Didn't we see this already?
May. 20th, 2004 07:30 amAt risk of seeming like I obsess over my computer hardware(1), a new Snotfish project.
1) Most of the things I obsess over are hard to take pictures of (eg, software libraries), move away quickly when I try to take a picture (eg, Camilla) or someone else takes better pictures already.
Getting onto the project, two things happened at the same time. Snotfish's RAID tossed a hard drive after a power cycle ('click of death') and all the heatsinks needed a good cleaning. There's a simple problem with air-cooling a big machine in a dusty house and the following picture illustrates the problem nicely:
That's only two months of dust buildup on the processor heatsinks, visible after removing the heatsink fans. Regularly getting in to suck dust out of hard-to-reach places not only requires an annoying amount of disassembly, but there's always the slight but real chance of damaging something in the box, such as cracking a processor core fiddling with the heatsink, or having the shopvac throw a static-electricity spark.... shopvacs generate a surprising amount of static electricity.
I've been expecting the need to add filtration and both already had a basic design for what I wanted to do and been collecting parts slowly for the past month or so. Due to the dead disk I suddenly had to open the machine again anyway, so yesterday (stretching into today) I dove into the project.
First need; a new front panel, having already carved up the old one. An old P100 Zeos full-tower my housemate Proven trashpicked long ago had a proper-sized front panel that offered a perfect unstyled blank front surface with no holes, but plenty of space to cut some. The plan was two 120mm fans and one 92mm fan in front with spun glass filters in front of them. With enough intake, I was also hoping for slight positive pressure inside the case (to avoid sucking dust into all the crevices... like the CDRW drive doors).
Step one:
Dremel fan holes/mounts in the new front panel. One fan mounted as an example:
The filters are the blue spun-glass style used in high-flow ventilation systems for buildings. A secondary advantage is most hardware stores sell this style of filter cheap. A grillwork basket will contain the filters and hold them in place. Expanded metal provides a nice grill pattern. Unfortunately, the quality of this specific piece of expanded metal itself was poor; the steel was incredibly brittle and cold-working it required some practice.
The end result is what mattered though. Test the fit of the filter grilles... perfect:
Antec steel full-tower cases are wonderful things. Heavy, solid, well-made, usually plainly styled and thus a blank slate for one's own artistic whims. Even the plastic is notches above the competition; Snotfish's front panel plastic is about three-times as thick as the plastic used in the Zeos front panel, and even more noticably after ten years it isn't showing any signs of yellowing. The Zeos front panel used in this project is undamaged but very yellowed and that calls for painting everything. I chose a dark-grey scheme with a center section that matched the filter-glass.
...I'm not going into what an incredible pain spraypaint is, although I did eventually get the hang of it. The front panel and filter grilles after painting:
While I was at it, I decided to go for blinkenlights. The motherboard has a number of status LEDs that it puts on the *back* of the case, so it was logical to move them to the front. Also, the 3ware RAID card has a disk-activity light for each spindle, but places them on the card which is inside an opaque case. ATA pin 39 is an open-collector disk status line, so a simple cable modification lets me drive an activity LED directly. In all, 18 LEDS of blinky goodness.
The front panel with the fans, switches and LEDs mounted and wired:
The fans are thermally controlled using a little thermisistor; the idea is, when things are hot, the fans move more air. When there's no need, they're quieter. The problem with using these fans as intake fans is that they place the sensor on the hub of the fan itself, and sense input air temperature. It's easy enough to cut a notch into the fan plastic, expose the solder pads for the thermisistor, and place it on the end of a wire pair instead:
Another thing occurred to me some time ago; it's odd that PCs, especially ones with hot/hungry CPUs, dump all that heat into the case air (and expect some other fan to eventually move the air out) rather than venting it directly out like any system manufactured for heavier use would do. This is a holdover from the days when PCs didn't really need much cooling ("fan? Yeah, the power supply has one.") but it's poor design in a modern machine.
Although exapandable 'dryer hose' is 4" in diameter, 3" is also available-- the perfect size to mate to an 80mm fan. It's possible to just get this stuff from McMaster-Carr, but recently places have started selling 'overclocker kits' with a length of the hose and premoulded plastic mounts for mating to the fan. Given that this obviously saved me some work (and it was flattering someone else had the same idea and was successfully marketing it) I bought two rather than making them.
Heastsink fans work just as efficiently 'sucking' as 'blowing', so with one 80mm fan pulling air through the heatsink, and a second on the other end of the hose helping things along, hot air from the processors is shuttled directly out of the case. Empirically, this has dropped both my CPU temps and case temperature. The fans are also running slower due to lower heatsink temperature (the CPU fans are also temp controlled with sensors bonded to the pair of Thermalrights).
At this point, I'm a solid exhibit in "hopelessly overstuffed full tower cases of America", athough there is still room for a small Buddha statue on top of the PSU:
(The buddha statue, obviously, is invisible)
After assembly, it's time to admire the handiwork:
And one with no flash:
The only drawback is that Snotfish had derived some character from looking like a cobbled-together monstrosity. Now it all looks intentional. At least it's still ugly on the inside.
