GODJonez
Half-new computer
2009-08-21 4:04 PM PDT
Let's take a look back to last week, starting from Monday August 10th 2009. On that day I saw that the order I placed on Finnish on-line computer shop has been handled and sent. At that point I was not sure whether the packets would arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday, but as I had been waiting for almost 3 months for them, you can guess how glad I was to know they would finally arrive.
Why did it take so long then? Well, I got most of the parts ready in a week after placing the order, except for the video card. For various reasons I wanted to try Radeon HD4770 but as many people might know, the new 40 nm manufacturing process didn't really work so well. Producing the 40 nm RV740 chips has been too slow to meet the market demands. So two weeks ago I finally called in and asked them to send all the parts that they could and wait for the GPU and send it in whenever they can (of course this adds extra postage).
On Tuesday while I was working in the University Clean room laboratories handling the e-beam equipment, I felt my cell phone vibrating, indicating me that someone was calling me. Well, since due to the nature of work we need to wear protective suits there, I couldn't answer the phone. And no, the suits are not to protect us, the suits are to protect the labs from us! (for real!)
When I left for lunch break I took a look at the phone's logs and saw that there were actually two calls at different times from the same number. "Could it be from the post office regarding the delivery?" was my thoughts. I took a look at the online packet following page and indeed for both packages there were reports of "trying to call the recipient". And even the times marked there matched those on my phone. Time to call back! I would be getting the parts "after 5" (after 5 pm) delivered to home. YAY!
When I got home after the work day (around 4 pm) I was very hungry and didn't really have anything to eat in fridge, so I immediately took a trip to local Citymarket to get something to fill the empty fridge with. When the clock was close to displaying 17:00, I ate my dinner, waiting anxiously for the doorbell to ring.
During the next hour I did hear doorbell sounds, but from all the other apartments in this building, not mine. They were obviously teasing me. Conspiracy, I say! While waiting I decided to start preparing for the arrival by disassembling my (back then) current computer since my intention was to transform the previous computer into a dedicated server machine and use the new parts for a new gaming/general use computer.
I also got a great idea that I could clean up my wireless keyboard. After all, it looked quite dirty and has been in use for 5 or 6 years, in 4 or more different locations, and never cleaned during that time. I expected it to look quite awful when torn apart, but the reality was even worse, so bad I didn't even dare to take a photo of it. I did, however, take a photo of my soap bath for the keys:
Soon after getting the keyboard parts wet (the keyboard had 19 screws to be released before it could be opened!) I finally got the doorbell sound louder and happier than ever. Sure enough, the courier was there with two biggish boxes. Now it all started looking very good:
I still held my horses and continued with the keyboard and disassembling the existing computer. Here you can see the keyboard body too:
As for the previous computer in this point, this is how it looked before I took stuff out of it:
And this is what it was like after my first line of operations:
From left: 3 hard disk drives, 2 with coolers on them, CPU cooler, various cables, Radeon X1900XT with aftermarket Zalman cooler on it, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU, Creative Audigy 2 sound card and AGEIA PhysX physics acceleration card, the old computer case with cheapo PSU and MSI K9N-SLI Platinum motherboard still in.
Part of this process was also cleaning the parts. I didn't use soap water for them, though. Rather, I used compressed canned air and a vacuum cleaner. The air I sprayed wherever I saw dust to blow them off, then the vacuum cleaner to suck them in to prevent the dust from getting elsewhere. It wasn't even many months since I last time cleaned my case, but still there was quite a lot of dust in there. I would recommend everyone to clean up their computer physically every now and then. Non-flammable compressed air is a great help in that.
Cleaning was not the main purpose of me getting everything out, though. As you can see from the photo, I even removed the CPU and it's stock cooler. This was because part of my order was two Arctic Cooling Freezer XTREME CPU coolers. The stock cooler for the server's AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ was quite loud and since the computer is supposed to be running 24 hours a day in the same room I sleep in, I want it to be quiet, so I went and bought a silent but effective cooler for it. And since I managed to get them so cheap, I ordered one for my new computer too.
