Ah crap, the Danner is doing something [lots of pics]

[radodrill]

I know it's probably too late now but I would have scored a slot on the back of the plate that would be wide enough for the circuit board to fit in to a depth of about half the width of the plate. Then you wouldn't have had to counter sink the holes to accept the washers and nuts or could have made them shallower.

 

M2C; if he had cut a slot for the PCB; that would have significantly weakened the acrylic and made it more likely for it to snap, counterboring the holes doesn't reduce the structural strength nearly as much.

 

Also, having the counterbore brings the knobs closer to the acrylic, giving it a cleaner look.

 

 

Also, when drilling the holes, I would have clamped the plate to the wood so it wouldn't move from the rotational torque of the drill. A depth gage would have kept the holes from being too deep.

 

The main issue is that Dan was using a spade bit. Spade bits have cutting tips on the sides that cut deeper than where the bulk of the material is being removed. And from experience, wen drilling through acrylic with a spade bit, there's a fine line between still cutting and breaking through and it's very hard to gauge.

 

I personally would have used a router with a plunge base to do the counterbore (or a mill if I had one)

 

 

EDIT:

however I'm kind of leery about using a standard transparent acrylic since the rest is UV Blue.

 

You could always check if Sunbeam would send you a replacement cover, then all one would need to do is properly brill/counterbore the holes

[soundx98]

(1) 11 x 7.5 inch Brushed Chrome Film

(1) 11 x 7.5 inch Carbon Fiber Film

are in the hands of the USPS and winging their way towards Iowa

 

(They actually put up quite a stink about having to go to Iowa,

but I reminded them it was a hale whole lot better than having to go to Idaho)

[red930]

You could always check if Sunbeam would send you a replacement cover, then all one would need to do is properly brill/counterbore the holes

 

I thought about that when I was typing that last bit and shot them off an email, if it's cheap I might just have it shipped to you, if you don't mind cutting the holes for me. :angel:

 

(1) 11 x 7.5 inch Brushed Chrome Film

(1) 11 x 7.5 inch Carbon Fiber Film

are in the hands of the USPS and winging their way towards Iowa

 

(They actually put up quite a stink about having to go to Iowa,

but I reminded them it was a hale whole lot better than having to go to Idaho)

 

What, the Minnesotan USPS has a thing against Iowans? I'm not surprised...

 

Thanks man, really appreciate it!

 

However, I have new developments. I was heading outside to ruin a bit more of my case when I noticed Fedex had kindly left my graphics card outside. I'm not posting any pictures yet, but needless to say I'm a tad upset about the contents.

 

I'm working the card now with a giant bottle of Everclear/equate mouthwash next to me, you'll see what I mean in half an hour or so when I'm done. I "assume" it works since the eBay post said it did....but yeah...you'll see.

 

*sigh*

 

All in the name of saving cash....

 

*double sigh*

 

At least it might hit 60 today. That'll be nice.

[radodrill]

I thought about that when I was typing that last bit and shot them off an email, if it's cheap I might just have it shipped to you, if you don't mind cutting the holes for me. :angel:

 

Cutting the holes is the easy part, with the right tools of course; just LMK

[red930]

Okay, well as I was saying I was headed outside to put some holes in my case to route wires through when I saw Fedex had stopped by with my graphics card. I purchased this 7600GS from a dude on eBay used for $15 plus shipping. Considering every other card at that price point was considerably worse (and very few PCI-e) I figured what the hell.

 

I'm glad to see that this card is "designed for extreme HD gaming" because now I'm gonna totally use it for that.

 

/sarcasm

 

 

Anyways, the picture on eBay demonstrated that it had an aftermarket heatsink on it and the seller said as much as well. Since some 7600GS cards just come with a passive sink I figured that was good news.

 

 

It's just a crappy little Vantec fan, probably from a CompUSA and cost 20 bucks. I wish I took a picture of the backside of the card because - I . you not - it was held on by an intricate series of rubber bands. Here's part of one.

 

 

I have no idea if this is Vantec's "brilliant" design or if the guy had to rig something up himself. In any case it was not on very tightly, and I imagine once the card heated up it was even on less tightly. Whatever, I wanted to test out that fan so I plugged it into a spare fan controller and discovered it was annoying as .. Okay, that's cool I was gonna take it off anyways to clean it, I'll just put on one of the other fans I've got lying around here. Something oughta work since the damn card offers passive cooling on some models. So I cut the rubber bands and took a looksie.

