Somethin' For Fun

Mod - Short for modification.

2008-07-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

So in March I had already told my parents what I wanted for my birthday...a 8800GTS to pair with mine in SLI, but I was concerned about my case. I mean size-wise it was fine, but cooling wise, it was totally inadequate. Why? Well think of it like this. I have now overclocked my Quad to 3ghz (say 40C in heat), plus one overclocked gpu (50C), plus mobo, HD, psu, and memory (50C). I had only two 120mm, one an innie the other an outie. Now that just wasn't going to cut it with another G80 gpu. I NEEDED MORE!! More fans, more airflow, and more room!! Now that only means one thing: a giant mod of my Gladiator case!!

Now looking at my case before being chopped up:

...it looks good enough, but there is always room for improvement. My original idea was for an extra FOUR 120mm fans: two top, two bottom. Well funds restricted me so I had to compromise. Only two 120mm fans on top and two 80mm fans on bottom. I then wanted a vent over the top two fans and a some nice legs for the bottom two for ventilation.

Now I had the idea (with cutbacks). Implementation was a whole other bucket o' ICchips. I needed some way to cut through the steel on the top of the case for the two fans. Well, I had my Dremel and I picked up a circle cutter of CPO Dremels website plus a carbide drill bit. I also needed some JC Weld for the vent and some rivets.

Well a week later (and one carbide bit, and two cans of spraypaint, and one wood bit, and...) I was finally able to complete my project.

Now for the cherry. I had my mom work on the side panel. Her job was to paint a depiction of the name of the computer (Blue Flood) on it and I must say, it came out great!

*APPLAUSE**APPLAUSE**APPLAUSE**APPLAUSE**APPLAUSE**APPLAUSE**APPLAUSE*

Thank you, thank you!! You're to kind :P

New updates soon.

To Overclock is Human...

2008-03-05T17:32:00.000-08:00

So me and my processor hit it off quite nicely. That is until I got the Urge again. Ok, you have pushed the limits of the computer hardware wise, whats next? Overclock the sucker!! Which is why after a few false starts, I got started on a forum known as Overclock.net. The people there were really helpful, but I couldn't achieve a stable overclock of 3ghz for my Quad. I tried overvolting, undervolting, setting radical memory timings, underclocking my memory and nothing worked!! I was headed for a long journey of broken dreams...but wait!! Someone on the forums said "Try BIOS 0608." Well, this could be problem since I had upgraded my BIOS to 0803 in anticipation of using a 45nm Core 2 Duo. Most people had a lot of issues downgrading their BIOS's on this board. This guy, (name's Diddler), also was kind enough to write up of FAQ for downgrading the BIOS. Yay!! So after school a couple of days ago I got up the guts to try it. First time it didn't worked. It was because when I booted into the command prompt to downgrade the BIOS, I forgot to set the proper drive letter that the replacement BIOS was on. I tried again. This time it worked and it booted fully into Windows, no problem.

Next step, overclock!! I quickly restart my computer and boot into the downgraded BIOS and set my AI overclock to manual, my FSB to 1333 and my memory to 667 to keep a 1:1 divider on boot up. I saved the settings and what do you know? I booted fully into Windows riding on a 3ghz processer!! Oh yeah!!

But now I had to compensate for the extra heat generated by the overclock. So, I crank on an extra 92mm "booster" fan on the back of my computer and it pretty much sucked out all the heat produced. Unfortunately, that fan is REALLY LOUD!! Oh well, the price of overclocking. I can deal with it. But, before I had started this overclock I had purchased some upgrades...

