About

4/9/12

Old gaming rig rebuilt to RAID diskmonster!

So this is my main diskmonster rig:



  •  MSI K9A2+ Mobo
  • 460W PSU at the moment
  • 4 Gb Kingston HyperX 1066
  • Phenom II X4 960T
  • GeForce 8800GT
  • 2x SiL SATAPATA cards ( 320GB RAID 10,  120GB RAID 1, 640GB RAID 0)
  • 1x WD 250GB IDE drive
  • 1x Maxtor 40GB IDE for booting (Gonna move the user dirs soon, only 19 gigs free here!)
  • Gbit ethernet
  • 1TB IoMega USB external drive
  • 2TB WD USB external drive
  • About as many fans as I could fit in there.
  • A total of 10 disks!

Notes about the PCI SiL0680 SATAPATA cards: These needs to be flashed with a downloadable BIOS to enable RAID modes. This is originally just a quad channel IDE controller. But with the flashing, you get RAID modes 0,1 and 10. This is one of those 'Medley' RAID cards and it seems they are even bootable but i can't confirm that yet.

Also the gfx card in the picture is not the 8800, it's out for de-dusting. That card is just an old 64MB PCIe2.0 Nvidia card i had lying around.

The rig in it's current state draws about 180 Watts of power.

4/6/12

How to save your AMD Phenom 960T CPU with a broken pin

So I bought this Phenon II X4 Black Edition and put it into my MSI K9A2+ mobo. Then I bought a Noctua SE fan and all was going well. Until I discovered that the Promise RAID controller on the card did not work and the advertised 1Gbit ethernet port is actually just 100Mbps, that is.

Since the retailers (komplett.no) are complete jerks I  had to buy a new motherboard.

So then I bougth the excellent Gigabyte 990FXA UD7 board, in which that new 960T actually fits if you have BIOS v7 on the Gigabyte board installed.

When the new board arrived, the old MSI mobo wasn't even cold before I started to pull out the *heavy* Noctua fan long before the cooling paste had changed to 'cold state' and at the same time the Noctua fan kind of had a disagreement with Newton. And WHOOPS I ripped the 960T straight out of the socket. A lot of the pins were bent but I did not see any broken pins. So far. BTW, this pocket knife is perfect and widely available to use for CPU pin straigthening. First run it sharp edge up, then sharp edge down along 'bent lanes' of pins:
Better than MacGyvers pocket knife!



I put the 960T into the UD7 board. No post, just a mystical hex value 0x88 on the mobo POST indicator (pretty fancy!). After some Googling, I figured out that code means dead CPU. So a pin must have broken.

I had already put my old Athlon X2 back in the MSI board as as backup computer and it worked. I then disassembled it, shook the mobo over some pieces of newpaper and wouldn't you know, a pin from the 960T had been in there at the same time as the Athlon X2 was running fine!

So the next project was of course to get the 960T working again in the old mobo.

Here's the AM2+ socket, and I circled in red which hole it is that corresponds to the CPU.

Here's a blurry (sorry) picture of the location of the broken pin (it's the opposite of the triangle-mark side)

And here is the CPU pin, which still is not in the socket slot. How come ?!

 I lost that 960T pin about 6-7 times and I could not find it when I had finally figured out a way to securely insert the pin into the AM2+ socket. So I gave up an said to myself, well I do have a an old Pentium 3 1.4Ghz lying around, I'll just snap off a pin and use that instead!

Poor Pentium III got it's pin cut off :(


Then after a lot of Benny Hilling around that night, my old computer finally posted!
My 960T finally posted! YAY!

 And that's the story of how a Pentium III saved a Phenom II X4 960T. If anyone needs any tips for doing this, I can safely say I have the know-how now!

3/29/12

Tech: PC building and casemod

PC mechanix

Useful Things you can do to your box:

* Add silencing isolation. Havent done that yet.
* Add special silent PSU fan(s) Not done that either!
* Install a control panel for adjusting fan speeds:



* Add water cooling to the CPU. Water near my CPU? Nope.

* Install heatsinks on RAM and hardisks. Here's my RAM heatsink:


* Generally install as many fans as you can.



 That was my twin top 120mm fans, a rear blue led 120mm fan and lastly an 80mm fan (should have been 140) green led fan on the bottom, and a red led 120mm fan in the front.


Cool but maybe not Useful Things you can do to your box:

* Install neonlight everwhere (bulbs mounted on transparent CPU heaksinks are awesome)
* Use neon-wire in ie. your keyboard
* Make own fan-grills
* Install glass doors/walls: This came standard on my CoolerMaster HAF 922 Tower. I rather prefer heat outtakes on the sides, but this tower has so many outtakes that the glass wall is worth it!