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Case Mod - In Progress Project Pheonix

Discussion in 'Project Logs' started by falcongrey, 9 Aug 2010.

  1. RichardShah

    RichardShah What's a Dremel?

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    Glad you found a solution.

    Back to the hole, I'm new to all this but I heard fiberglass reinforced body filler is good for these things. But buying a new product is that, buying (spendng money) to fix a small thing like that. Maybe it is worth trying to find something else to do with it.

    Sorry I couldn't help more, but I'll try keep an open mind and see what can be done with it!!
     
  2. falcongrey

    falcongrey Master of Nothing, Student of All.

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    Well, haven't gotten a solution yet for the Cool-n-Quiet part. I'm having a feeling that Asus won't bother with it as it is an older board and Windows 7 is not one of the 'listed' operating systems on the board's specification page. In fact, Windows 7 wasn't even around when this board was released.

    As for the hole. I'm thinking of possibly using the main to make a division appear to be there.
     
  3. confusis

    confusis Kiwi-modder

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    Awesome you posted your log! Good to see I'm not the only one f'n around with dual CPU boards. Maybe we'll start a new trend?

    Just keep at it with the modding - I get quite bad shakes when I hold tools/sit in certain ways so I'm shocked to see my lines are straight!
     
  4. falcongrey

    falcongrey Master of Nothing, Student of All.

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    Ok, the new heatsinks are in. They are MASSIVE compared to the old ones. I had to take the 3.5in drive bay out in order to install the new heatsinks. Moved the 120mm fans out of the case and attached a single 120mm fan to the side pannel.

    [​IMG]

    On installing the second heatsink I found they were so massive that they actually butted up against each other leaving no real airflow for the hot air to blow through except against the heatsinks between them.

    [​IMG]

    The solution I came up with was to reverse the fans so that they pulled the air up through the heatsinks and shoved it away from the motherboard as opposed to the default pulling air in and shoving it through the heatsink and down across the motherboard.


    Testing results were quite positive! With the last heatsinks, the average heat sitting idle had been about 52c and light stressed pushed it up past 60. If I attempted to run Prime95, in 10 seconds the system shut itself off.

    With the new heatsinks, average idle temp is about 44c. I installed Prime95 x64 and told it to burn the chips out. After 10 minutes of max core burn, the heat level never pushed past the initial 55-56c levels before the fans kicked up and brought the temperature down to a rock steady 53c for the whole duration.

    Here is a view of my desktop (yes, spread across 2 CRT monitors and click to enlarge).
    [​IMG]

    As you can see on the left hand side, Prime95 torturing my 2 Processors and all 4 cores. On the right, you can see the readings on CoreTemp .997 and the stress level on MultiMeter 3 (in the Diagnostic area) and on MultiMeter 2 in the gadget column.
    :clap:

    All systems are near complete. Just awaiting the hard drive.
     
  5. falcongrey

    falcongrey Master of Nothing, Student of All.

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    Reversed the fans back to default to see the temperature difference. Only 2c difference on average so trying to determine if it will be better to pull the heat away from the motherboard and caps or keep it default and push the hot air across the board... :confused:
     
  6. falcongrey

    falcongrey Master of Nothing, Student of All.

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    I figured out the memory problems as well as the reason the cool 'n' quiet doesn't work.

    cool 'n' quiet = CPUs with the OSP designation are designed with "Power Now" feature not "Cool 'n' Quiet" feature as AMD in an email explained the OSP Opterons were designed for laptops. Similar but not compatible features.

    Memory of 4gb or more = To get TOTAL memory while using an add-on PCIe video card you MUST select an aperture size in portion to the memory on the video card (1gb video ram = 1gb aperture). IN ADDITION, you must also turn on Hardware Memory Hole remapping. If you do not select the aperture size, the CPU's memory controller will make the choice for you.

    Side case fan has been installed and the CPU fans reversed to default direction with air blowing through the heat sinks across the board. With the side case fan drawing cooler air and dumping this against the CPU fans, it has dropped the temp by over 2c and holds it down by that much in testing and stressing. The huge OCZ fan in the power supply sucks most of the heat out of the case and the small 80mm case fan in the back gets most of the remaining. Case temps average at the hottest 40c while the hottest recorded core temps with the case closed is 58c. Very acceptable with the Tjunction at 69c.

    Determined how to fix the feature of the over sized (broke through) hole in the side case fan port. I have purchased a 120mm filter to mount over the opening. Not only will this cover the hole, it will make the air pulled into the computer much cleaner and thus cooler in the long run. The black will make a nice contrast on the white case as well.

    Determined issue with many thermal monitoring programs confused with the boards chip set. This board has 3 chip sets for various functions. The two primary are nForce 4 and nForce 2200 Professional. That being said, the poor monitoring programs do not know which one it is and often select one that is neither of those two.

    Now for a bit of bad news, due to problems with the breaker box and power, until the breaker box is repaired/replaced along with other needed to do repairs around the house I have decided to place Project Phoenix on hold for at the most a month. So until then, place the thread on auto notify on reply so you can see when I add more to the Project! :thumb:
     

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