I dug this old thing out again today. Blew off the dust etc, and she still runs.
Got 8GB RAM, and its got 2x3.2Ghz XEON CPUs in the thing, so its not a bad little thing.
Should be more than capable of doing anything needed to do, so I decided to sort it out.
I have put in a 60Gig SSD ( cos you just dont waste your time on any PC unless its booting from an SSD these days do you! ) and a pair of old 400GB IDE Drives, and set them up with Software RAID in windows, and its running quite nicely to be fair... XP though, but I still have a bundle of Vista licences that I will most likely put onto it, if for no other reason than to not have them lying about rotting away! LOL
The only issue I am having, is the temperatures... NOT NICE AT ALL.
The thing is noisy as anything, the fans making one hell of a howl, but they are 60mm and there is 2 of them, and so I installed SpeefFan to get an idea and both CPUs are at 68/69c and thats just too much. They have it seems a max of 71c according to the intel specs.
I have had a bit of a scout for replacement coolers, but I have not been able to find anything that will do the job?
These coolers are seriously close together, about a 10mm gap, although I have not measured it, and thats a wild stab, buts too close for any normal cooling options.
The only thing I am thinking of right now, is to bodge it, and take the sheild off, and fling a 120mm onto the top of both heatsinks, to try to get some cooling that way... I have also thought that since there is a pair of 80mm at the back, of simply having the cooling sucked into the case, and towards the heatsinks, but will it be enough? Coiuple that WITH the 120 on top to add even more?
Options yes, but I would simply prefer to just get a pair of coolers that will do the job.
Hang on... What about a pair of very efficient 60m fans? ( I hear myself ask... Cos no one is reading this waffle.. )
Well, I have little room to cram any bigger fans in there, but the grill comes out a bit, and so I removed that, and that has allowed me to put a pair of old Delta fans in. These are hellishly loud buggers, but I ran them with 7v to help quieten them and the temps hardly changed a bit, and with 12v the temps did drop, but at best I got 64/65 so not at all worth the effort.
So its back with the stock fans, and sure, when its idle, its silent, but anything more than notepad, and the fans start giving it large again.
So, once again, its back to searching for coolers to use?
Got 8GB RAM, and its got 2x3.2Ghz XEON CPUs in the thing, so its not a bad little thing.
Should be more than capable of doing anything needed to do, so I decided to sort it out.
I have put in a 60Gig SSD ( cos you just dont waste your time on any PC unless its booting from an SSD these days do you! ) and a pair of old 400GB IDE Drives, and set them up with Software RAID in windows, and its running quite nicely to be fair... XP though, but I still have a bundle of Vista licences that I will most likely put onto it, if for no other reason than to not have them lying about rotting away! LOL
The only issue I am having, is the temperatures... NOT NICE AT ALL.
The thing is noisy as anything, the fans making one hell of a howl, but they are 60mm and there is 2 of them, and so I installed SpeefFan to get an idea and both CPUs are at 68/69c and thats just too much. They have it seems a max of 71c according to the intel specs.
I have had a bit of a scout for replacement coolers, but I have not been able to find anything that will do the job?
These coolers are seriously close together, about a 10mm gap, although I have not measured it, and thats a wild stab, buts too close for any normal cooling options.
The only thing I am thinking of right now, is to bodge it, and take the sheild off, and fling a 120mm onto the top of both heatsinks, to try to get some cooling that way... I have also thought that since there is a pair of 80mm at the back, of simply having the cooling sucked into the case, and towards the heatsinks, but will it be enough? Coiuple that WITH the 120 on top to add even more?
Options yes, but I would simply prefer to just get a pair of coolers that will do the job.
Hang on... What about a pair of very efficient 60m fans? ( I hear myself ask... Cos no one is reading this waffle.. )
Well, I have little room to cram any bigger fans in there, but the grill comes out a bit, and so I removed that, and that has allowed me to put a pair of old Delta fans in. These are hellishly loud buggers, but I ran them with 7v to help quieten them and the temps hardly changed a bit, and with 12v the temps did drop, but at best I got 64/65 so not at all worth the effort.
So its back with the stock fans, and sure, when its idle, its silent, but anything more than notepad, and the fans start giving it large again.
So, once again, its back to searching for coolers to use?