The holy moment of opening the box delivered to me:
It appears that over the half of the volume of that box is filled with stuff to protect the valuable contents from bumps (they happen very frequently on Xfire forums). That's good. Now after removing the first layer of them the actual contents can be seen:
From top: 2GB kit of Corsair DDR2 memory for my friend, 4GB kit of Kingston DDR3 memory for my new computer, Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P motherboard for my new computer, Samsung SH-S223F/BEBE 22x DWD+-RW drive, two hard disk drives for my friend, two Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme CPU coolers, AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU for AM3 socket and Corsair TX650W power supply
At this point I took one of the CPU coolers from there to install to the older computer. Of course I first cleaned the old thermal paste away from the CPU surface. I didn't have any chemicals for perfect cleaning, but as the final results will show, the cleaning was at least good enough. The next part was the most difficult part of the whole project: getting the new cooler installed.
The cooler package and information claim that it is AM2 compatible. Well, the module to install it to AMD boards had three holes as if the cooler holder on the motherboard had three hooks on each side. Well, mine had only one. Of course, this would normally only mean that only the center hole would be used and the other two would just be there. But it wasn't so easy. First I just tried directly following the instructions and put the cooler there. It didn't go. After a few more tries and wasted pre-applied thermal paste I removed the motherboard from the case for closer inspection on why it doesn't fit in.
It appears that the plastic module on the motherboard to seat the cooler on has rounded corners around the screws. Those were quite badly conflicting with the wide three-hole design of this cooler. In the end I ended up taking metal cutters and modding those parts on the cooler a bit; I cut the corners off so that it only had one hole on each side. With some work it now could fit there. So I applied ArcticSilver5 on the CPU surface after cleaning it again and tried installing the cooler again. Well, it did get in, but due to all the work done to it, the metal had already bent a little so it didn't seat that well; it can be rotated by a few degrees in two directions. I did run a stress test on the CPU and monitored the temperatures; they didn't get higher than 57 degrees Celsius, so the conclusion was that it was installed well enough. Here's a photo of the server computer during testing:
Something funny had happened with the CMOS settings, though. The computer clock was somewhere at year 2099, USB controllers were disabled, and other weird things. It took a few reboots to find out what all had gone wrong. At least Windows 7 RC noticed that the clock had changed since it promptly claimed that my evaluation period was over and that now it is not genuine Windows, warning me to back up any data since the computer will shut down in 2 hours. Xfire also seemed to be affected, it displayed timestamps in chat windows always as [00:00]. Well, that computer no longer has Windows on it anyway and the BIOS setup was double checked to be correct before installing Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 server edition on it.
It was late at night at this point and I had early wake up for work, so I called it a day. This is the condition my room was left to:
Note the messy desk, shiny backbag, faithful old chair that has lived with me for many years, supporting my computer activities and the keyboard parts, now drying up.
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Why did it take so long then? Well, I got most of the parts ready in a week after placing the order, except for the video card. For various reasons I wanted to try Radeon HD4770 but as many people might know, the new 40 nm manufacturing process didn't really work so well. Producing the 40 nm RV740 chips has been too slow to meet the market demands. So two weeks ago I finally called in and asked them to send all the parts that they could and wait for the GPU and send it in whenever they can (of course this adds extra postage).
On Tuesday while I was working in the University Clean room laboratories handling the e-beam equipment, I felt my cell phone vibrating, indicating me that someone was calling me. Well, since due to the nature of work we need to wear protective suits there, I couldn't answer the phone. And no, the suits are not to protect us, the suits are to protect the labs from us! (for real!)
When I left for lunch break I took a look at the phone's logs and saw that there were actually two calls at different times from the same number. "Could it be from the post office regarding the delivery?" was my thoughts. I took a look at the online packet following page and indeed for both packages there were reports of "trying to call the recipient". And even the times marked there matched those on my phone. Time to call back! I would be getting the parts "after 5" (after 5 pm) delivered to home. YAY!
When I got home after the work day (around 4 pm) I was very hungry and didn't really have anything to eat in fridge, so I immediately took a trip to local Citymarket to get something to fill the empty fridge with. When the clock was close to displaying 17:00, I ate my dinner, waiting anxiously for the doorbell to ring.
During the next hour I did hear doorbell sounds, but from all the other apartments in this building, not mine. They were obviously teasing me. Conspiracy, I say! While waiting I decided to start preparing for the arrival by disassembling my (back then) current computer since my intention was to transform the previous computer into a dedicated server machine and use the new parts for a new gaming/general use computer.
