I run Rosetta@Home on all of my computers, and my file server had only been using the stock cooling for the longest time. My CPU temperatures were constantly hovering around 55, which isn’t too bad, but a bit high for my tastes (especially with an Intel E2160). NCIX.com was selling the Scythe Ninja for $30 a while back, so I decided to pick one up. I installed it onto my CPU, and noticed that it wasn’t doing that much better than my stock heatsink. At first I thought that I might not have installed it properly, but the problem was worse than I initially imagined…

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EDIT – Hamachi has updated their licensing, allowing you to run Hamachi as a service for free. Check here for more information.

So… I still love Hamachi, it’s the best thing since sliced bread in my opinion, but there are times when we want or need it to run as a service, or without the user knowing it. LogMeIn has made this “run as a Service” a feature of their premium version for Windows XP, which will set you back $39.00 per year. Here’s a way of getting around this litle connundrum.

A word of warning, this procedure alters the registry. Improper changes can result in a screwed up system, so don’t touch anything I don’t tell you to touch, mmkay?

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No… it’s not a baby. I’m 22, and about to start my masters. I don’t plan on having a child for another couple of years, at least.

Anyways……… the new addition is a new file server. I’ve been eyeing the parts for this system for a good while now, and finally got the main core of the system. Here are the specs so far:

Motherboard – Foxconn G9657MA-8EKRS2H
CPU – Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160
RAM – 2GB (2x 1GB) OCZ Gold DDR2-800
OS Drive – Western Digital WD2500KS 250GB

It’s basic, but it’s a platform for a much larger beast…. the 3ware 9650SE-8LPML. I’ve already got four 500GB drives, and ultimately, they’ll be put in that system in RAID5, giving me a healthy 1.5TB of storage space. Yes… I know. I’m crazy.

Then again – the 3ware card has a lot of advantages over other RAID solutions. One of the key ones for me is array expansion. One day, if the 1.5TB fills up (and it probably will), I can simply add another drive and expand the array to 2TB without losing any data.

All of my computers have names from Star Wars, so I’m giving the new system the name of Coruscant. I find it fitting, considering that it was the center for pretty much everything in the galaxy.

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So… I had a slightly hairy run-in with my workstation last night. Let me start by saying that whoever designed the heatsink retention for S370 and SocketA should be smacked over the head at least twice. If you look at the CPU socket in this picture, you’ll see three tabs on each side. The heatsink is held in place by a metal shim that’s clipped onto those tabs. The main problem is that those little tabs have a tendency to snap off at the most inconvenient times, leaving you with a system that can’t have a heatsink. If the tab breaks off cleanly, you have a chance of gluing it back on with some epoxy or the like.

So this happened to me – the tab on both of the sockets of my workstation, Lusankya. I figured that I could epoxy them back on and bend the metal clip to reduce the pressure a bit, since the CPU’s have an integrated heat spreader, leaving plenty of contact area. I got the system up and running again and all seemed fine and dandy. I use SpeedFan on my systems to monitor temperatures and voltages and such. SpeedFan lets you configure events based on this temperature being too high, or that voltage too low, or whatever else you can think of. I have a rule set that if the CPU temperature goes above 60C, the system will start to beep.

So last night, I’m watching TV, and I hear the system start beeping away. I’m thinking… what’s going on. I open up SpeedFan and lo and behold, CPU2 is running at 106C!!! I slam the power switch on the PSU to shut off the system, and then open it up. Sure enough, that broken clip broke off again, and the heatsink had slid most of the way off. I removed the CPU and heatsink and as much as I needed too, and set about mixing my epoxy again. After leaving the epoxy to set overnight and all of today, I carefully reattached the heatsink and tried to start up the system. Ok… clear BIOS, set the CPU speed again… starting Windows…

BSOD!!!! Aww crap. The computer restarts right away, so I don’t get a chance to see what it says, but after a few more BSOD’s and restarts, I finally read it: UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME. In otherwords, my system partition/drive is screwed. Probably happened when I shut off the system. Crap.

Well – it’s incentive for me to transfer two 80GB drives and a Silicon Image SATA RAID card into this system and run the boot drive off RAID0. After a bit of fiddling around with the SIL3512 drivers, I finally got Windows to install. Let me just say – the difference is highly noticable.

HDTach Results

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So… I’ve been trading up various computer parts lately. One of my recent trades was random stuff I had lying around for a dual 1GHz PIII server, which I gutted and is now powering my main workstation. I’ve gotta say – dual CPU’s is wicked.

The cooling on the PIII’s was somewhat low-end and noisy, so I decided to put my two Zalman CNPS3100+ heatsinks on the CPUs. That meant I had to take one of them off my Athlon XP 2000+ in my file server. Being left with no other quiet heatsinks, I had to find something new. The only decent heatsink I could find at NCIX.com was the CNPS7000B, which is S462 compatible… but… Zalman claims that the NF7-S motherboard that I have is incompatible with that heatsink. I’m not one to take no for an answer, so I decide to find out why.

It turns out that the culprit is the attachment clip on the heatsink hitting one of the capacitors near the socket, as shown in the next couple of pictures.

To hell with that, I say… if it’s just that one of the little clips hits the capacitor, why not get rid of it? I grab my trusty dremel and slice away… tada!!! The result!

After installing the heatsink on there and getting everything back into place, I turned down the speed to the minimum I could with the included FanMate2, and then ran CPUBurn to make sure nothing was amiss. After 15 minutes, the temperatures were 6C lower than before. Looks like we’ve found a winner.

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