build details on the new computer
May. 6th, 2007 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eorThe goal with this machine was originally to make a machine as power efficient as reasonably possible, do some shuffling, and retire a 7 year old machine. After a discussion with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derien, we may retire two machines after all the moving around is done.
Comments on the Thermaltake Armor VA8003SWA case:
It's large and a very pretty black. It has lots of drive cages and if you don't need them, you can remove them easily.
The fans it comes with are quiet but silly. First off, they don't have 3pin motherboard connectors. Most modern motherboards allow the CPU to control fan speed. Not if they're thermaltake fans. The other silly thing about the fans is that the two 120mm ones have nice blue LED's built into them. They're pretty, but they use twice as much voltage as a Scythe fan of the same size and twice as much as the super large fan on the side door which doesn't have an LED. Silly and now removed, my fans will be without LED.
From the factory all the vents in the front of the case have little bits of perforated foam behind them. I chose to remove every one. I figure dust is going to get into my case no matter what and if it wedges into these foam bits it will greatly reduce airflow and I'll never get it all back out. I can vacuum out the case more easily than I can get dirt out of foam.
Comments on the Seasonic S12 SS-550HT power supply: Cool looking black power supply with lots of mesh for air flow. I wish the cables were detachable because there are a buttload of them and they're long, it makes a huge wad when you tie the spares up together. Quiet, quiet, quiet. I like this power supply, but I'd suggest going for the 430watt version of this power supply, it has fewer cables.
Comments on the Thermalright cooling components: The HR-01 CPU cooler is huge. With the ducting provided going to the one case fan I've got running it runs cooler than the fan dependent heatsink on my older box. The HR-07 memory heatsinks aren't small. I'm not sure I could fit two more memory sticks with even standard cooling beside them.
I also have a WD Caviar SE 320Gig hard drive in a Scythe fanless HDD box. Most of the time I have to look at the HDD LED to see if it's doing anything. It will take a while to get used to this, a few times now I've thought the box was hung when it was performing a long process, it's just not loud enough to give that "I'm working on it" feedback.
The motherboard is an Asus M2NBP-VM CSM. I chose this motherboard because of the compatible with FreeBSD AMD64. I don't need support for dual video cards or anything fancy and it has more than enough capability as far as I can tell. I matched it with an AMD Athlon64 X2 Brisbane 2.5GHz. Other than the RAM slot pairs being so close together I haven't found any real complaints with the board.
I couldn't figure out a way to make the Antazone AS-N2000 northbridge heatsink fit on the northbridge. It looks like it will fit quite nicely on the other machine I will be keeping, so when I get time I'm going to install it on there.
Overall passive cooling: When I first turned on the system the mb and cpu temps hung around 30C and 33C respectively with one case fan ducted to the CPU and the power supply fan. Powering up the large fan on the side didn't appreciatively change the temps with an ambient temp of about 28C. I then let the CPU determine fan speed on the case fan: fan speed dropped to 400-500rpms and temps went up to about 40C. One Scythe S-flex at 500rpm is very quiet and if the CPU gets too warm it can kick up the speed plenty.
I like the idea of passive cooling as a way of saving energy and grief (how many noisy fans have I gone through?). Now I also like the application of the idea.
The OS:
I installed FreeBSD 6.2 for AMD64 on it and ended up bringing it up to current-stable in the process of getting things to work. Since the hard drive is huge I didn't think too hard about my partitions. root is 2G, /tmp is 4G, /var is 4G, swap is 8G in case I add more memory, and the remainder is userland.
The problems:
I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to read the temp settings from the motherboard within FreeBSD. mbmon does this easily and neatly.
It took me a while to get the system up to the point where the patch that makes the sound card work would install. There was much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. After much grief the HDAC driver is installed, in the kernel, and making the card play.
I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to make X11 have the 1600x1200 resolution that's native to my monitor. Well, it wasn't the monitor, it was the onboard graphics chip that wasn't playing. It turns out that the NVidia driver in the FreeBSD release is too old. When I updated X using the current-stable port I got support for more cards, but not the one I needed apparently. The current version of the driver on the X.org site has support for my chip (I think), but try as I might I can't get it to install in my system. It's looking for files that aren't produced when the port is installed on FreeBSD. I tried to hack at it, but it's beyond my ability and patience and I don't want to completely pigify my OS before I get started. Instead I'm going to install a GeForce 6600 GT graphics card and Thermalright HR-03 heatsink. That card is supported and has 128Mb of its own memory instead of stealing from system memory.
Conclusions:
The components fit together quite well considering the calculated risks I took. I had to take some plastic off the large fan on the side of the case so that it would clear the CPU cooling tower, but the dremel tool handled that easily. I also had to hack together a longer USB cable to run from my multi-card reader to the USB headers, but that was minor.
Other than the onboard video for X giving a lower than ideal resolution, everything works with FreeBSD-stable.