1) Most of the things I obsess over are hard to take pictures of (eg, software libraries), move away quickly when I try to take a picture (eg, Camilla) or someone else takes better pictures already.
Getting onto the project, two things happened at the same time. Snotfish's RAID tossed a hard drive after a power cycle ('click of death') and all the heatsinks needed a good cleaning. There's a simple problem with air-cooling a big machine in a dusty house and the following picture illustrates the problem nicely:
That's only two months of dust buildup on the processor heatsinks, visible after removing the heatsink fans. Regularly getting in to suck dust out of hard-to-reach places not only requires an annoying amount of disassembly, but there's always the slight but real chance of damaging something in the box, such as cracking a processor core fiddling with the heatsink, or having the shopvac throw a static-electricity spark.... shopvacs generate a surprising amount of static electricity.
I've been expecting the need to add filtration and both already had a basic design for what I wanted to do and been collecting parts slowly for the past month or so. Due to the dead disk I suddenly had to open the machine again anyway, so yesterday (stretching into today) I dove into the project.
First need; a new front panel, having already carved up the old one. An old P100 Zeos full-tower my housemate Proven trashpicked long ago had a proper-sized front panel that offered a perfect unstyled blank front surface with no holes, but plenty of space to cut some. The plan was two 120mm fans and one 92mm fan in front with spun glass filters in front of them. With enough intake, I was also hoping for slight positive pressure inside the case (to avoid sucking dust into all the crevices... like the CDRW drive doors).
Step one:
Dremel fan holes/mounts in the new front panel. One fan mounted as an example:
The filters are the blue spun-glass style used in high-flow ventilation systems for buildings. A secondary advantage is most hardware stores sell this style of filter cheap. A grillwork basket will contain the filters and hold them in place. Expanded metal provides a nice grill pattern. Unfortunately, the quality of this specific piece of expanded metal itself was poor; the steel was incredibly brittle and cold-working it required some practice.
The end result is what mattered though. Test the fit of the filter grilles... perfect:
Antec steel full-tower cases are wonderful things. Heavy, solid, well-made, usually plainly styled and thus a blank slate for one's own artistic whims. Even the plastic is notches above the competition; Snotfish's front panel plastic is about three-times as thick as the plastic used in the Zeos front panel, and even more noticably after ten years it isn't showing any signs of yellowing. The Zeos front panel used in this project is undamaged but very yellowed and that calls for painting everything. I chose a dark-grey scheme with a center section that matched the filter-glass.
...I'm not going into what an incredible pain spraypaint is, although I did eventually get the hang of it. The front panel and filter grilles after painting:
While I was at it, I decided to go for blinkenlights. The motherboard has a number of status LEDs that it puts on the *back* of the case, so it was logical to move them to the front. Also, the 3ware RAID card has a disk-activity light for each spindle, but places them on the card which is inside an opaque case. ATA pin 39 is an open-collector disk status line, so a simple cable modification lets me drive an activity LED directly. In all, 18 LEDS of blinky goodness.
The front panel with the fans, switches and LEDs mounted and wired:
The fans are thermally controlled using a little thermisistor; the idea is, when things are hot, the fans move more air. When there's no need, they're quieter. The problem with using these fans as intake fans is that they place the sensor on the hub of the fan itself, and sense input air temperature. It's easy enough to cut a notch into the fan plastic, expose the solder pads for the thermisistor, and place it on the end of a wire pair instead:
Another thing occurred to me some time ago; it's odd that PCs, especially ones with hot/hungry CPUs, dump all that heat into the case air (and expect some other fan to eventually move the air out) rather than venting it directly out like any system manufactured for heavier use would do. This is a holdover from the days when PCs didn't really need much cooling ("fan? Yeah, the power supply has one.") but it's poor design in a modern machine.
Although exapandable 'dryer hose' is 4" in diameter, 3" is also available-- the perfect size to mate to an 80mm fan. It's possible to just get this stuff from McMaster-Carr, but recently places have started selling 'overclocker kits' with a length of the hose and premoulded plastic mounts for mating to the fan. Given that this obviously saved me some work (and it was flattering someone else had the same idea and was successfully marketing it) I bought two rather than making them.
Heastsink fans work just as efficiently 'sucking' as 'blowing', so with one 80mm fan pulling air through the heatsink, and a second on the other end of the hose helping things along, hot air from the processors is shuttled directly out of the case. Empirically, this has dropped both my CPU temps and case temperature. The fans are also running slower due to lower heatsink temperature (the CPU fans are also temp controlled with sensors bonded to the pair of Thermalrights).
At this point, I'm a solid exhibit in "hopelessly overstuffed full tower cases of America", athough there is still room for a small Buddha statue on top of the PSU:
(The buddha statue, obviously, is invisible)
After assembly, it's time to admire the handiwork:
And one with no flash:
The only drawback is that Snotfish had derived some character from looking like a cobbled-together monstrosity. Now it all looks intentional. At least it's still ugly on the inside.
