before MX Linux started in 2014. I can't recall where, but there was a time back on the forums where people were posting their system specs, mine was running so cold that it raised quite a stir. The HSF combo makes a BIG difference, they are not that expensive and they are transferrable between machine upgrades.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=19Ks6A ... DJQBLy6qdi

[JayM]

OK, I'll move that fan to the upper spot tomorrow and see if there's an improvement.

Re: the cables, I'll only do that if I can do so without having to remove the motherboard first. Maybe I can feed them through a hole, remove the other side of the case, then route them to where they need to go. Otherside I'll just do the best I can with some wire ties or something.

Meanwhile lowering the CPU's freq and voltage seems to be working out pretty well. I haven't had any instability so far, knock on wood.

It's interesting that they're applying acoustic design to computer fan design.

Re: heatsink and fan, I had to get what I could afford. One like that in the picture is beyond my means. The closest to it that's available here costs almost as much as I paid for my computer when I bought it, which was ₱2950:
https://www.lazada.com.ph/products/deep ... N&search=1
It also would stick out so far I wouldn't be able to close my case. I have to just do the best we can with what I have available to me.

[JayM]

I've moved the rear exhaust fan to the upper grille. I haven't noticed any difference in temperatures yet, but I'll let it run like this and keep watching it.

BTW the fan on the CPU cooler blows cooler air down onto the heat sink, not away from it to remove the heat and disperse it inside the case. That's the same design as the Athlon's OEM cooler.

[m_pav]

That is correct, the CPU fans in ATX cases are designed just for that, to blow cool air down on top of the heatsink but in order to do so, they must have cool air to begin with. Each HSF combo has a maximum heat dissipation property/capability and the close they get to their maximum, the less efficient they become.

Here' s a HSF combo that I just installed into my sisters PC after her CPU fan started rattling very loudly. I just did the conversion to your currency, ₱946.49. I wish I was in a position to send it to you (sporadic work since March, only part-time jobs, very low wages, typical small-town living

[JayM]

Thanks for the thought anyway, Mike. I think the cooler I got will do OK as long as I don't leave the computer running 24x7, which I don't do. With just Firefox running (besides some panel applets and the conky) and one to three tabs open it stays at around 42C-44C depending on the ambient temperature, and while doing more CPU-intensive tasks (or streaming YouTube videos in Pale Moon for some reason) I haven't seen it climb above 50C at the most. That will have to do.

[JayM]

Yesterday the power button on my computer's case quit working. I have another case here and planned to move my motherboard to that one. After removing all of the wiring and stuff I found that one of the screws holding the motherboard in wouldn't come out. It loosened and turned and turned but I couldn't remove the board. I ended up taking a lesson from Red Greene and put the front panel from the other case on mine. It didn't quite fit, so Gorilla tape was involved.

While I was reconnecting everything I routed the wiring and cabling a bit better so it looks somewhat neater and the cables don't cover up the motherboard nearly as much. I also found a 90mm fan that's mounted to a PCI card-like bracket that I screwed onto one of the lower expansion slots, blowing upward. So I now have a 120mm intake fan in the front, an 80mm exhaust fan in the upper fan location on the back, a 90mm fan near the rear bottom blowing upward, and a 120mm CPU cooling fan blowing case air onto the CPU's heatsink. I know, some of the air from the new bottom fan will just be sucked out by the exhaust fan, but it should still help somewhat with the air circulation inside the case.



Dat's mo' bettah compared to this, taken last Saturday:


(I'd take a picture of the outside of my Frankencase but I'm a bit ashamed. But hey, it works. Good to be back on the desktop instead of the old slow netbook I was using last night.)

[JayM]

Feh. I think my PSU died again. Lord, let it be that and not the northbridge! Same symptoms as before: fans all spin, plus my new gaming keyboard lights up so I know the USB ports on the back have power, but there's no video and no "beep" from the wee speaker indicating that it's booting. I wonder if that 90mm fan is causing it? I've had PSU failures in every computer it's ever been in, once in my old Athlon 64 x2 4000 (2.1GHz) one that now has a bricked BIOS from a flash gone bad, and twice in this one. Either the PSU just happened to go bad, it being a very cheap, lightweight, generic one, or something about the fan is causing it. The 90mm fan still spins though...maybe I'm just being superstitious.

I'll have to see if I can find a replacement PSU tomorrow or Tuesday when I go out to get groceries. Shouldn't be more than around ₱750 for 700W. If I can find one.

[Eadwine Rose]

DANG!! That sucks..

[JayM]

Yeah, it's been a terrible weekend. First the power switch, now (hopefully) the PSU. I'm beginning to wonder if upgrading my CPU was such a good idea after all.

Oh, yeah, last night my voltage regulator also died. I had to plug everything into a plain old power strip just to get even the fans to run. All I was doing was watching a YouTube video at around 8PM and suddenly all h*** broke loose. I'm getting kind of tired of having to work on this computer.

But when it works, it works pretty well. It's been almost trouble-free for over two years until I decided to do something nice for it and buy it a better CPU and cooler.