Up and running.

So far, so good.
by AC - permalink

All the parts I ordered from Newegg showed up at 5:30pm on Wednesday, almost exactly 48 hours after I placed the order. They shipped out that morning at 8:30, but I was the UPS guy's last delivery of the day. Which wouldn't have sucked quite so hard if I hadn't gotten up at 8:30 and seen that my shit had just left and was "in transit for delivery," giving me a good nine hours to wonder where the hell that stupid brown truck was, already. But at least everything was in one piece. I was disappointed in the packaging, though. My new AMD 64 4000+ CPU came from the OEM and not retail, which meant it was in a tiny plastic square sandwiched between a couple of quarter-inch pieces of foam. It worked, but it was slightly disconcerting. And nothing I ordered, including the cooler and PSU, came with any documentation of any kind, not even a registration card. If I wasn't moderately familiar with how to put a PC together I wouldn't have had even the slightest idea where to start.

Everything plugged in and seems to be working fine, except the Kingwin CPU cooler. Apparently it wasn't designed with my particular motherboard in mind, as there's no way to attach it. The clips sort-of fit across the old cooler's base, but only enough to keep it from sliding around. Which means that until I can jury rig it all together somehow, I'll have to keep my tower on its side indefinitely; if I stand it back up, the whole thing will pop off the CPU and crash down on top of my video card. So... yeah.

In any case, the CPU and power supply are working, and my rig hasn't crashed, so I guess one or the other was the problem -- probably the CPU. It's a good thing I'm not pushing the PSU anywhere close to its limits, because it unexpectedly has a big, fat fan built into the top of it. My case doesn't have a gaping hole back there, so I had to mount it with the fan pointing down, where its air-flow clips the back edge of my CPU's new cooler. As far as I can tell, though, it's only been running on its lowest setting, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, with my vid card seemingly cleared of being the cause of my overheating issues, and my new CPU holding a steady idle temperature of around 40C whether the case is open or not, I looked a bit more into what the acceptable temps are for a Radeon X800 XL. With the case shut up, mine hovers around 38C, which is apparently decent considering my case's layout and cooling setup. The GPU is on the far side of the single case fan, which I helped a little by digging up some tin-snips in the garage and using them to cut away the unnecessarily dense stamped-out grill that was covering it. It's still running hotter than I would like under load, but for the most part I'm finally comfortable with shutting up my case again, and it's nice not having that ridiculously loud desk fan blowing into it three feet from my head all the time.

I'll keep toying around with things, and update as needed. I also picked up the new Nine Inch Nails disc today, so I'll be posting about that after I've gotten a feel for it. And, I think I've finally got GTA Vice City working again, and I want to write about some crazy performance improvements I've gotten out of GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2.

Blogged with Flock