A 'puter in your shop?

[Doug Winterburn]

...and AMD?

-Doug

[David Babcock]

I have a friend who builds liquid cooled pc's for high end engineering and graphics firms. Tried to get him to let me borrow one, he told me I could if he could borrow $4000 dollars.

[Jerry Gilreath]

Yup, got one in the garage and one in the shop. Connected to the main server in the house via fiber optic cable. Got a Cisco 2950 in both garage and house. That's what I do for a living, so why not?

[Jerry Gilreath]

Aint that the truth!!!

[Edwin Pawlowski]

You have to see the whole Blue Man Group show to appreciate it. 60 second snippets just don't convey the real deal. Ed

[John Crea]

Up until recently, the AMDs did NOT shutdown when they overheated, they just died a fiery death. Especially if you didn't have a heatsink/fan attached, they would self destruct in something like 7 seconds. Lots of folks killed bunch of AMD CPUs by turning on the power "just to be suire the machine boots" before putting on the heatsink/fan

John

[Charlie Self]

Doug Winterburn responds:

He was. Mine was an Intel, straight from Intel's PR department for an article I was doing. It was an early one, and the replacement chip is still down in my kitchen running my wife's machine, but it has been downrated to 800 mHz to reduce its tendency to have fits.

Charlie Self "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." Dorothy Parker

[Mike in Mystic]

I just got a P4 3.2 HT system. The heatsink on the CPU is unbelievable. First you have the huge airflow shround with 2 80 mm case fans pulling heat out from the CPU. Under that are a set of metal fins - nothing unusual about that, except the density of the fins and the overall size. They are probably 5x the area of the actual chip die. The most interesting thing is there are some really think heat channeling wires that run across the diagonals of the heatsink. They seem to come directly from the processor itself, but I didn't screw with it and take the heatsink off to find out.

The case itself has 2 more 80 mm fans pulling air from the 450 W power supply. There are 2 80 mm fans blowing air in from the front of the case. This system has two 7200 rpm 250 Gb hard drives, as well as 2 optical drives, and a very fast video card, so heat is obviously an issue.

The neat thing is that the fans respond to the environmental conditions - they speed up when it is too hot and slow down when it isn't.

Mike

[mrdancer]

Older chips (AMD and Pentium) had no thermal protection. Intel was the first to add thermal protection, and it took a while before AMD added it (and they caught hell for it, even though chances of a heatsink falling off the CPU are slim to none). When AMD finally added thermal protection, it took the motherboard manufacturers a while to implement it (AMD doesn't have the clout to strong-arm the mobo makers like Intel does). All modern CPUs (within the last year) have thermal protection IF your motherboard supports it.

Now, AMD has surpassed Intel regarding CPU management. If the motherboard manufacturers will support it, your AMD CPU can automatically run anywhere from, say, 800Mhz to 2200Mhz depending on your needs - this keeps the whole system much cooler and quieter, since most people don't need more than

800Mhz over 90% of the time. This is pretty new technology though, only 1 or 2 mobo makers support it so far....

[mrdancer]

That's one reason why I like to build my own systems. One of my cases has two 120mm fans (1 front, 1 rear) as they move more air with less noise. The heatsink (ThermalRight SLK-900) has a 92mm fan.

My other case has 2x80mm front, 1x80mm rear, all speed-controlled.

That sounds almost like a heatpipe. Heatpipes are becoming more and more common in modern systems as they can transfer the heat better, allowing for a quieter fan. It's a good interim step prior to watercooling.

My systems use Antec power supplies. They throttle the fans down according to temperature, and also have a thermostatically-controlled throttling wire for other fans in the case.

Again, this is becoming more common on modern systems. My motherboard is an Asus A7N8X-Dx and it supports this feature wrt the CPU fan.

It's good to see the oems are finally paying attention to making systems quieter.

[Mike in Mystic]

I know what you're saying about noise, but I was very happy to see that this system is VERY quiet. The harddrives make virtually no noise, which a few of my previous systems seemed to be the biggest noise maker. The fans only got noisy one day when SWMBO turned the heat up in the attic where the PC is and never turned it off. It was something like 90 deg. F up there and no ventilation. Other than that, the PC just whispers along.

I tried an experiment to see how much I can utilize the HT functionality, as well as the 2 Gb of DDR400 membory and the 500 Gb SATA RAID 0 hard drive setup, as well as the 8x DVD burner and Radeon 9800 XT vid card. I started burning a full-length DVD at 4x, launched a DVD movie that was saved to my hard drive, started a download of the internet, and opened a powerpoint presentation and started a slide show to run automatically. I figured this would push the CPU through its paces, ramp up the video cards fan speed, and work the harddrives, too. The PC didn't miss a beat, no increase in noise and all the applications ran without any hangups (although there was definitely a bit of delay in some of the functionality, but that's not surprising). This is a long way from the Pentium 1 75 MHz machine that I had in 1996.

