Lie-chan 2

About the day after the fan incident with Mei-chan, I put in the upgrades for Lie-chan, which was the PCIe Wifi card from Mei-chan, a Radeon HD 6450, a USB header hub, and a Vantec Spectrum Fan Card.

When I built Lie-chan, the graphics I chose was the Radeon X1650 Pro. About a week before I had these upgrades, I got a dead X700 card from my friend with an interesting looking cooler, which still worked just fine. I looked at the X1650 card and it had the right mounting holes for it, so I decided to swap it, seeing as that the stock X1650 cooler was kinda small and crummy. Cleaning up the cooler from the X700 was easy, but the stock thermal grease from the X1650 was not at all; I ended up pushing around weird flake things until I finally got them off the video card. The X700's heat-sink draws heat away from the GPU better, though the fan spins a bit slow, but enough to push air through the heat-sink. With doing some heat tests, it seemed to cool better than the stock cooler alone (I don't recall the temps I had when I had the intake duct fan underneath it), so it seemed to work better.

The 6450 replaced the X1650, and the X1650 went into my parent's computer (Intel build). I was originally going to get a 6670, but the prices were a lot more than I wanted to pay for, and since Mabinogi is the only GPU-intensive program that Lie-chan would run, I figured the 6450 would be enough, considering it's almost the same GPU as Triela (Triela has the mobile 6450). The card has a DVI, a VGA, and an HDMI connector (this was the other reason for buying this one and not the 6670), which is nice since I don't need any adapters for the TV (connected via HDMI) or the secondary screen (connected via VGA).

The fan card was placed under the 6450 for additional cooling (the 6450 only has a heatsink), and keeps the heat at satisfactory temperatures at minimum speed while playing 1080p video. I'll test with Mabinogi when I have the chance as it's a bit more GPU intensive than 1080p video.

Lie-chan's case came with two sets of USB ports - one set on top and the other set on the front - and along with that I added a USB card reader, raising the total to three USB header plugs. Lie-chan's motherboard only has two USB headers, so I opted out of the set of USB ports at the top, since it wasn't easily accessible when Lie-chan was the workhorse computer. When Lie-chan became the media PC, I used her card reader for Melty and plugged in both sets of USB ports, but eventually I found out that card reader wouldn't read SDXC and had to get a new card reader for Melty. After giving Lie-chan her card reader back, I unplugged the top set of USB ports again (in honesty, I actually removed the panel from the case, and put it elsewhere).

I also got a Logitech Unifiying keyboard and mouse to use, and unfortunately, I couldn't have it plugged into the rear, since the case interfered with the signal, so I used an extension cord to bring it around the case for better reception (I wanted to keep the front USB ports open). After a while I also used the keyboard in the Xbox 360 a bit (since there's no other readily available keyboard around), and it was a bit annoying to unplug it from the extension cord and back in. I decided to modify the drive bay cover to accommodate the extension cord end, and put a tie down point on the optical drive. I used a zip tie to attach it to the tie down, so that when the receiver's plugged back into the cord, the strain relief pushes on the zip tie and doesn't travel into the case (I also had to use a screw to keep the cord end from moving upward). I ran the cable inside, and was hoping to use one of my USB expansion cards, but with no avail; I was forced to connect the USB extension cord to the rear USB ports of the motherboard through a PCI slot cover stripped from an old PCI ethernet card.

While I was digging around on Newegg for 140mm fan filters, I also saw some weird USB thing, and after looking at it, I found that it solved all of the USB problems I had with Lie-chan, since it takes up one motherboard header, but provides three headers and two USB ports. After remounting the top USB ports; I looked at where I wanted to have the hub at, and what orientation; then mounted it and plugged the top USB header plugs into it, the card reader, and the extension cord for the receiver (the front USB ports are plugged into the other motherboard header because it's part of the front panel wire tie downs). The only problematic thing with it was that the power cord for the hub was short, about 4-5cm, and I didn't take that into account when I was finding a position for the hub, but was lucky that there was a molex connector just about that distance away.

Later on, when I have a separate keyboard for the 360, I'll fully enclose the receiver.

At one point while I was using Lie-chan as the workhorse, I had the headphones connected to the speakers, and when I came back to sit down, I brushed by the headphones and discharged static to one of the sides to the headphones. I played music and the sound wasn't working on that side, and I think I tried a different pair just to confirm it was not the headphones. I rush out, without thinking, to buy a sound card from Circuit City (when it was still open where I live), and then set it up when I got home. I don't remember when I realized it, but I eventually realized I could've just remapped the jacks to compensate for the problematic port; I decided to not do anything, since I was liking the CMSS3D feature (puts out stereo sound as surround for music and such). The ESD probably killed part of the onboard sound chip or a resistor or something.

When Lie-chan became the media PC, I think I was using that sound card for Melty until I got a PCIe one for Melty. I just had stereo output for a while (via headphone to RCA cable), since I wasn't picky and didn't really need surround sound. I kept that sound card in an anti-static bag for a while since all the PCI slots were blocked off until this set of upgrades. I was also thinking of using the PCIe sound card that Melty was using (the PCIe x16 slot I had it in eventually made the sound card glitch out eventually) because it had an optical out port, which I was going to use, but had to scrap the idea because I had troubles figuring out how to get digital out to work in openSUSE (I think the optical out was unsupported); I decided to use her original sound card instead. I start thinking of another way to connect surround sound to my receiver/amplifier thing, and looked through the manual a bit and found there's a set of RCA jacks that enable me to do so (but the receiver/amplifier doesn't process the sound at all, just outputs them on the corresponding speakers.

I had enough headphone to RCA cables to do it, but they were only one meter in length, so I almost gave it up until I remembered about the sound switching box I made (when I got the PCIe sound card, it didn't work in openSUSE because there weren't drivers for it at that time, so I made a box with switches to switch between the PCIe and the onboard) that I could use as an extension cable (originally, when it was stereo, I had a couple RCA couplers and an RCA-RCA cable, but I didn't have enough of those). It worked, and it came out louder than I was used to, which was nice, since it always seemed kinda annoyingly quiet. I also tested out the surround sound and it definitely worked like it was supposed to.

So even though optical out doesn't work, I still have surround in some other fashion.