Green with Envy

2008-03-04T15:16:00.001-08:00

Like I said I was in the market for a new graphics card. Why? Well my old 7300GS was giving up the ghost or rather screaming like a banshee. The bearings in the GPU fan had gone out. Eeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkeeeeeeekkkk. Oh man that hurt my ears. Fortunately, I went on EBay a couple of days before this problem started and picked up a 8800GTS OC 320Mb. Pant, pant, pant. It was a choice between that and two 8600GT's in SLI. Again I wanted the best and hoped I could pick up another 8800 and run SLI later. So, I purchased it online. $300. That was more money than anybody in our house had ever spent on a "frivolous" piece of hardware. So, until it came, everyday in my living room that stupid fan kept screeching. It drove my family nuts. My dad finally got fed up enough to ask me to shut off my computer. I told him he just needed to wait till my new graphics card came. That made him happy.

When the card arrived, I was all agoggle over it. There was just a small snag. It wouldn't fit in my tool-less rear PCI slot. Uhoh. But, the trouble shooter in me came out and fixed the problem with ease. Whew. Ever since then I have had fun with this system and taken it as far as I could go with stock. Oh no!! The Urge!! The urge to..to..DO MORE!! Aargghhhh!!!!

Down the Multi-Core Road

2008-03-03T09:26:00.001-08:00

A processor. A small piece of hardware that has such a huge impact on the rest of the system. I was so wanting a new processor ever since I heard that the Core 2 Duo's came out. Then as I was reading online I came across a review for a Core 2 Quad processor. Hmmm. I read the whole review like a thirsty man. And then I read another review and another. The price for this cool piece of hardware was $300. But it only utilized 1066mhz FSB and the core speed was only 2.4ghz. I wanted to utilize the full FSB of my board, 1333mhz. So, I looked at other processors, first the E6550 2.2ghz 1333mhz FSB at $179 Then the E6850 3Ghz 1333mhz FSB at $300, this was the absolute best processor you could get without moving into the Extremes.

And because I wanted the best, it finally came down to a contest between the Quad core and the E6850. Back and forth I went every minute. Then one day we were at Fry's and I was determined to get A processor that day, but I couldn't decide!! Arrghhh!! Then a light bulb struck. "Ask your dad." it said. And I did. He recommended the Quad core and gave me a couple of good reasons why. 1. This is where technology is going. 2. Its at the same price as the E6850. 3. Why not?

Now how could I argue with that. I went and purchased a brand new Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.

Now she isn't the fastest horse on the track, but multiply the 4 cores by 2.4ghz and you get more processing power than the E6850 or even the brand new 45nm Core 2 Duo's. The 8MB L2 cache doesn't hurt either.

We then move on to the mean green eye, Nvidia and their awesome GPU's. Which of them will be my next graphics card?

The Nemesis...

2008-02-20T15:21:00.000-08:00

...Of all custom computer's. Why won't it turn on!!

I was in big trouble. I had just purchased all this brand new equipment, but nothing worked! So, I went online to the Asus Forums for the P5N-E SLI and enlisted their help.

"Its your 4-pin plug! Did you plug it in?" Of course.

"Its your memory! Is it on the QVL list?" Yes, but I didn't know that till I had ordered another stick of the same memory.

Ok, enough with that. I had played around with this thing for almost a week to get it to work. Even tried RMA'ing the board, but the people at Fry's got it to work? COME ON!!

So I sat down and studied the board for hours thinking over all the possibilities. Then something struck me. I just set the heatsink on the cpu. I didn't attatch the brace. And you know what? It worked!!

How the heck? Then I remembered what my dad kept telling me about my board problems, "It sounds like a short, Dan." I looked at my metal brace and where it touched the Asus board. Then I looked a the back of my original Intel board. There was a thick sticky substance on it. Doing!! Light bulb!! My METAL heat sink brace wasn't shielded from the back of my Asus board!!

I ran into my dad's room, interrupting his hundreth odd rerun of a episode of M*A*S*H, asking the question "How do I shield my board from the brace?" He said the best thing to do is put some Kapton tape over it. This tape is non conductive and is used in a lot of electrical applications. So I put on the tape and turned the system on and it worked.

Sometimes the hardest problems have the simplest answers. DUH!! But I wasn't going to stick with that P4 for much longer. I was anxious to move into the 21st century...

