Just a quick post to link this video. I was playing around with some old computer parts, and this actually came up in conversation with a customer today. So I thought I'd post.



I know I'm not the first person to figure this out. I did a quick Google search and found out it's nothing all that new or exciting. I did, however, find a way to make them more efficient than just connecting something to the positive and negative wires of the fan.

By soldiering wires directly to the coil I have some fans that increased their voltage by over ten fold. Doing this by passes all the voltage regulators and other electronic junk the fan uses when plugged into a computer. Be warned, if you do this do not plug the fan back in to the computer. It will short out power supply and potentially damage it.


Now all we have to do is find something creative to power with case fans.

Labels: case mods, energy conservation

For Valentines Day the boss got a card from his wife that sang a classic Hank Williams song (I still can't believe he didn't even know it was Hank!). Most of the time these electronic greetings get thrown away, but this one made its way into one of my test optical drives.



Okay, maybe that is a little weird.

Labels: case mods

The computer I work at on a day to day basis is named Bench; because it's on the work bench (clever huh?). It is nothing spectacular. Pentium 4 1.8GHz, with some DDR RAM that which the amount changes on an almost daily basis. The motherboard is so old I am surprised it is still kicking. It is so old and featureless it does not even have an onboard network adapter, blasphamy!

The video card was cream of the crop in its day. It's a GeForce FX 5950. It originally served as the video card of the bosses gaming PC, but that was two gaming PC's ago now. The card still works great, but by the time I got to it there were heat issues. I picked up a Zalman heat sink for it, and for a little over $30 the card has never run better.

The optical drive was one of the first generation DVD burners. Usually as optical drive get older they burn slower and slower, yet it still burns at full speeds without any problems. Of course the floppy drive is old. I think even new ones feel old. Unfortunately I still use it to make the occasional boot disk because Microsoft thought the floppy was the only option to install RAID drivers for Windows XP (what were they smoking that day?).

One of the more interesting features of the Bench machine, at least in my opinion, is the operating system switch. Dual booting can be fun and easily done with software, but I'm more of a hardware kinda guy. I wired a physical swich that allows me to boot from one hard drive or the other. One has Windows and the other runs Ubuntu, a Linux distrobution desgined to be simple. It works out well, but of course when the switch is flipped one hard drive is off. Meaning if I have a file on my Windows drive I cannot access it from Linux. This issue promted me to put in a third hard drive both operating systems can see.

The warning label is for the benefit of switch flipping happy co-workers.

Today's post was inspired by me having to replace the power supply in the Bench machine. The 450 Watt power house came to a sudden end this morning with a nice little firework show for unknown reasons. It goes to show that sometimes good hardware just goes bad, even for us.

The Bench has tested more hardware, trialed more software, rescued more data from dying hard drives, than I can remember. It has even gone through an experiment or two. All while maintaining a mostly original configuration ever since I put it together over four years ago. Keep in mind, with the exception of the power supply, every part was used when I put it in here. As a geek, I have created an understandable sentimental value for this Frankensteined work horse. It has served the company well, and deserves nothing less than its lasting memory in our Blog.

Labels: case mods, Repair, Tools

Another slow day at the repair shop means I get to have some fun. I replaced my power and hard drive activity LED's with a more suitable red. I began covering the wiring with mesh. Below are some random pictures I uploaded. I even took a video of the remote lights.

The mesh definitely gives a more professional look. I don't know what I was thinking just covering things in red heat shrink.

Labels: case mods

Today was a slow day at the shop and would have been a perfect day to work on the demo PC, but as fate would have it I'm still waiting on parts. So I played with Google Sketch-up and created a scale 3D model of the building we are in. By "to scale" I mean I imported a Google Earth satellite image and then proceeded to make my model totally from memory and eyeballing all the measurements. Feel free to download and make fun of my model here, but keep in mind you will need Google Sketch-up. Don't worry, it's free and pretty easy to pick up.

