Sunday, May 31, 2009

Posting's a tad light these days...

I'm currently up to my eyebulbs in modifying my big IBM workstation to run with a newly-purchased Koolance Exos water-cooling system. 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) was just too much for both the computer's innards and the immediate space around it in my office, especially now that summer's arrived. Intel Xeons, even if they're good at crunching numbers, are also damned efficient at converting electricity to heat. They take some coolin', yes indeed. Fire up BioShock or even Half Life 2, and they sound like friggin' jet engines with all the internal fans ramping up the RPM to move extra air over the heatsinks. Something better was definitely in order.

Right now, there's stuff strewn all over the place, tubing, fittings, waterblocks, temperature sensors, controller cards, wiring harnesses, bottles of blue coolant that smell suspiciously like ethylene glycol, you name it. I'm relegated to using my trusty Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook for everything, and it's kind of a drag when you're used to having 4 Xeon 3.0 processors normally doing your grunt work. The end will justify the means, however. It will be a marriage of one of these:



To one of these:
Pics of the installation process to follow, I promise! If it works as well as I think it will, I have 4 more of these machines in Casa de' G-98 that will receive similar upgrades.