I used to build my own systems (I built 3 all together at various times, as well as serious mods to them along the way). Nowadays I can afford to buy it, and having a 3 year warranty on this latest system (which was pretty damn expensive, btw) makes me feel a little better. I had to replace components that failed on the last system I made and it was a royal PITA getting each vendor to give me RMAs and accept the parts and replace them.

I forgot to mention, doing all this while watching it on a 20" LCD with 16 ms response time is a very very nice thing :) (I ain't putting this PC in my shop EVER hehe).

conditions -

[Greg]

I made the case of the machine in the shop. It has a filtered air intake and an extra exhaust fan. If you want to make cases invest in one of those indoor/outdoor thermometers with the probe. I set the unit near the case to get ambient temp and position the probe at various places in the case to measure the temp when it is closed up and running. As long as size isn't a problem an off the shelf case is fine but I like built ins and non-standard shapes for my MP3 players. I also like red oak.

[C]

Decide if you want to play on the computer or do woodworking. Dust, dirt and grime do not make a computer happy. Unless you are using it for process control, it is better off kept in a clean working environment.

[mrdancer]

I can afford to buy complete systems, but I'm pretty disgusted at some of the ways manufacturers cut corners to save a few pennies. Components are much better these days. I've built a dozen computers over the last year and everything has worked perfectly. If a part fails three years from now, I don't have to worry about proprietary components and drivers when I replace/upgrade parts. One of the big advantages to building your own computer is not just saving money initially, but for years to come. =)

[Mike in Mystic]

That's a good point. I planned this system, even though it isn't homebuilt, to be able to use the parts on a customized version in the future. The motherboard is a proprietary design (i.e. it won't fit a standard ATX case), so I would be able to get into a homebuilt box with a case and new motherboard. Everything else should be competitive performance-wise for at least 2 years, IMO. I can always add a few more 250 Gb SATA hard drives (gotta get to a terabyte, right??). The video card get's updated the most. The sound card supports 6.1 THX, so I don't expect to need to update that. I guess I'll just have to see if the PCI bus ever get's upgraded for more bandwidth, as well as the memory pipe, etc.

I've been pretty pleasantly surprised by this off the shelf system. And pricing out the components individually shows me I only spent about $400 more than I would have if I built it myself. To me, that's worth the time savings, warranty, etc.

But, I do miss the fun of really making it my own project.

That's why I'm planning to build a really cool computer desk hehe :) (gotta make more room now that I have 2 (and maybe 3 in the near future) monitors).

Mike

[hamrdog]

i know this is even further off topic, but it's a story i always love to tell. my "every day" system (the one i'm writing this from in fact) is an old 266 MHz PII that has the bus overclocked so it runs at

300 MHz. i never paid much attention to CPU temps, and figured this thing is kind of old (this was several years ago) so if it melts down, i didn't care. well one day i had the case open for some reason and felt the heatsink on the CPU. it was so hot i literally burnt my finger. i told a bunch of fellow computer nuts at work and they couldn't believe it was still running. i have since added several fans to the heatsink and case, and it now always stays cool to the touch. other than power outages this machine has been running steadily since 1998. i can't complain about Intel's products, that's for sure.

oh, and if i had a PC in my shop, i would cover it mainly to keep the harddrive from crashing from all the dust. i've seen the insides of computer cases with so many dust bunnies that they could've started their own zoo, but fine dust will kill the harddrive before you know it.

andy b.

[Fatty Mcgee]

well, actually...

your hard drive is sealed. If the seal is broken, its only a short matter of time before the drive dies, shop or no shop.

[Mike Patterson]

y'know, I had the very same reaction and almost posted the same thing, then I thought about dust building up on the drive's controller pcb and realized he might be right after all, though maybe not the way he meant it

Mike Patterson Please remove the spamtrap to email me.

[Nova]

Hard drives are sealed and will not be not affected by dust. Keyboard, monitor, floppy/CD drives and fans would be my concern.

-- Jack Novak Buffalo, NY - USA (Remove "SPAM" from email address to reply)

[Greg G.]

Actually, drives are NOT sealed, there is a filtered vent that is open to atmosphere. Otherwise the covers would bulge from the internal pressure generated by temperature changes and such. They DO breath.

YOU are not allowed to open them, however, as they are assembled in a clean room, and are generally referred to as sealed assemblies.

Greg G.