I also got a great idea that I could clean up my wireless keyboard. After all, it looked quite dirty and has been in use for 5 or 6 years, in 4 or more different locations, and never cleaned during that time. I expected it to look quite awful when torn apart, but the reality was even worse, so bad I didn't even dare to take a photo of it. I did, however, take a photo of my soap bath for the keys:
Soon after getting the keyboard parts wet (the keyboard had 19 screws to be released before it could be opened!) I finally got the doorbell sound louder and happier than ever. Sure enough, the courier was there with two biggish boxes. Now it all started looking very good:
I still held my horses and continued with the keyboard and disassembling the existing computer. Here you can see the keyboard body too:
As for the previous computer in this point, this is how it looked before I took stuff out of it:
And this is what it was like after my first line of operations:
From left: 3 hard disk drives, 2 with coolers on them, CPU cooler, various cables, Radeon X1900XT with aftermarket Zalman cooler on it, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU, Creative Audigy 2 sound card and AGEIA PhysX physics acceleration card, the old computer case with cheapo PSU and MSI K9N-SLI Platinum motherboard still in.
Part of this process was also cleaning the parts. I didn't use soap water for them, though. Rather, I used compressed canned air and a vacuum cleaner. The air I sprayed wherever I saw dust to blow them off, then the vacuum cleaner to suck them in to prevent the dust from getting elsewhere. It wasn't even many months since I last time cleaned my case, but still there was quite a lot of dust in there. I would recommend everyone to clean up their computer physically every now and then. Non-flammable compressed air is a great help in that.
Cleaning was not the main purpose of me getting everything out, though. As you can see from the photo, I even removed the CPU and it's stock cooler. This was because part of my order was two Arctic Cooling Freezer XTREME CPU coolers. The stock cooler for the server's AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ was quite loud and since the computer is supposed to be running 24 hours a day in the same room I sleep in, I want it to be quiet, so I went and bought a silent but effective cooler for it. And since I managed to get them so cheap, I ordered one for my new computer too.
The holy moment of opening the box delivered to me:
It appears that over the half of the volume of that box is filled with stuff to protect the valuable contents from bumps (they happen very frequently on Xfire forums). That's good. Now after removing the first layer of them the actual contents can be seen:
From top: 2GB kit of Corsair DDR2 memory for my friend, 4GB kit of Kingston DDR3 memory for my new computer, Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P motherboard for my new computer, Samsung SH-S223F/BEBE 22x DWD+-RW drive, two hard disk drives for my friend, two Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme CPU coolers, AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU for AM3 socket and Corsair TX650W power supply
At this point I took one of the CPU coolers from there to install to the older computer. Of course I first cleaned the old thermal paste away from the CPU surface. I didn't have any chemicals for perfect cleaning, but as the final results will show, the cleaning was at least good enough. The next part was the most difficult part of the whole project: getting the new cooler installed.
The cooler package and information claim that it is AM2 compatible. Well, the module to install it to AMD boards had three holes as if the cooler holder on the motherboard had three hooks on each side. Well, mine had only one. Of course, this would normally only mean that only the center hole would be used and the other two would just be there. But it wasn't so easy. First I just tried directly following the instructions and put the cooler there. It didn't go. After a few more tries and wasted pre-applied thermal paste I removed the motherboard from the case for closer inspection on why it doesn't fit in.
It appears that the plastic module on the motherboard to seat the cooler on has rounded corners around the screws. Those were quite badly conflicting with the wide three-hole design of this cooler. In the end I ended up taking metal cutters and modding those parts on the cooler a bit; I cut the corners off so that it only had one hole on each side. With some work it now could fit there. So I applied ArcticSilver5 on the CPU surface after cleaning it again and tried installing the cooler again. Well, it did get in, but due to all the work done to it, the metal had already bent a little so it didn't seat that well; it can be rotated by a few degrees in two directions. I did run a stress test on the CPU and monitored the temperatures; they didn't get higher than 57 degrees Celsius, so the conclusion was that it was installed well enough. Here's a photo of the server computer during testing:
Something funny had happened with the CMOS settings, though. The computer clock was somewhere at year 2099, USB controllers were disabled, and other weird things. It took a few reboots to find out what all had gone wrong. At least Windows 7 RC noticed that the clock had changed since it promptly claimed that my evaluation period was over and that now it is not genuine Windows, warning me to back up any data since the computer will shut down in 2 hours. Xfire also seemed to be affected, it displayed timestamps in chat windows always as [00:00]. Well, that computer no longer has Windows on it anyway and the BIOS setup was double checked to be correct before installing Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 server edition on it.
It was late at night at this point and I had early wake up for work, so I called it a day. This is the condition my room was left to:
Note the messy desk, shiny backbag, faithful old chair that has lived with me for many years, supporting my computer activities and the keyboard parts, now drying up.
