On Project #1, part 010: Heat

Pardon me while I get my geek on:

It turns out that chip on a 3Ware AMCC LSI 9650SE RAID card under the heatsink is so for a reason.  I don’t know what that chip does, but it gets awfully damn hot.  The stock heatsink is only wahfer-thin, which is curious because it isn’t the tallest part of the card, and there is considerable room for a larger one.

For background, I took my card of my server and booted to my external hard drive while I think on the subject.  Without the four Seagate Barracuda drives spinning the only things making noise are the power supply and an extremely quiet 120mm fan pointed at the video card.  That card coincidentally is an ancient 32MB nVidia piece which I chose because it will do 1280×1024 in a PCI slot without a fan.  (That is was 10 bucks on eBay was a benefit, too)  The 2.5″ drive in my external enclosure is nearly silent, I can just barely hear it if I stop typing and listen very carefully indeed.

So at the moment I’m enjoying some nearly-silent computing.  The only thing left is a fanless power supply, and those are all kinds of money.  (If you’re wondering about the CPU, it is a Celeron 430 with a heatsink the size of a loaf of bread.  It doesn’t need a fan at all.)

Anyway, the RAID card.  The stock heatsink is about 0.030″ (oh fine, I’ll check… 0.0426″, I was halfway close) larger in width than a heatsink I purchased for a Pelletier cooler I was going to use for something else.  As luck would have it, it is a matter of removing two rows of fins and presto, a big giant heatsink which looks like it belongs there.  The next slot over is PCI-e x1 and I have nothing to go in it, so I don’t feel the need to trim the 1″+ fins on this heatsink to fit into the standard card spacing.

The thing I must consider is whether or not to trim the fins anyway.  If I’m going to go to the trouble of using the bandsaw at work to pop off the extra fins, I might as well, no?  It’ll be a bit of bother to clamp it to the guide, but I’m only making one.

Speaking of attaching this new heatsink, I suppose I could epoxy a heatsink-sized copper shim to the chip itself (which is maybe .75″ square) and pull the old thermal paste in the middle/thin seam of epoxy along the edges trick, that would work well enough and not add much thickness.

Much to do, I suppose.  I can live without the RAID volume for a day or two, and anyway it turns out the external drive is pretty close for read speed.  That tells me that the motherboard is the issue, but RAID 5 for me is more about reliability than gee-whiz read speeds.

On shortages.

It seems I have run out of breakfast cereal.  (Awww…)

So I’ll have bacon and eggs instead. (Yay!)

On upgrades.

My laptop being the dodgy piece of kit it is, I’m in the market for something new.  I’ve found that the ASUS N61VN-A2 meets pretty much all of my criteria:

• HDMI out, for driving a big TV if I ever buy one
• An onboard Blu-ray player, no point in not getting into that if it is available
• eSATA so I can realistically boot from an external drive*
• Gigabit and Wireless-N.  I don’t need the speed, but they’re there, and Wireless-N seems to connect more reliably than A/B/G

Granted the battery life is probably going to suffer under the load of the high-speed parts it has, but then I can live with that; I don’t do too much actual mobile computing anyway.  That it ships with Win7 I can live with too.  The touchpad apparently supports a small library of sophisticated gestures for common tasks, which is perhaps double-edged?  I guess I’d have to try it to see if they are helpful or if it is the first step to the radio in HHGTG which changed stations at a glance but required the listener to sit absolutely still if he wanted to hear an entire program.

That the GPU has Cuda support is great, too; I’ll have to resist the urge to run Folding@Home on it because that was a slightly contributing factor to the demise of the northbridge chip in my current laptop.

The advertised price works for me, as does the size.  There are much bigger laptops, and much smaller ones, but I’ve found that 15-16″ displays equate to an immersive video experience when they’re sitting on your lap, and still fit into a carry-on sized hard case.  Also, the motherboard in my desktop is an Asus product, and aside from the flopply drive port (no kidding) it is a great piece of kit.  With that and some good PR on the reliability of Asus laptops, I think I’ve made a pretty solid choice.

*Speaking of booting from an external drive, Ubuntu comes with a really slick partitioner which will effortlessly make a new partition when you install it, but getting that partition out of the MBR is a pain in the ass, so if I can transparently leave Ubuntu on an external drive then so much the better.

On elegance.

Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, won’t you dance for me, ’cause I just don’t care, whats going on today:

On progress.

I didn’t mean to, but I now have Karmic on my external drive for my laptop, Windows on its internal drive, and my server up running Karmic also.

Here is what happened:  I watched one of the myriad Downfall parodies, and that made me curious to see the rest of the movie in its original context.  I went out and rented a copy, and if you haven’t seen it I’d recommend it highly.

Bruno Ganz does a very engaging job of playing Hitler, even having gone so far as spending time with people with Parkinson’s to better play the part.  I don’t know how exactly the events in the Führerbunker were portrayed, but Traudl Junge was there as was Rochus Misch, the radio operator in the movie.  Alexandra Maria Lara didn’t quite steal the show in her part as Junge, but it was close.  If you have a weak stomach, you’re going to have a hard time with this one, but if you can watch this one and not be disturbed then you’ve probably got issues to deal with.

Getting on with it, after having watched the movie I read the IMDB page on it (linked above) to see who was who and read up a little on each.  I was about to launch Songbird when I noticed that the sound wasn’t working properly.  Needless to say, I pushed the Wrong Button in some part of my attempt to fix it and mangled the Ubuntu installation I was using.  After a considerable fight with a laptop that only intermittently recognizes its internal optical drive and doesn’t care to boot from anything USB I got it mostly sorted out, although I am actively considering its replacement.

Needless to say, I still haven’t gotten around to the original task to reading up on historical figures involved in the Battle of Berlin, but I’ve discovered that Karmic works well indeed.  I had read some reports of some people having some hardware problems, but it works fine for me.  Even little things like the extra buttons on the mouse working out of the box, which previously required downloading a manager program.

In the end I’d recommend both, one for a reminder of how bad things can get when people stop acting rationally, and the other as a viable alternative to Windows.  Yes, this is probably the strangest review I’ve ever written.

On priorities.

Go here and watch.  I’d suggest the two final pieces to which Peter linked but didn’t embed, too.

 

These problems are real, and they are here, right now.

On thoroughness.

It seems I have this thing for attracting visitors from major defense corporations:

I think I’m still missed General Dynamics and GE and all the international companies, but for no apparent reason I’m getting there.

On good deeds.

I have no idea who was here looking for “epic fail wallpaper,” but I’d suggest despair.com.  That is all.

On food.

I can only assume that my contribution to the pantheon of free-minded blogger recipes will be fairly minor, but here it is:

Irony sandwiches:

Jewish style rye bread.

Black forest ham.

Enjoy.

Seriously, you can’t put those side by side at the deli and expect me to pass up the opportunity.

On irony.

It figures, doesn’t it?  I put up a weiner joke, and then a blogger of no less repute than Peter links to me.

So if you’re new here please understand that there is a bit of a backstory to my last, but I won’t get into it because I’m a little shy about what I do and for whom.  That aside, hello and welcome.  I maintain the only thing anyone really has is freedom of thought, and I try to exercise mine here.  (In other words, proceed at your own peril)