My new PC

Filed under: TechNotes, Custom PCs — lars @ 02:19:57 pm

I recently got to build myself a new PC. This was a bit more effort than usual, as it was my first in a smaller form-factor case - an Aspire QPack. It's a nice little case (despite feeling a little flimsy), however the size made it challenging not only to find components that would fit in the case, but also the management of heat was more difficult than any of my previous midi-tower PCs. During this process, blogs and forum posts by others with the same case proved invaluable in determining what components would fit - so I decided to write up my experiences also.

Components

So first, a quick word on the innards - chosen to offer reasonable performance without going silly on price, and to try and keep things relatively quiet:

  • Asus P5K-VM iG33 Motherboard - it's a nice micro-ATX board and I've always liked Asus. Though I've since regretted getting a board without a ps2 mouse port as my USB mouse just never gets as smooth during gaming.
  • Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Q6600 G0 - cause quad-core is the future! I ended up just using the stock intel cooler though I would probably recommend looking for a replacement if you can be bothered - mostly because intel's seems impossible to fit securely without the motherboard being somewhat buckled. It's only impatience and laziness that have prevented me from replacing it.
  • Sapphire X1950Pro Ultimate - One of the few quiet video cards I could find with decent performance with a fan that wasn't way too big for the case. Ships with a nice Zalman cooler (though I have to use the excellent Ati Tray Tools to slow this fan down to make it quiet).
  • 430w Seasonic S12II-430 PSU - A nice, reasonably priced, effecient PSU, as the Aspire PSU that shipped with the case was noisy as. The Seasonic wasn't exactly silent, but it was reasonably quiet. Dimensions of this are quoted as 15.0 cm(W) x 14.0 cm(D) x 8.6 cm(H) - and I don't think you could go any bigger in this small case. One other thing - this PSU does come with a lot of cabling which was hard to fit inside the case. For others, I would recommend a PSU with removable power cables.
  • 500 Gb Samsung HD501LJ Spinpoint T - As this was reputed as a nice quiet drive.
  • Pioneer DVR-112D Dual Layer burner (in black, to match the case!)

Video Card and PSU Sizing

A very tight squeeze! PSU plug almost didn't match the case. As you can see from the left photo, the PSU and video-card were a very tight squeeze. I only had a couple of mm clearance between the top of the Zalman fan on the x1950Pro and the PSU. Also, the Seasonic PSU was a fair bit chunkier than the original Aspire PSU and gave me very little clearance between this and the back of the DVD writer. Many of the quieter PSUs are even larger to make space for larger quieter fans, and these would not have fit at all if I wanted to have my DVD writer.

Additionally, the Seasonic PSU had slightly different positioning of the power socket that goes at the rear of the case. It only just let me get the plug in there, and part of the case went over the plastic trim around the socket (see right photo) - which meant I couldn't quite do up all the screws fastening the PSU to the case. It's secure enough though.

Case Fan and CPU Cooling

Cool air being sucked into the case and then into the CPU cooler The fan, mounted back from the case grill Then there's cooling. The Aspire case-fan that comes with the case is quite noisy so I bought a 120mm Zalman ZM-F3 Case fan to replace it. This comes with a resister to slow the fan down and hence make it more quiet, and it was close enough to inaudible when this was done (though I now use a fan-speed controlling front-panel to slow it down).

I also noticed that the stock CPU cooler that I was using with my Q6600 sucked air down through the CPU heatsink and then out the sides. My CPU was idling at a bit over 50 degrees celsius - not exactly cool. So I decided to turn this case fan around to make it air intake rather than exhaust. This bought fresh cool air directly into the case to be sucked up by the CPU cooler, and bought it's idle temp down to 47 degrees. However, this bought another problem! There is a grill in the case which the fan sits on top of, and although this has no effect when air is being blown through the grill, it seems to create a very annoying noise when air is being sucked through the grill! To eliminate this noise, I found I had to seperate the fan from the grill by around 1cm. To do this, I managed to find some 50mm screws from a hardware warehouse and use these to mount the fan back from the grill.

GPU Cooling

My x1850 idled at around 38-39 degrees with the case off, but reached up towards 50 degrees with the case on. Too much heat was building up in this tiny little case causing the Zalman cooler on this card to struggle. On a trip to Hong Kong, I picked up a PCI Slot exhaust fan to sit next to the cooler and try to dissipate some of this heat. This helped a little bit, however for similar reasons to the CPU - I think it would work better if the fan was used as air intake rather than exhaust. Unfortunately, a PCI Slot fan is not something that can just be turned around, and wiring it up backwards cause the fan not to spin at all - so I guess I'm stuck with this small improvement.

Fan wiring illustration One challange I did face though was the wiring. The fan's plug was a large 4-pin molex (see lower-left plug on photo) wheras my fan-speed controlling front-panel required a 3-pin fan connector (see upper-left plug on photo). By doing a bit of searching , I discovered that 2 of the pins on the larger 4-pin molex are +/- 12v, which is the same as two of the pins on the 3-pin fan connector. The 3rd pin on the fan connector is simply to provide feedback on fan speed and is totally optional. So by doing a bit of cutting on some spare cables I had kicking around, I was able to wire up a connector (see photo left) as per the table below:

Fan plug wiring table

Disclaimer - use this information at your own risk! I'm no expert and you shouldn't go messing with electrical wiring unless you know what you're doing!

The End

The finished product So on the whole, I'm pretty happy with my new machine. Here's a photo of the finished product. I do like the small form factor, especially given my current limited desk space. But it is a lot more work than building a full sized PC - in particular because making small changes can involve having to take half the machine apart. I'm not sure I'll be in a hurry to go through this again!

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