Assembling the parts starts with routing the front panel connector cables properly. They will be sandwiched between motherboard and motherboard tray, so rerouting them pretty much means detaching the motherboard:

Motherboard and the hard drive installed. As you can see, the chassis is just high enough that motherboard clears ODD on top and HDD on bottom:

Motherboard and the hard drive installed. The hard drive clears the motherboard by just few millimeters.

The stains on the southbridge tell that this motherboard is already on it’s second life. It served originally my personal desktop machine, but I poured white wine over it on certain party, and +12V voltage sensor and one of the DIMM slots stopped working.

Now that the previous motherboard of this machine broke, I gave it another try and was able to wash it clean. Literally wash - I removed all detachable parts including CMOS battery, washed it under tap water, dried with hair dryer and let it dry for 24h before connecting again. And lo and behold, the fourth memory slot started working. Another 70€ saved!

Hard drive mounts to aluminium sled with plastic rails. The two aluminium sleds also double as case bottom and feet:

The SATA cable for ODD is routed under the motherboard like front panel connectors. The SATA cable needs to do a tight turn - needed to be very careful here to not place too much stress to motherboard SATA header:

Opening the right side panel we see that there’s not much there. No space for anything, and thus no holes either:

Except this one, for screwing ODD in place. Notice also the steel inserts for motherboard standoffs - this is a quality case, and it shows. Aluminium is not good for screw threads, it breaks too easily and it has lot of friction. Steel inserts make sure the threads are easy to use and last some use and abuse:

One of the downsides of the M4A78-EM motherboard is that it has only two chassis headers. But it’s a solid budget motherboard otherwise, can’t get everything for just 70€.

Notice also the clearance between motherboard and ODD tray - not too much space wasted here either:

In this revision of M4A78-EM the other chassis fan header is awkwardly between IO panel and CPU cooler. This might work for cases that sport case fan in back next to IO panel, but it’s very bad for this build. Interestingly enough, on my newer M4A78-EM the headers are in a bit different locations, better, if you ask me. Different revision, I guess.

Quality case often come with details you didn’t know to ask, but which help you build better machine. And here’s one: an extra PCI slot cover. There is some amount of room behind the ODD, but not enough breathing space for anything that generates heat, so SilverStone engineers added this slot there:

The USB PCI backplate cable is *just* long enough. Remember it needs to go between motherboard and VGA card, which requires an additional turn.

Here you can also see both ends of the ODD SATA cable, routed behind the MB:

Graphics card in place. This was the only “oops” on this rebuild: on the previous motherboard, M2A-VM, VGA slot was one spot higher, on M4A78-EM it’s one spot lower.. meaning the graphics cooler fans sit very, very close to the hard drive cages.

Do note that the fans face to different directions - this is intentional. At first they blew both away from the VGA card, but that heated HDD to uncomfortable levels, so I switched it around. This hurts GPU temps a tiny amount, but very little in practise, and helps HDD a lot. And because HDD dislikes temps over 40C, while GPU can handle up to 95C, shifting some thermal load from HDD to GPU is a good deal:

This S shaped piece of acrylic is the only totally custom part on this build, and plays a crucial role:

These black tabs are rubber foam; expensive and heavy, but very good at vibration insulation. Attached with hot glue.

The air guide (the S-shaped piece of acrylic) installed. The purpose of this is twofold: First, it directs air from the front fans towards the CPU/PSU intake area and second, it keeps the cables from the non-modular PSU out of the way of the said airflow:

The air guide friction fits between front panel connector PCB and case border, with help of the rubber foam tabs:

Air guide and PSU in place. The PSU is 380W model from SeaSonic S12II series. It’s 80Plus certified and one of the first sub-400W 80Plus PSUs on market back when it was bought. And 380W is already too much for this system, but because everyone and their dog believes bigger is better this was the best fit I could find.