 

 

I guess I don't know why I was surprised, I really should have expected as much. I have no idea what the paste is, it's very, very thin compared to Ceramique so I assume it was included with the Vantec fan. Which (I hope) means that it was designed to be slathered on electronics without breaking them.

 

No big deal, I can clean this right? Well, turns out my Arctic Silver cleaner FINALLY ran out after 3 years leaving me somewhat dead in the water. Until I remembered I had this stuff.

 

 

No, that's not mouthwash boys and girls. That's Everclear. Mixed with blue food coloring. Long story short some buddies wanted to take booze with them on a cruise a couple weeks ago. They finished the other 4 bottles like this and spent well over a grand on other booze there. Nobody wants to drink this now, so I'll use it.

 

 

After a good 20 minutes and two dozen q-tips, I ended up with this. not perfect, but good enough. I had to use my fingernail to scrape off a thin film all around the chip itself, suggesting it had been baked on. Awesome-o.

 

 

So I had to go find a suitable fan. Found an old northbridge heatsink from my 975X/G that would been nice to use but I had no way to attach it. Though about using an Evercool VC-RE but found out it was broken...debated using the northbridge heatsink fan from the board I'm using since I'm gonna swap it out anyways...then said xxxx it and picked the biggest one I had and after I cleaned it up a bit with some steel wool...

 

 

..and applied the CORRECT amount of thermal paste...

 

 

...I had a (theoretically) working graphics card.

 

 

Overkill? xxxx no.

 

I'm probably going to set up this computer on my desk at some point to see if it works. not to mention my board, my processor...ram...etc, etc.

 

I hate added headaches.

[pikachinks]

 

No, that's not mouthwash boys and girls. That's Everclear. Mixed with blue food coloring. Long story short some buddies wanted to take booze with them on a cruise a couple weeks ago. They finished the other 4 bottles like this and spent well over a grand on other booze there. Nobody wants to drink this now, so I'll use it.

 

Omg.. I almost died when i saw that bottle of mouthwash.. ROFL.. dan.. that would be such a mean trick to give someone everclear as mouthwash.. .. p.s. it looks like that guy that owned the card before you had no idea what he was doing lol.. neways looks great so far.. ^^

[t_ski]

Dan, we'll be creating duplicates of your YMCA pass and we'll be racking up some some serious pool time by this weekend.

 

All kidding aside, I have one possible alternative for you on the drive bay panel. If for some reason the guys at Sunbeam can't hook you up, perhaps I might be able to snag one for you from school. We had the full-tower case for a build in our Advanced Hardware class, so we might have one extra slot cover. I'd have to do some serious begging and pleading with the teacher, but she loves me

[dr_bowtie]

Dan....

 

run down to the local dollar store and get some of those tiny bottles of "Goof Off" or "Goo be Gone" that stuff will remove any TIM you can throw at it...I even cleaned up some nanotherm epoxy 1/2 mixed with regular stuff...wont hurt the PCB or anything and cleans up with alcohol...which you aready have...or wait...I got extra i may send you some...I am in a giving mood today...lol

[red930]

Dan, we'll be creating duplicates of your YMCA pass and we'll be racking up some some serious pool time by this weekend.

 

All kidding aside, I have one possible alternative for you on the drive bay panel. If for some reason the guys at Sunbeam can't hook you up, perhaps I might be able to snag one for you from school. We had the full-tower case for a build in our Advanced Hardware class, so we might have one extra slot cover. I'd have to do some serious begging and pleading with the teacher, but she loves me

 

Feel free to copy it all you want! Believe it or not I'm using it every day, sometimes twice a day. And eating a can of tuna for each meal. I'm cranky a lot these days, i wonder why...

 

No worries on that cover man, if Sunbeam doesn't hook me up (and maybe even if they do) I'll just stick with what I've got.

 

Omg.. I almost died when i saw that bottle of mouthwash.. ROFL.. dan.. that would be such a mean trick to give someone everclear as mouthwash.. .. p.s. it looks like that guy that owned the card before you had no idea what he was doing lol.. neways looks great so far.. ^^

 

Lol, we tried that already. The smell is surprisingly faint and still has a little bit of that mouthwash essence as well. I'd use it, but I'm a man. My roommates on the other hand can't grow beards.