Not long after I got to a stopping point on my masterpiece, my parts came in. I put in my red thumb screws and fan vibration dampener right away. The red mesh I plan to sleeve all the wiring with will have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest. The thumb screws are quite nice I think.

Labels: case mods, Software Recommendations

The video card in Ridiculous Red isn't anything all that powerful. It is a mid-range ATI card by MSI (2600 Pro if anyone wants to know) I chose because it is red. I also chose ATI because I'm a big nVidia fan, but like everything else in this machine I wanted to try different things. I used to be a big fan of ATI, but of all the video cards I've owned they seem to fail the most. Perhaps it's luck, but I have only replaced nVidia cards because they were too old. Never because they died.

I also chose ATI because I plan to run Linux. ATI recently opened up their drivers. Hopefully sometime soon we'll see some useful Linux drivers come out of it. Right now it is running Ubuntu 8.04 and I did not see anything special when it came to the video card, but I did not look very hard yet.

I was impressed with how well the power coating finish matched the rest of the card. I even thought about powder coating the large silver heat sink in the second picture, but I'm sure that would have dramaticly affected its ability to cool.

Labels: case mods

The case we used for the Ridiculous Red mod was a cheep acrylic case from Xoxide. I am no fan of cheep cases, but an expensive case was not in the budget. Over all I think it is a great case for the money. My only real complaint is the case works like one of those Chines boxes you can't open. First you have to remove the video card, then the motherboard, then remove the back panel, all just so you can take the screws out on the far side of the optical drive and hard drive. I'd say this case is great unless you're going to do any complicated modding.

The motherboard (see pictures below) is an MSI el cheepo, but I found it to be perfect. I've never had to look for parts by color before. I chose an AM2 board for a couple of reasons. First being price again, and second I know Intel is the better CPU at the moment. I get to use Intels in all the machiens we have built for the past year or so. I wanted to see what is up on the AMD front.

The CPU was under $40, and it is a single core 2.0GHz no nonsence kind of processor. Serves our purposes perfectly. For the memory I tried a brand I've never tried before, GSkill. Granted memoery is memory, but for customers and myself I generally stick to Corsair. GSkill came with red head spreaders already put on.

The giant red heat sink that dominates both of my motherboard pictures is a Thermaltake Ruby Orb. It actually cost a couple of bucks more than the CPU, but it makes for some awesome eye candy. Sticking with my "try new brands theme" I chose this one because it was red with red LED's. Zalman is my choice of after market heat sinks, but they don't make a red one I like.




Tomorrow I'll try to post a little blurb about the video card. It turned out so great it deserves it's own post.

Labels: case mods

As promised, here are some pictures of the case mod we are currently working on. I decided to call this mod Ridiculous Red. The only guidance I was given from the boss was to make it red and put it in an acrylic case. The farther along we get on this mod the more I think it might actually be possible to go over the top with the red.

Here it's easy to see how nice the powder coating turned out on the power supply. This is the first mod I've ever had parts powder coated, and thanks to Protective Powder Coating I think I will be doing this on future mods as well (they're worth the drive).

Hands down, this is the most heavily modded power supply I've ever done. The beauty of an acrylic case is that it has to look good all over. There is no place to hide wires, or so I thought. The power supply I chose just happen to have a bit of open space inside.

The lights turn on and off from remote control. I chose to put the receiver in the power supply. I realize, in the long run, this may make the power supply run a little hotter than usual. On the other hand it does eliminate a lot of wires in the case.

The final picture here is testing the lights. I was very pleased that the remote and power supply worked on the first try. Admittedly, I did a lot of testing with the multimeter to eliminate possible problems, but there were so many little things that could go wrong I was very relieved to have it all work.

I have to admit the remote light switch turned out a lot cooler than I thought it would be. Unfortunately no one else around here gets as excited as I do about it. Today I'll be working on making the mess of wires look nice. Next week I'll have some more pictures.

Labels: case mods