Easter Tune Up

[daglesj]

Ok so I finally dared to get round to pulling the PC desk out from the wall and getting round to doing a few jobs on my PC that I had been putting off for months.

The jobs were -

Clean out the case.

Replacing the chipset fan on my DFI Ultra with a better copper one (Evercool VC-RE) as it always runs at 65c or more.

Mod the chipset to enable SLI.

Check that the stock AMD Opteron cooler had bedded in ok and replace the stock TIM with some new silver paste.

Replace the audio cable from my soundcard to my speakers with a better quality shielded PC-OCC one.

Ok so I pull it all out and remove the board from the case, the chipset cooler came off ok but the yellow heatpad had cooked to it and was hard as rock. Had to use a small screwdriver to gently scrape the residue off to get it back to a clean surface.
I then got my small pot of silver particle paint and gently put a small splot on the two contacts and that was that.
Put some Akasa silver paste on the chipset and gently placed the new all copper HSF onto it. Pressed it in firmly and plugged it in. Job done.

Then I took off the CPU cooler. Here I got a shock. The CPU had always run hot but I read that Opterons do that and it is reasonably OC'd (but no volt increase). It was hitting 55c+ at some points under load but never caused any problems.

Anyway the cooler came away from the CPU and I discovered that the stock TIM appeared to have only been making contact around the edges. The majority of the centre was untouched. Hmm no wonder.

I was surprised as I always make sure coolers are seated properly, but something went awry here. Maybe I didnt do the twisty-squishy move as it was the solid grey TIM type. Anyway I clean it all up and placed some new paste on the CPU. I smeared it around neatly, placed the cooler carefully back on, twisted it slightly and lifted it off. Yes we had full contact. I then wiped off the paste that had got on the cooler (just to reduce the amount) and placed it back down using the same method again.

Put the board back in, plugged all the cables etc. back in and powered it up. Bingo it fired up again first time and it now states SLI!!!!! Probably wont use the SLI (even though I got a spare 7900GTX) as I'll need a new PSu and the single card does just fine. Nice to have the option though.

Wow big difference to temps. The CPU idles at 40c and hits 47c at load. I went with the stock cooler as reviews said it was pretty good even in comparison to aftermarket ones.

The chipset sits at 45c and goes up to around 50c at load, the fan is a lot quieter too.

I dont see any burning icons in Speedfan anymore!

Sp overall a success. Put it all back.....but I just noticed that I must have put the HDD indicator plug on the wrong way round. I now remember in the case its reversed from the other ones. Ah well can't win em all.

[powerarmour]