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Step 3 Mod
Okay, some of you might be wondering "What could he possibly do next?". Well very simply put: Cable Clutter Removal. Air flow, Air flow, Air flow! Lets tidy up the case and cut those ribbon cables up to get the best airflow possible! Now, two things to do, make round cables and tidy everything up.
Making round cables, well basically it involves cutting up the big ribbon cables into smaller ribbons and stacking them. Since you guys are prolly falling asleep already I think I am gonna make another article on the fabrication of Round Cables, stay tuned if you are interested.
Here is a pic of the before: (click to enlarge)
Here is a pic of the after: (click to enlarge)
Now onto the results!
Testing Methodology
It might be a good idea to let you know how I took the temperatures you shall see in the rest of the article. I used a total of 7 different sensors. Four of them where from an external sensor, and the other 3 were taken off the motherboard. I have pics to show 3 of them here:
The Voodoo3 3000 temp sensor: (click to enlarge): right on the back side of the V3, where it is hottest
The CPU probe: the thermistor is pressed right up against the edge of the cpu slug, it's also covered in thermal paste to ensure the most accurate reading possible
The ambient temp probe: just chilling outside, I was careful not to breathe on it.
The fourth measurement for the external sensor was the voltage regulators, this is directly behind the CPU, directly in front of the dual 120mm fans. I chose to do this on a hunch, and it turned up some interesting results.
The last three temps were recorded off the motherboard, they include the heatsink, case temp and voltage regulators. The heatsink thermistor is mounted beneath the heatsink and comes into contact with the bottom of it. The case temp is mounted near the ram slots, and finally the voltage regulator is mounted right in the middle of the voltage regulator array, not touching the voltage regulator like mine.
I took two sets of measurements per Step, Idle and Full Load. For Idle I simply let the system sit for 10mins before recording temps. For full load I ran Dcyphers' CSC.exe dos executable from a window, again for 10mins. From my experience this program gets right near 100% load the entire time it is running. Q3A on the other hand only gets the cpu up to 100% (if even that) at certain spots. So it cycles and is not constant like CSC.
System Specs
Modded Liteon FS020
400w Zippy Emacs PSU
Gigabyte 7IX
Athlon 650 @ 750&1.6v core
128mb Crucial PC133 SDRAM
Voodoo3 3000 not o/c (AGP)
Adaptec 2940 (PCI 3)
Soundblaster Live! Value (PCI 5)
Quantum Atlas 10k (bottom slot in main drive cage, FAST!!)
Toshiba 40x SCSI cdrom drive (top 5.25" bay)
FD / Generic Keyboard / Razor Boomslang 2000 mouse
>> Spec/Testing Results
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