With all the other PCs off, no music playing, and the fridge compressor off, you can just hear the machine at idle. I haven't run any stress tests on it, but for what I use it for most of the time it will be virtually silent.
derien, we may retire two machines after all the moving around is done.Comments on the Thermaltake Armor VA8003SWA case:
It's large and a very pretty black. It has lots of drive cages and if you don't need them, you can remove them easily.
The fans it comes with are quiet but silly. First off, they don't have 3pin motherboard connectors. Most modern motherboards allow the CPU to control fan speed. Not if they're thermaltake fans. The other silly thing about the fans is that the two 120mm ones have nice blue LED's built into them. They're pretty, but they use twice as much voltage as a Scythe fan of the same size and twice as much as the super large fan on the side door which doesn't have an LED. Silly and now removed, my fans will be without LED.
From the factory all the vents in the front of the case have little bits of perforated foam behind them. I chose to remove every one. I figure dust is going to get into my case no matter what and if it wedges into these foam bits it will greatly reduce airflow and I'll never get it all back out. I can vacuum out the case more easily than I can get dirt out of foam.
Comments on the Seasonic S12 SS-550HT power supply: Cool looking black power supply with lots of mesh for air flow. I wish the cables were detachable because there are a buttload of them and they're long, it makes a huge wad when you tie the spares up together. Quiet, quiet, quiet. I like this power supply, but I'd suggest going for the 430watt version of this power supply, it has fewer cables.
Comments on the Thermalright cooling components: The HR-01 CPU cooler is huge. With the ducting provided going to the one case fan I've got running it runs cooler than the fan dependent heatsink on my older box. The HR-07 memory heatsinks aren't small. I'm not sure I could fit two more memory sticks with even standard cooling beside them.
I also have a WD Caviar SE 320Gig hard drive in a Scythe fanless HDD box. Most of the time I have to look at the HDD LED to see if it's doing anything. It will take a while to get used to this, a few times now I've thought the box was hung when it was performing a long process, it's just not loud enough to give that "I'm working on it" feedback.
The motherboard is an Asus M2NBP-VM CSM. I chose this motherboard because of the compatible with FreeBSD AMD64. I don't need support for dual video cards or anything fancy and it has more than enough capability as far as I can tell. I matched it with an AMD Athlon64 X2 Brisbane 2.5GHz. Other than the RAM slot pairs being so close together I haven't found any real complaints with the board.
I couldn't figure out a way to make the Antazone AS-N2000 northbridge heatsink fit on the northbridge. It looks like it will fit quite nicely on the other machine I will be keeping, so when I get time I'm going to install it on there.
Overall passive cooling: When I first turned on the system the mb and cpu temps hung around 30C and 33C respectively with one case fan ducted to the CPU and the power supply fan. Powering up the large fan on the side didn't appreciatively change the temps with an ambient temp of about 28C. I then let the CPU determine fan speed on the case fan: fan speed dropped to 400-500rpms and temps went up to about 40C. One Scythe S-flex at 500rpm is very quiet and if the CPU gets too warm it can kick up the speed plenty.
I like the idea of passive cooling as a way of saving energy and grief (how many noisy fans have I gone through?). Now I also like the application of the idea.
The OS:
I installed FreeBSD 6.2 for AMD64 on it and ended up bringing it up to current-stable in the process of getting things to work. Since the hard drive is huge I didn't think too hard about my partitions. root is 2G, /tmp is 4G, /var is 4G, swap is 8G in case I add more memory, and the remainder is userland.
The problems:
I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to read the temp settings from the motherboard within FreeBSD. mbmon does this easily and neatly.
It took me a while to get the system up to the point where the patch that makes the sound card work would install. There was much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. After much grief the HDAC driver is installed, in the kernel, and making the card play.
I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to make X11 have the 1600x1200 resolution that's native to my monitor. Well, it wasn't the monitor, it was the onboard graphics chip that wasn't playing. It turns out that the NVidia driver in the FreeBSD release is too old. When I updated X using the current-stable port I got support for more cards, but not the one I needed apparently. The current version of the driver on the X.org site has support for my chip (I think), but try as I might I can't get it to install in my system. It's looking for files that aren't produced when the port is installed on FreeBSD. I tried to hack at it, but it's beyond my ability and patience and I don't want to completely pigify my OS before I get started. Instead I'm going to install a GeForce 6600 GT graphics card and Thermalright HR-03 heatsink. That card is supported and has 128Mb of its own memory instead of stealing from system memory.
Conclusions:
The components fit together quite well considering the calculated risks I took. I had to take some plastic off the large fan on the side of the case so that it would clear the CPU cooling tower, but the dremel tool handled that easily. I also had to hack together a longer USB cable to run from my multi-card reader to the USB headers, but that was minor.
Other than the onboard video for X giving a lower than ideal resolution, everything works with FreeBSD-stable.
With all the other PCs off, no music playing, and the fridge compressor off, you can just hear the machine at idle. I haven't run any stress tests on it, but for what I use it for most of the time it will be virtually silent.