Air guide and PSU in place, cables in their almost final places. As you can see, there’s a lot of spare cabling to store, and this is where the custom guide really shines:

All major components in place:

Tape was used to keep power and SATA cables out of the way. The borders and corners of the case have quite a lot of room for cables, you just need something to hold them there:

The Fanmate 2 controlling VGA fans was routed to the back of the case. If you do tricks like this, keep an eye on the power ratings - the reason why I was able to pull it off is that I used small (92mm) low power fans. Anything larger would go over the max rated power supported by a single fanmate:

Here you can see the bottom of the case and the HDD caddies. They are machine aluminium extrusions that also form the feet of the case. Now that the VGA fans are blowing almost against the case floor, I’m thinking of machining a fan vent to the empty HDD tray. I just need to make sure the structural strength of the case is not compromised:

The bottom of the case and the HDD caddies. They are machine aluminium extrusions that also form the feet of the case. Now that the VGA fans are blowing almost against the case floor, I’m thinking of machining a fan vent to the empty HDD tray. I just need to make sure the structural strength of the case is not compromised.

Overall view of the completed innards. Some of the cables look like they’d be in way of airflow, but trust me, none of them actually are:

Finished!

Completed system, from front. To get idea of the size, the front grille is almost exactly the size of 2*120mm fans. You can actually see the hub of the top fan through the mesh:

It’s small and pretty, but does it perform? Yes. By stressing the system with EVE, the most consuming task she suspect her system to, we got CPU temps a bit past 60C and GPU temps a bit past 65C. When you weight in the HDD being below 35C, the system works very well thermal-wise.

It’s also quiet. Not silent, seeks of the random 7200rpm 500G WD drive are audible if the room is very quiet and you can hear medium band whoosh of turbulence when you go closer than 30-50cm of the vent on the left panel when room is otherwise quiet. However, the left panel will face to the wall, not to user, so the perceivable noise is lower. In practice the easiest way to check if the system runs is to look at the blue leds on the front, or their absence, so I consider this very successful build.

Turns out the cleaning and swapping was indeed a good idea. In conditions like this the fan bearings will break over time, however good fans you use:

The Accelero S1 leans to the graphics card PCB with plastic standoffs seen in the middle, we need to clear then when mounting fans:

To run both VGA fans from a single Zalman Fanmate 2 I soldered together an Y splitter:

The fans are mounted by two layers (remember, we need to clear the plastic standoffs) of double-sided tape on each four corners and zip ties on two opposite corners:

Graphics card cooler with Y splitter but with not zip ties yet:

The Accelero S1 overhangs the graphics card PCB by hefty amount. Luckily this is the direction where we have plenty of space in SG03:

And now we are in this stage, as advertised:

Next and last page: putting it all together.

The clearance for CPU cooler in SG03 is 82mm, and the PSU on top of the CPU area can be installed two ways; intake facing either the side panel mesh or the CPU area. In the previous generation of this system CPU cooler was Zalman CNPS8700 NT, a heatpipe flower where stock fan blows towards the motherboard and PSU was installed to draw air through the side panel.

Zalman is known for creating amazing metal parts for their coolers and then pairing them up with lousy fans that are hard to replace, and CNPS8700 NT was not an exception. The fan was mediocre to begin with and after half a year of usage it started to produce annoying rattling noise even when undervolted. Most likely trying to suck air just 5-10mm from the solid back of the PSU put too much stress to bearings of a fan of questionable quality.

So, in this generation I am using Scythe Big Shuriken, a short but wide cooler that has received high praises on SPCR:

The dimensions of the Big Shuriken are almost optimal for SG03, as cooler height is limited, but due to supporting regular µATX boards, width is not an issue:

Big Shuriken comes with unique 120*10mm fan which is really, really thin:

Cleverly the fan mounting clips seem like they’d accept any open-cornered 120mm fan. This means you can use thicker fan, if you have enough clearance. Per my guesstimate 15mm or even 20mm fan would still fit SG03.

The fan was installed blowing away from the motherboard, because that way it works to same direction than PSU fan, meaning the fans work in tandem, instead of fighting against each other. Obvious downside is that PSU now breathes pre-heated air, but on the other hand PSU fan has to rotate less to move similar amount of air, because CPU fan creates positive pressure for intake side of it.

Bug Shuriken installed on the Asus M4A78-EM motherboard:

The Big Shuriken still clears all power circuitry and standard memory modules with flying colors. Memories with tall heat spreaders need not apply, tho:

Next page: Preparing graphics card for installation.

The system is used by my better half, who mostly uses it for playing back video, surfing, word processing and EVE. I wanted the system to be quiet and utilize standard components, she wanted it to be small and stylish. While you can build mini-ITX gaming machines these days, they still carry hefty premiums and often need to cut corners on things like IO connectivity and power delivery. So, a case that can fit µATX motherboard, ATX power supply and gamer graphics card without being any larger than it has to be to fit those was needed. And SG-03 fitted the bill.

The images link to gallery where you can view all the images from this build and see larger-sized versions of them. License: CC, Attribution, Share-alike, Noncommercial.

Assembled system from left side:

Assembled system from back:

As you can see, the case is really small for µATX case: 360*312*200mm (H*D*W). Power supply sits on top of the motherboard, which seriously restricts the height of CPU cooler. However, graphics card has almost as much room than in mid-tower case - the width and height available for it are decent. Super-long cards might be a problem, but the AMD Radeon HD 3850 used here fits with room to spare.

The system from front, as first assembled:

The SG03 ships with one case fan, 120mm SilverStone one. I complemented it with Scythe SY1225SL12VBL, a 120mm fan that sports blue leds and comes with integrated speed control. Fan speed can be adjusted from 800 to 1600 rpm. Because she liked the leds, I replaced also the stock SilverStone fan with another Scythe unit.

Hub of the Scythe SY1225SL12VBL showing rated specs:

The system from front, with fan grille removed for dust cleanup before proceeding to install the latest generation:

I’m a bit suspicious about filters that are this open (ie. not filter cloth but coarse-grained plastic mesh), but judging from the amount of dust collected in the filters after year of use they indeed have some merit.

To be continued on next post.

The DSLR I am using is Canon EOD 450D, and I am mounting the M42 lens with passive M42 adapter.

Here’s the lens before the operation:

Taped up the lenses to protect them from the metal dust:

I used Dremel router mount table to keep the cutting disc precisely on the desired level:

The router table worked very fine here. As you can see, the removed part stayed in one piece despite of being just fractions of millimeter thick - sign of the cutting disc staying put as it should:

The lens after the operation:

The image magnifies the deepness of the cut; the shiny, cut section is actually less than 1/20th of millimeter below the inmost surface of the aperture ring. If it was sanded down and painted black, you would have to strain to see it was cut.

Because this comes to my own use and you can’t really see the cut part when the lens is mounted, I did not sand or paint it; I only filed down any sharp edges.

Here’s the lens mounted after cleaning up the dust. It’s just as desired; the gap between mounting adapter and the aperture ring is around 0.25-0.4mm, just enough for the aperture to turn smoothly but not having to cut out any more metal than absolutely necessary:

If you want to see images I publish, please direct your browsers to http://www.iki.fi/zds/art.

All modern CPUs (AMD Athlon 64 and Intel Core series to name the most popular) support functionality called “CPU power scaling”. This means that when the CPU is not doing anything, ie. is sitting idle or doing only some light work, it runs at lower clock speed and lower voltage than normally. When CPU is loaded, the speed is adjusted accordingly so that you get the full power to your hands.

So in essence, the point is to reduce the speed of the CPU when the speed is not needed and call it back as soon as there is something to do. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The sad thing is.. you need to do this yourself, because by default this functionality is disabled. This post goes to explain how.

Case: our home server

As nowadays our home server is the only piece of electronic hardware that run 24/7 in our apartment, I have had a project on reducing it’s power consumption. Surprisingly move from power-hungry (at it’s time) Athlon XP to more power efficient Athlon 64 X2 did not help much. I guess the motherboard itself, Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, and its NForce 4 chipset consume too much and balance for the more energy-efficient CPU. Then again, now the gigabit ethernet runs on PCI Express bus, machine has 2G instead of 256M of main memory, there is four hard drives instead of three and naturally the dual-core CPU has at least three times the horsepower compared to the old one, so still running at almost the same AC power is not that bad in the end.

Now, to the benefit of all the potential googlers and to help my own memory, follows a brief description of how I got the power saving enabled and how I checked it actually works.

Hardware
OS: Ubuntu Linux Hardy
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 4600+
Mobo: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
Memory: 4G DDR-400 total
PSU: Antec 350W, bundled
Hard drives:
ST3120022A Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120G
WD3000JB-00KFA0 Western Digital Caviar SE 300G
ST3160023A Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160G
WD6400AAKS-00A7B0 Western Digital Caviar 640G

Results
Without CPU performance scaling enabled: 124-131W AC on light load/idle.
With CPU performance scaling enabled: 110-116W AC on light load/idle.
Saving: 14 to 15W AC.

In this particular case the savings are not tremendous.. I really should look into replacing the PSU with a modern one. But still, 15W 24/7 is energy wasted.

Notes: the hard drives are not the definitely most quiet models available, mostly because I buy server hard drives when some old ones fails and thus I want something that’s available right now, right here. Still all of those four drives running on hard surface are easily drown by the sound of quiet 92mm and 80mm fans keeping the CPU and chipset cool.

Seeing how the CPU runs
This applies to both Linux and Windows: Go to http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html and download the AMD Power Monitor. Install it and run to see your CPU speed and voltage:

What you want to see is to have the voltage be reduced to 1.1V and clock speed to 1GHz when the machine is idle and then check that it rises back to full speed (like 3200MHz and 1.4V) when machine is loaded. Especially the voltage reduction is important - clock speed increases power usage linearly while core voltage increases power usage to second power or more.

To install the Power Monitor to my Ubuntu box I first installed Alien by running

apt-get install alien

as root. Then I downloaded the Power Monitor rpm (tagged RHEL 32-bit in this case) and used alien to create .deb of it:

alien PowerMonitorLinux-1_0_4_118-RHEL4-External.bin.rpm

Then installed the resulting .deb:

dpkg -i powermonitorlinux_1_0_4-1_i386.deb

And finally ran the Power Monitor itself:

amdpwrmon

Note that this is X program - so you need to have X support. In my case I ran it remotely by running and X server on my Windows box, but you can naturally run it locally, too, if you have X running.

Necessary drivers

To actually install the CPU scaling support I followed this tutorial: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=248867. It should work equally for Debian, too.

Since I am running stock Hardy kernel, 2.6.24 derivative, the necessary modules were already compiled with my kernel, so I needed just to make sure they are loaded at every boot and then configure them to save energy by enabling mode ondemand.

With iperf I found that the bottlenecks were the actual pieces of software doing downloads, not the network itself. I managed to pull some 300+ megabits per second over TCP with gigabit link between nForce gigabit NIC and Netgear PCI NIC, and 700+ megabits between the said nForce NIC and Realtek TRL8111B integrated on Riitta’s Asus M2A-VM motherboard. Satisfactory to say the least.

Strongly recommended.

We today disassembled a Lifebook S7010 to examine problems in the cooling fan. Unfortunately after opening it we found nothing in the cooler we could have fixed, tho the thermal paste was in bad shape and we changed it; hope it helps the cooling somewhat.

However, when assembling the system back we got it working but the backlight was not working. Suspecting broken inverter we tore the machine back apart but as we had not touched it, we found it strange to have broken it.. The problem was solved when I screwed back the screws securing the D-Sub external VGA connector to the chassis - after fastening them the backlight worked like new.

Seems the inverter is grounded with the screws that also hold the VGA connector in place. Talk about kludge..