Monday, November 12, 2007

Upgrades?

I've started researching a little to move my current PC into a "new" case. I have an SGI Indy case with a dead Indy in it. I'd like to move my PC into it because I like the look of the case. I know that sounds like sacrilege but the SGI is dead so what else could I do with it anyway. I haven't decided for sure that I want to that yet, but I'm seriously considering it. I have to figure out how to cool the CPU. Right now, its really under-cooled in the case I'm using now. Partly that is because I'm impatient and cheap. The case is easily 10 years old and never really had enough cooling before anyway. There's only one case fan in it and then the retail AMD Athlon 64 CPU cooling fan attached. I need something better if the case is going to be much shorter. It looks as though the cooler needs to be less than 55mm from the mainboard to the top of the cooler to fit in the case. The power supply can be a 1U unit I think. That should be plenty small enough to replace the supply in the case now. I'll need a PCIexpress16 90 degree riser card to fit the video in it. That doesn't have to happen right away. There is a built-in card on the board, but the nVidia 7600 GT is nicer. Then I just need to accommodate the TV tuner some way. I think I'll also cut out the entire back panel and replace it with a thin sheet of copper to make cutting the holes for the ports on the back much easier. I'm sure that none of the current holes will be in the right place anyway. This is just a brainstorming thing right now. I need to gut the old SGI out first. I might save the guts only because I don't remember what about the system made it dead. I think it may have been a combination of things but I'm pretty sure that the power supply was the last problem and the most expensive to fix.

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