 

Dan....

 

run down to the local dollar store and get some of those tiny bottles of "Goof Off" or "Goo be Gone" that stuff will remove any TIM you can throw at it...I even cleaned up some nanotherm epoxy 1/2 mixed with regular stuff...wont hurt the PCB or anything and cleans up with alcohol...which you aready have...or wait...I got extra i may send you some...I am in a giving mood today...lol

 

Nah I'm good man, thanks though. I got the rig hooked up on my desk right now, and the only available monitor with our projector so I ended up flashing the bios, running memtest, and installing XP on 110" of glorious...blue mostly.

 

Haven't tried anything 3D to make sure the card completely works okay because my keyboard is hooked to this computer for the time being.

 

Anyhoo, a couple more pics.

 

Here's where I bent some damn sink on the board so my heatsink would fit onl correctly. It could go the other way but the heatpipes would block the orange slot next to the cpu socket. That pissed me off because it made my memory run even shittier than normal. So i broke out the pliers and made . work.

 

 

And here she is up and running. I actually took the time to not only slipstream the RAID drivers onto an XP CD, but also integrated all drivers for the board. And even shut off a bunch of services from Angry's video before even installing it! Runs quick because it's a 1.6GHz Sempron, .. I swapped the X2 out because frankly it doesn't hold a candle to my cute little Sempron. Strangely the BIOS read it at 33C or so though, which I'm not a real fan of. I realize the Ceramique is old and needs time to sit, but it's pretty chilly in my room and the processor is at stock volts and stock speed. I'd expect low 20s here. But whatever.

 

The chipset fan seemed to get warmer than I remembered too, so I slapped one of my memory fans on it for the time being. I imagine my HR-05 is sitting upstairs right now, but I'm too lazy to go check. Also note the hot sauce Likewhoa - I'm tellin' you buddy, HOT SAUCE!

 

 

Lastly I cut a hole in one of the supports for the 5.25" bays. This is where the front panel cables will run through to sort of go around the case.

 

 

That bit worked fine for this application at least.

 

 

Edit:

 

It's ridiculously upsetting how crappy the nf590 chipset is for CPU overclocking and yet how dominant it is for memory overclocking. Max FSB on this thing is 320-325. Absolute max. By anyone. Meaning I'm gonna have to swap out my Sempron with an 8x multi for that X2 with a 10x multi so I can actually play with my RAM more.

 

*sigh*

 

Oh yeah, that's the other crappy part. Instead of linking your memory speed to the FSB, this board links it to the speed of your CPU. Meaning that if your CPU hits a wall at, say, 2.56GHz (320x8, where I'm at now) I can only bring my memory at just over the DDR2-1000 point. Which is lame, because I really want to get my $450 out of this kit someday.

 

But I guess the good news is that the computer works great right now! And seeing a $40 processor completely max out a decent board whilst still being at stock voltage is something you don't see every day.

[red930]

Well looks like I'm eating my own words on this one. The max I could do with this board back when Travis lent it to me was 320 FSB, meaning that a little mATX Biostar could do better.

 

Still on stock voltage on the CPU and running lower volts on the chipset than I did back then, I'm priming away at 340 with no issues. Didn't even put the memory on a divider, 5-5-5 2.25v @ just under DDR2-1100. Maybe I'll stick with the Sempron for a little bit yet, see if I can't pull 2.8+ out of her. If the board actually has the FSB, I have no problem putting 1.7 volts through this little classy lady.:tooth:

[dr_bowtie]

I was going to say...that CPU should be the limitation of the board...not the other way around....

 

With AM2 you gotta get the ram dialed in to get the CPU to fly regardless of what Memtest says....I tune all AM2s in with Orthos and pass right by Memtest...

 

I have had Memtest say 100xs the rams fine but Orthos crap in a minute...change a secondary ram timing and what do you know it starts lasting longer and longer...

[pikachinks]

First we see everclear.. then hot sauce.. next i'm gonna see a beer.. then tomato juice.. lol.. then we'll top it off with tequilia rofl.. cable management is gonna be a biznick.. but it should look reallly good if you already taking precautions and drilling wire holes.. ^_^ are you gonna sleeve everything?