Raspi 1

Note: Raspi = Raspberry Pi

I'm surprised I haven't even posted a thing about my Raspi... Anyway....

It's not horribly powerful, though it's supposed to be able to stream 1080p video... Chrome kicks the SoC to 100%... so yeah, idk :/

I plan on doing a few tests with Transmission (BitTorrent program) to see how it works out... Otherwise, I'll have to drop the idea of holding openSUSE torrents, which would be a bit of a bummer.

I made a "case" for the Raspi... it's quite crude and actually doesn't hold the Raspi 100% securly. BUT! It does have a fan! XDDDD

Just a fan that blows on the ARM chip, none of the funny heat-sinks that I've seen... too much drilling XD

The case is made from a optical disk drive shell, a 5.25" bay tear-off cover, and some tear-off PCI covers XP



You can see the SD card sticking out and the anti-static foam that the Raspi sits on (rather have any ESD from the case go to the Raspi power cable that's not plugged in for the picture, not to mention, it needs to sit on something anyway). The fan is on, it was the stock fan from Ziggy's CPU cooler, and you can also see the fan controller I added so it's not blasting at full speed. All the "case" parts are from computer parts as previously stated XP

The ARM chip stays relatively cool even though I keep the fan speed at lowest. Funny thing is that when I plug the fan in, I have to kinda turn the knob a smidge higher (enough to where it "bounces" back like when you turn the key of a car to start the engine, which is about 1-2 degrees on the knob) spin the fan with a finger and then let go. At worst though, I just turn it up and then ease it down.

The "shroud" has a spring underneath with some rubber pads and mounts to the case with a couple motherboard stand-off screws.

There are three screws in a triangular formation that make up the feet (since the motherboard stand-off screws protrude from the bottom).

Two of the fan's mounting brackets are screwed into the case to make sure it doesn't decide to fly away or something XD

I think I'm done now.

Upgrades (Round 2) Part 1

I realized yesterday that I haven't written about some of things that happened recently.

I was going to upgrade the Dell computer I acquired to a dual core, but after ordering the parts, I found out that the BIOS is locked to certain processors (which is one of the main reasons why I never buy desktops and build them instead). So I ended up doing a build for it, which I'm not really going to go into.

I found that the Zalman CNPS9700 that I installed for Lie-chan was not plugged in... Oops. Luckily, it wasn't a problem, and I just plugged it in and toyed with some settings in BIOS to spin it down some.

After the Intel build, I decided to poke around Mei-chan a bit and I found the reason why she was loud was the 9700, so I ordered a Zalman CNPS9900 Max and put in the old fan controller that was originally for Ziggy (back when I had the 92mm Vantec Tornado in the case) while I was waiting for it to arrive. Installation was a bit difficult, since the tool supplied with that specific one was a bit short in the nib and lacking the bevel, which ended up stripping enough of the screw head to make it annoying... I had to use the short end to finish mounting it. It also warped the motherboard slightly, but not nearly as much as the stock 775 cooler on the Intel build...

For the Intel build, I removed the stock cooler and put in the 9700 from Mei-chan, along with Zalman's Fan Mate 2 fan-controller on the front of the case, which cooled the processor down about 10C compared to the stock cooler.

Mei-chan isn't nearly as loud as she used to be, but she's not dead silent either.

Oh, I found that if I discharge a large amount of electro-static to Mei-chan's case, the voltage leak noise stops until I turn her off after booting, but it's less annoying than the PSU power switch I think *shrugs*

I also cut the mouse from the VAIO in half to use the scroll wheel since the Marble Mouse doesn't have a scroll wheel and the scroll ring on the Wacom tablet is too far when I need a quick scroll. I just need to get used to it now.

I recently upgraded Melty from the AMD FX 8120 to the AMD FX 8320 and noticed the improvement that the other Newegg reviewers noticed that did the same upgrade. I'm also going to upgrade the keyboard for Melty as well from the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard to the G710+ mechanical gaming keyboard.

I technically don't need the extra gaming features on the G710+ (in fact, a mechanical keyboard would have worked just fine, but I'm a Logitech loyalist), but hey, I can't really complain about more macro buttons XP

Main reason why I'm replacing the keyboard is that it's getting annoying to use sometimes... I think I pressed pause/play when I didn't press it down enough... and sometimes if I want it to go to the next song, it'll ghost press it for me, so it skips a song -_-;; not to mention that sometimes when I hit say Shift+F5, it doesn't respond, so either I have to hit it again or I have to hold it down -_-;;

I'm sure the contact sheets just need a cleaning, but I don't want to turn it into a periodic maintenance when I can get a keyboard that I won't have to worry about for a long, long while.

Well, within a couple months I'll have my own internet, so hopefully that works out better than the internet my parents are using... and have my own computer network complete with NAS! I'm so stoked!

Well, I think I'm done for now - building computers that is. There won't be a need to replace/upgrade any of the compies for a long while... Well, the BD-RW drive upgrade maybe, but that's pretty minor. I don't use Triela all that much, so she works well as a laptop (sometimes I use Momiji Sae-chan, but that's a bit different).