Recently my new SilenX fans and 5.25″ bay fan rheobus controller showed up from the guys at FrozenCPU.com. These new SilenX fans kick major butt. First of all they are far quieter then the stock Silverstone 60mm and 80mm fans. I now have two 60mm fans installed in the case, one for the vertical blowhole over the PCI-E card slots and one in the horizontal blowhole directly over the card retention brackets blowing out the back of the case. I also replaced the 80mm fan cooling the hard drive bracket with a blue LED SilenX 80mm fan which makes for a nice blue glow look through the ventilation grill on the side of the system. Click on any of the photos below for the full 6MP resolution photos (big! 2MB+ files).
The only problem I ran into with the variable speed fan rheobus controller was that it was slightly wider then the 5.25″ bay I had free on the case. I ended up having to bust out the wooden block and sandpaper down the edges of the wrap-around plastic sleeve on the Silverstone case. Additionally I also had to use a metal file on the retention flaps for the controller to shave off some excess metal to get the controller to fit. Eventually it did go in, but not before the plastic retention sleeve cracked in one of the corners from over stressing. I also replaced the interal IDE ribbon cable with a nice shielded rounded cable as you will see in the photos below.
At this point now, all that remains to be done to the system is to upgrade to a modular PSU at a later point when I am ready to purchase an ATI R600 based DX10 PCI-E graphics card, provided the retail card will fit in my case or not. That still hasnt been resolved to my satisfaction yet and it looks like I have to wait till April for the card to get released to find out for certain.
I also went ahead and took the time with the system open to install the new 500GB hard drive I had gotten for Christmas along with a spare older D-Link 802.11g PCI WiFi card that will work well for wireless network sniffing work.
Adding in all of the fans and switching over to the SilenX fans has had a good impact on the system overall. It is now quieter but more importantly the system temperatures seem to have improved as well. Right now the CPU runs 45C at idle which is higher then it used to be. The ICH hub chip however runs at 51C which is 25C lower then it used to be! So overall the temps seem a little higher, but overall decent enough. This is also with a second hard drive in the system now and slightly less cable cluttering up the airflow inside. Its still not exactly ideal but its good for now until I get the modular PSU for the system.
Ack, laundry time, aka the witching hours for me. Sometimes I wonder what it is about me and my genetic makeup that makes me seem predisposed to being more productive at night time then I am during the day. Maybe it’s because there are less distractions for me, maybe its because I need to adjust my sleep schedule so I go to bed earlier in the evening. Regardless of the cause I felt like I should show some of you the current state of the humble room/abode I’ve been toiling away at since I started my full-time class schedule at UC Irvine almost a year and a half ago now. Feels like a decade ago almost.
Click on the photos for the full 6MP resolution pictures:
Back to catching up on my reading for Informatics now.
So a few posts back I mentioned how cool a job I think the guys over in the UK who do Top Gear have. Well I have a few more bits of video from the latest series shows that I think are simply hilarious. In the first video we see one of the challenges the team had to face in a cross-country drive from Florida to New Orleans. The challenge was to make the other persons car as offensive as possible in the hopes of getting them in some kind of trouble as they drove through the state of Alabama.
Now, being Brits, I think they might have been a tad….ignorant as to just how much trouble they were about to make for themselves. At one point they stop for gas in Alabama and are nearly caught by a bunch of “good ole boys” looking to do some reconstructive work on their faces. Check it out, truly hilarious yet sad at the same time.
Top Gear meets Alabama 18.5MB H.264 Video
Earlier in their cross-country drive challenge however they had to live off the road. Literally speaking they could only eat whatever roadkill they could find during a particular part of their journey. In this clip we see that Jeremy Clarkson has managed to find a whole cow as roadkill and placed it on top of the Camaro he was driving. This was just too hilarious to pass up, check it out:
Top Gear’s Camaro Beef! 5MB H.264 Video
If you want to see the shows after they air on BBC 4 on Sunday afternoons you will have to use your favorite Bitorrent client and download one of the torrents for the show found on the Eztvefnet.org website.
So I recently went off the handle with regards to the news networks unrelenting coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith “news”. After writing that rant I decided to watch The Colbert Report that night and was greeted by validation from The Man Himself, Stephen Colbert in this piece he did lambasting the news networks for their ANS coverage. Check it out below:
Colbert Report goes off on ANS coverage 9MB H.264 Video
All I can say is, Stephen and I are in total agreement on this one. I can’t wait for real news to start getting reported again now that the stupid issues regarding who gets the body have been dealt with.
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