Bandit the desktop PC
With the arrival of the final version of Windows 7, it was time for a little maintenance on Bandit the desktop PC. See, the desktop PC used to be the media PC, until I built a newer, faster computer to use for a media PC. So the desktop PC was kind of leftover, kludged together, missing a few parts that were put in the new media PC, and had a motherboard that was dying one on-board part at a time. So last week, I ordered a new motherboard, and once the new motherboard was installed I spent a little time getting everything working right and running nice and cool.
The desktop PC is built in an Antec NSK1380 case, which is really tiny, and takes some creative work to make everything fit.
For instance, the power supply hangs down over part of the motherboard, and with the old, dying motherboard, I had to use a tiny little cooling fan on the processor. With the new ASUS M3A78 motherboard, I can JUST fit a 92mm Thermaltake TM3 aftermarket cooler on the AMD X2 processor.
Once the motherboard was in, with all the cables and fans hooked up, it was time to put the drives in. I’m using a Blu-ray/DVD/CD combo drive, mostly because I can:
Normally, the hard drive fits upside-down in the drive cage, underneath the Blu-ray drive. But thanks to that nice big cooler on the processor, the hard drive doesn’t fit anymore. However, there are 2 more spaces to put a hard drive in the drive cage, and because of the way the drive cage and more importantly the video card sit, I ended up installing a laptop-sized hard drive instead of a regular hard drive. You can just see the edge of the hard drive hanging down on the left:
After attaching the hard drive, I put the drive cage back in the case. It JUST BARELY fits over the cooler, in fact one edge of the cage actually touches part of the cooler, but since it misses the fan blades I count that as “fits.”
And from the other side, you can see the video card, extra cooling fan (that round black thing on the left) and how much more space there is since I installed a laptop drive instead of a normal-sized hard drive:
With the cage in and drives connected, I closed up the case. The top of the case has a fairly decent vent above the processor fan, but the sides were solid plastic with fake vents. 10 minutes with a pair of pliers turned the fake vents into real vents, and cooled the computer off by about 5 C, which is a lot for a computer:
Even with better fans and more vents, the computer still runs fairly warm, so the cats think it’s a great place to sleep:
