Last updated 06 March 2008
24/02/08 More power required
Upgrading to a Pentium 4
According to my nephew, the old silentPC is just “too slow to play games properly” ( I had a old P4 machine that I couldn’t even give away) so, I thought I’d try to upgrade the silentPC to something a bit quicker...
The P4 machine is a 2.53Ghz 478 chip (SL682) running in a Gigabyte GA8-SIML micro-ATX motherboard. The Gigabyte board’s layout is similar to the of the old P3 board, fitting it reasonabley straight forward.
I was able to use the same copper block and, for initial testing, the same 1K/W heat-sink from the old machine.
The 150w micro-ATX PSU would not be up to the job of running the new machine, so for testing, I used a cheap 200w Upguards LC-B200SFX box
My spare ‘passivated’ version of this supply, that I made for the PVR project , will power the finished machine.
The testing proved that the everything worked and that power supply was more than capable but, as expected, the heat-sink was not going to be big enough; The temperature stayed below the CPU’s 71°C thermal specification while the machine was idling in Windows, but as soon as the CPU load exceeded 50%, the temperature climbed towards the maximum in less than half an hour.
I did some more bench testing with a much larger heat-sink (the one shown is 0.23 K/W ); although this that able to keep the CPU below 50°C even under full load, it was clearly far to big (I had considered cutting it down to fit, but the resultant part would not have been much better than the original model).
For the moment I’ve decided to use the original heat-sink while I search for another with lower thermal resistance and a suitable shape to fit. I will have to restrain the nephew from playing games for a while until then.
To be continued...
Upgrading to a Pentium 4
According to my nephew, the old silentPC is just “too slow to play games properly” ( I had a old P4 machine that I couldn’t even give away) so, I thought I’d try to upgrade the silentPC to something a bit quicker...
The P4 machine is a 2.53Ghz 478 chip (SL682) running in a Gigabyte GA8-
I was able to use the same copper block and, for initial testing, the same 1K/W heat-
The 150w micro-
My spare ‘passivated’ version of this supply, that I made for the PVR project , will power the finished machine.
The testing proved that the everything worked and that power supply was more than capable but, as expected, the heat-
I did some more bench testing with a much larger heat-
For the moment I’ve decided to use the original heat-
To be continued...
