Well I finally decided to break down and take some pics of my latest poverty rig.
The CPU is still running a tad bit warm for my tastes even after installing the 120mm fan on the side panel. I tried hooking it up to the motherboard's 3 pin power connector but the BIOS has the PWM output set so low that the fan won't even spin up. Its amazing that the scythe fans still even work, had them since like circa 1999ish with god knows how many thousands of hours on them... nothing like good old fluid dynamic bearings. Since there was essentially no other viable way to power the fan I just decided to hack a couple of the crimp connectors off and use a spare wall wart with a bit of terminal block foam taped to the side to make the connections. My DMM reads 11.65v... a bit high perhaps for a 210ma unregulated 9v rated PSU.
Now with the fan running it takes about ~25-30 mins of Prime95 before my CPU temps top out around 67-68C... quite a bit of improvement over the ~5 minutes to reach that temp before. I still think its running pretty darn hot for what it is. Going to attempt application of Artic Silver and see if that helps my core temps go down any. AFAIK the heatsink has never been removed but who knows. Would be a great time to use some scrubbing bubbles on it and get it nice and clean.
I think Friday is going to be full tear down day... gonna finish cutting another air hole up around the graphics card and try to BSEL mod the CPU.
The CPU is still running a tad bit warm for my tastes even after installing the 120mm fan on the side panel. I tried hooking it up to the motherboard's 3 pin power connector but the BIOS has the PWM output set so low that the fan won't even spin up. Its amazing that the scythe fans still even work, had them since like circa 1999ish with god knows how many thousands of hours on them... nothing like good old fluid dynamic bearings. Since there was essentially no other viable way to power the fan I just decided to hack a couple of the crimp connectors off and use a spare wall wart with a bit of terminal block foam taped to the side to make the connections. My DMM reads 11.65v... a bit high perhaps for a 210ma unregulated 9v rated PSU.
Now with the fan running it takes about ~25-30 mins of Prime95 before my CPU temps top out around 67-68C... quite a bit of improvement over the ~5 minutes to reach that temp before. I still think its running pretty darn hot for what it is. Going to attempt application of Artic Silver and see if that helps my core temps go down any. AFAIK the heatsink has never been removed but who knows. Would be a great time to use some scrubbing bubbles on it and get it nice and clean.
I think Friday is going to be full tear down day... gonna finish cutting another air hole up around the graphics card and try to BSEL mod the CPU.
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