4 posts tagged with "hardware"

Back in part 1 of this build, I ran in to some overheating concerns with the northbridge. So I decided to try a passive tower cooler for both the north and south bridges.

So here's the new parts that are ready to go... From left to right, they are:

• Thermalright HR-09S (type 3) VRM cooler... which I didn't end up using (more on that later);
• Thermalright HR-05 IFX chipset cooler - this is the straight-up version, which I'll use for the southbridge;
• Thermalright HR-05 SLI IFX chipset cooler - the "bent" version for the northbridge.

This is just couple of quick pics to give you an idea of what will be coming sometime in the next few weeks ;)

This is a project that I've been plotting for quite some time now, and I'm finally about the have a go! The idea is simple, I want to build a media center PC, but with some perhaps-slightly-unusual requirements - purely to suit my own preferences.

We use a Thecus N2050 at work for external backups. The Thecus had been running very well (albeit noisily) in a hosted data-center environment, but has recently been shifted to our local office.

Now, a couple of days ago, the Thecus (as we like to call it) started to have some serious issues - spefically, our Linux kernel was reporting constant IO errors whenever the device was under heavy use. After a quick check, I noticed that the lights on the front were flashing to indicate that the second disk had failed. Since the device was (and still is) running in RAID 1, this should not have affected the device's reliability, but just to sure, I pulled the second disk out.

It was then, upon restarting the Thecus with one less disk, that I noticed the horribly loud fan... and subsequently realised, that the fan could not have been working prior, since it was so obvious now! :(