The Saga Continues

2008-01-23T23:11:00.000-08:00

I received the Ultra case from Tiger Direct on a school day. Ho hum. I have to wait till after school before I can do anything. But after school I dig in. I find the sparse instruction book and proceed to install every single mounting pin...whether it be for a mini ATX of a full. But finally it was all in. I now have a clear sided case that is so big it takes up a good 1/4 of my school desk. I was so happy...for a while. Now came the incessant need again. I WANTED MORE!!

I now order a single blue/blue UV Cold Cathode light and install it, but with a tiny modification. I remove one of the 5 1/4 in drive bay covers and take my dad's drill press and promptly cut out a hole for the switch. Now I have LIGHT!! Well it wasn't quite the effect I was going for. Firstly a green mATX motherboard and a cheesy looking heat sink really do not look that good bathed in blue or in UV, for that matter, and second, there just wasn't enough light. The case still looked like a voluminous cave. Yuck. So what do I do? I order another. This finally sets the case right, but not the board. Like the dentist said, "Its gotta come out".

Blue Cold Cathode Light

Now really I didn't purchase a new board purely on aesthetic reasons. I will say that it was on the list of look-for's, but it wasn't the highest priority. I was actually looking for three things. Affordibility, Upgrade-ablity, and SLI capablity. And I found it. I went to Fry's on the way back from work one afternoon and had my mom and brothers sit in a car on a humid Houston day while I looked around. (It was actually their choice) The board was an ASUS P5N-E SLI with a nVidia 650i chipset, 1333mhz FSB capable, and SLI capable, not to mention that it supported Core 2's . Intel Core 2 Quads, to be precise.

Asus P5N-E SLI

Beyond the board I purchased two Antec blue LED 120mm fans for intake and outtake on my case and a stick of Kingston DDR2 6400 memory.

Antec 120mm Blue LED Fan

Now this whole system, as it was, depended on one thing - my aging Pentium 4 processor. Somethings never go as planned...

Sometin' For Fun

2008-01-22T21:18:00.000-08:00

Somethin' for fun...aka a hobby. You know I just wanted to build custom computers. Like the biggest, baddest, custom lookin', heat producin', gaming machine. Well I did. The problem was I couldn't stop. I have now made a small business out of the whole thing. It all started with the PC I was given for my 16th birthday. It was the best computer in the whole house and I treasured it. It was a Gateway with a tiny micro ATX board that had a PCI 16x slot on it (which I thought was the coolest thing because of the graphics card potential) and a Pentium 4 3ghz processor. A few months after that I entered a gaming clan called ECO which got me into a favorite game of mine, Day of Defeat. I soon found that my on board graphics couldn't handle my insatiable need for gaming. So what did I do? On my 17th birthday I was handed $100 by my parents to do with what I wanted. I headed down to a Best Buy and purchased a Nvidia 7300 GS graphics card.

It was 2006 and I was cruising down gaming lane. Till I hit a snag. "Dear Daniel, I am running out of memory. Please donate out of your savings for more" said my computer one day. Well really it said. "Error. Out of Memory" but it might as well had. I was hooked and spent $70 on a 1 gb of DDR ram. Now thinking I was set for the next couple of years, I tackled harder and harder GPU crunching games, till my poor GPU fan screamed. (Well it was more like my parents screamed at my attentiveness to my computer rather than my school. But we all know that song)

2007 has rolled around and my computer has been bettered with a SATA 160GB HD to correct a misconceived notion that my original hard drive was going out. (Heck, my OS was ganging up on me, but, well, it was Windows) Now a new idea struck - What about a new case?. During this time my CPU was undergoing heat problems (which was later corrected by a clean out of the heatsink and fan) and I convinced myself that more space was in order for better ventilation. So taking my hard earned summer job money, I purchased an Ultra Gladiator Case.

And so begins the saga of Blu Flud, my very first custom computer.