Things, Stuff & Such

I submitted my little MAME page to the Arcade Controls website a while back. It’s a community of M.A.M.E. enthusiasts and they post other people’s projects on there site. Yesterday they put mine up (with around five other projects) and I’ve received over 200 hits so far. It’s not huge in the world of the web, but a record for me, so I’m happy.
For the uninitiated, MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator which allows you to play many of the classic arcade games you knew as a kid on your PC. The application is free, but you have to track down the actual game files (known as ROM’s) on the net. Some people have taken this a bit farther by building or retrofitting actual arcade cabinets to enhance game play. It is quite fun and a nice hobby. You can find more information on the net. If you had a favorite arcade game when you were young, you should check it out.

Who made this mess?
Originally uploaded by ROMbler.

My sister-in-law said she was enjoying some quiet time while Ethan was playing in his room. This is what she found when she went to check on him. It will be quite a while before she gets more ‘quiet time’ I think.

This is a lesson every parent can relate to. The beauty of this one is that it’s someone else’s lesson!

I got my replacement CPU Friday from newegg.com. This time I didn’t rush. I had used the downtime from blowing my chip to finish refilling the cooling system with the new UV reactive coolant. All that was left was to install the CPU, attach the temperature sensor to the underside of the heat exchanger and tighten it on top of the CPU.

Fired up and running! The new chip runs a little hotter, but still solid with the water cooling. The Evercool WC-202 is a low end cooler, so I am not expecting arctic temps. I just want it quieter – so far it is.

My origianl plan was to take my pc and mod it as cheaply as I could. I would have succeeded nicely if I didn’t have to replace my CPU. Oh well… on to enjoying my pc.

The coolant looks blue-green in daylight…

…but it glows nicely with the UV light on it.

First thing this morning I called my sales rep at the company we get our IT stuff from to see if he had a deal on CPU’s. I needed to replace the Intel P4 2.8GHz HT chip I fried last weekend. He had nothing for me, but said he’d keep looking. While waiting I tried the usual websites: Tigerdirect.com, eBay, Bestbuy.com, etc. I hit newegg.com and the page opened showing there 24 hour sales. Instantly I thought to myself, “maybe they have my cpu on sale”. I saw a listing for a 3.0 GHz CPU but dismissed it without even seeing the price. Well, they did not have any P4 2.8GHz’s on sale. Bummer. So, I thought I’d check the price on the 3 GHz (thinking I’d be willing to pay a little more for my replacement chip). I couldn’t believe it… The 3 giger was cheaper than my original 2.8 that I got on sale!! It doesn’t make up for my idiotic frying of my original chip, but it was a luck break. I should be getting it in a couple of days.

Holly crap! I fried my CPU!! It was a stupid rookie mistake. I’ve been digging my water cooled pc and decided I wanted to change the coolant. The Evercool WC-202 comes with a red colored coolant and I decided to change it to a blue UV reactive coolant to show off in my windowed pc case. Well, I got the coolant on Friday (yesterday)and decided to drain and refill it that night after work. Originally when I set up the system I used a tube that has a flow indicator build into it (basically a propeller to that spins to show the liquid is moving). I didn’t want to leave it in as this degrades the flow rate a bit, so when I went to drain the ‘old’ coolant I disconnected this tube (which went from the radiator output to the main unit’s input) from the main unit side and connected the extra tube here to prevent any flowback from getting on to any components. This left me with two open ended tubes to drain coolant. I also removed the CPU’s heat exchanger so I could remove the chip. I had to remove the chip because I would be running this thing until the coolant was drained. But, something happened. I forgot to take the CPU out! Why, you may ask? Was I distracted my the sound of breaking dished in the kitchen? Did the some detectors suddenly go off? Was I watching the Spice channel while doing this? Nope. I rushed. I was stupid and in my egarness to get the job done I skipped a critical step!

Now I have to wait until Monday to order a replacement pc from a vendor we use at work! I’m bummed. I think I’ll go put my head down for a while.

The system seems to be stable. I set my system BIOS to shut down the pc if the chip exceeds 140 degrees as the Evercool does not have an auto shutdown feature – only an alarm which I hope to never hear. The cooler is very quiet under normal load. When the chip temperature hits 104 degrees the fan will speed up and become a little noiser, but still quieter that a stock heat sink and fan.

Here are a few pictures:

The Evercool installed and running. The mean temperature seems to hover around 111 degrees with normal load. When I tested it running World of Warcraft the temp reached over 120 degrees, but still a safe temp.

Here you see the coolant tubes and the radiator. The instructions said to have the fan push air thru the radiator to cool the liquid, but I decided to have the fan pull in fresh, cooler outside air. We will see if this does any good as time goes on.

For a while now I have wanted to try out water cooling a pc. I’ve been reading and researching all the different companies and kits to cool your CPU without a heatsink and fan and finally decided on the Evercool WC-202. Not only was it inexpensive, but it displays the temperature and fan speed for me. You can easily spend several hundred dollars on a liquid cooling solution but, being my first time I wanted to get into it on the cheap (in case I needed to buy a whole new system because of water damage).

I started with a regular beige case that I panted black and cut out a window in the side panel and an exaust hole in the top.

Once I got the Evercool kit, I began by removing everything from pc case I was currently using. I was going to have to remove the motherboard anyway to attach the CPU cooler mount, so I waited til the last minute.

The process is to connect everything outside the case inorder to fill the coolant and bleed the air out. To do this I had to fill the internal reservoir, turn on the pump and tip the unit on it’s side. This lets the air build up in the reservoir and then pushed out when more liquid is added. I had to do this about five times to get all the air bubbles out of the system. Once the system was bled, I ran the unit for a few hours outside the case to check for any leaks. If any of the coolant was allowed to get onto any components in the case it would kill that component and possibly the entire system.

After completing the leek test it was time to install the system in the case. With the motherboard already in the case in began by passing all the cooling components thru the front drive bays. This was a little tricky, but not bad. After putting a couple of screws in the 5.25″ bay to secure the main unit I now had to secure the CPU and GPU heat exchangers. It was a little tricky getting the CPU exchanger screwed down – it kept wanting to slide on the thermal paste and twist out of place due to the plastic tubes – but I finally got it. All it takes is patience and knowing which swear words to yell out.

Once it was all together I set it up on my desk and said a short prayer to myself before hitting the power button…

…and SHE WORKS!!

Now to play around and see how well this baby really cools.