Its been a long weekend, and a hard weekend, I've been doing a lot of code over the weekend, moving an important project from a most defiantly developmental footing to a much more mature footing.
But I've also been and finally had the car sorted, the clutch was never right after the last fixes it had, I've had a new clutch fitted, then was told to fit a new clutch cable, which I did; but still the drive was not right. When I went to pick the car up a very sheepish mechanic said "Its only £30 for a new pressure plate and oil".. okay... Cool... Two days of labour, £30... What gives... Yes, it'd had a whole other new clutch...
It drives sweet as a nut now, but it does make me wonder how crap was the other clutch, it lasted from October 2013 to June 2014. I mean, I know after market clutches are cheap tack, but this took the Michael it really did.
Anyway, that all done I was wired late last night, so decided with the project above delivered for feedback I could take some time to service my main PC. It had been a little battered over time...
You can see the basic chassis here: http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Silent+Fans
And the first thing I did was give the whole brushed aluminium case a good clean, the fins at the top the grills on the front and the dust mesh points at the bottom over the air in takes.
Then I opened it up and cleaned the case fans, now as you can see I fitted them in 2011, so that's just shy of 3 years service. They were dusty, but not terribly so. A quick wipe was all they needed, the rear of the case also just a quick wipe.
The most dust was concentrated in the graphics card, and around the CoolMaster plastic funnel which has its own mesh dust cover, this was sodden with dust and I soon had the card out and dusted it clean before refitting.
My other task was to clean the Corsair Airflow...
Now, this thing had been making a lot of noise, and when I disconnected it and brought it out into the mid-night light bulb glow it was utterly ditched. Large foamy dust bunnies had formed on all the stanchions and as the whole machine is side mounted the upper sides of the support legs were thick with fir...
Really strange, considering that this is not the main cooler and that there's filtered grills all around this unit... But then it dawned on me, I connect this to the power fan header on the motherboard, and the Q-Fan profile does not include that header. So this is the only fan set in the machine NOT being speed controlled against performance/heat. So it was going to be noisy because of the small size of the fans.
Adding in the dust only added to the noise/turbulence.
Cleaned up and refitted tightly however and it is a lot quieter. My Ram of course is also now being cooled better.
One other thing I'm taking a look at is how OpenGL performs from the libraries shipped with MinGW on CodeBlocks for windows:
From the project menu you can easily create a Test OpenGL project and build it... I assume its running in Mesa/Software... But it runs...
Aside from this, I have Wednesdays Post for the Virtual CPU project done, it was actually written last week, but I've had some problems uploading the two videos for it to YouTube. I hope with the machine tuned up to upload them this evening. Even if the videos are not present, the post is scheduled to go... And it covers Interrupts.
No comments:
Post a Comment