03/05/2003 Archived Entry: "Neglect"

My poor, poor neglected blog.

Keeper has a new case! I've been doing some side-work for my brother-in-law, and I've invested the money gained into an Antec Sonata. The Transfer of Computer Guts took place a couple of nights ago, and I have been extremely very much happy with the Sonata. I went from an Inwin Q500N monster full-size tower to the little Antec mid-tower. The new case is quiet--very quiet. In fact, it's made me realize just how freaking loud my CPU fan is. Next purchase for me, in fact, will be a new CPU fan that's a bit quieter.

So, after transferring the guts, my brother-in-law made a very important and embarassing revelation--my CPU heatsink was on backwards. Chalk that up to poor inexperienced me installing a heatsink/fan combo for the first time and being intimidated by the whole thermal grease thing. We pulled off the HS/fan, blew it out with canned air (and man, let me tell you how much dust exploded out from between the fins!), cleaned the old Arctic Silver II off with some acetone, and then reseated the whole thing using a TIM pad instead of grease.

Guess what? My cpu temperatures dropped FIFTEEN DEGREES. I'm idling now at 38C, and under hard load (i.e. five hours of Prime95 in stress test mode) it taps out at 43C.

So, I'm now looking into the wonderful world of overclocking. Since I'm out sick this morning, I've jacked my frontside bus speed up from 133 to (so far) 145 MHz, which means my BIOS is now identifying my chip as an Athlon XP 1800+ instead of a 1600+, and the temperatures are holding rock-steady. I've had Prime95 running for the past hour with my FSB at 145, and the temps are STILL going no higher than 43.

w00t!

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