Start Your Engines!

Last night I put my first built-from-scratch computer together (Thanks to Ben for his help!).

As for the heat sink that I have been struggling with, it turned out I had been using the mounting clips for the heat sink wrong. They looked like the tabs on them would fold down to clamp when they really are just there to give you leverage to get them on the bracket. It actually was necessary to file down the risers on the bottom of the bracket in order for the heat sink to sit tight on the processor die. I took off about 1/32" and I think it would have been better to have taken off 1/16" to make it tighter on the die. My CPU temperatures seem to be staying very cool, though, so I won't worry about it for now. I also forgot to install the felt pad I made to go around the CPU die to balance the force of the heat sink. Hopefully this will not cause any future damage to the CPU. I may try to reinstall the heat sink later to file off the risers a little more and put the pad on.

The Arctic Silver went on smoothly and evenly in a very thin layer on the CPU die. I used an old Costco card I cleaned off to spread it. The Arctic Silver website claims temperatures will go down up to 3 degrees after a 200 hour break in period as long as the chip has a few cycles of cooling to room temperature and heating up again. We'll see if that proves to be true.

With that obstacle behind us, we put everything else together. We managed to install the temperature probe from my Micro Fly case directly on the CPU package with the strip of tape that conveniently came in the box with the case hardware. We put it as close to the die as we could get it without interfering with the contact between the heat sink and processor. This means I can't take the motherboard tray completely out of the case anymore, but it's nice to have a display of the actual chip temperature rather than that of the heat sink, which would be several degrees cooler.

We attached the front panel case connections to the corresponding headers on he motherboard. I was disappointed to find out that the motherboard does not have a header for the audio ports on the case. This means no front microphone or headphone access for us - Grrr. Oh well.

I was delighted when I fired it up and the CPU temperature in the BIOS showed a chilly 36 degrees C. The front panel temperature display was 3-4 degrees cooler. During the Windows installation, the front display showed as high as 40 degrees C, which may have not been a full load, but close to it. I experimented by unplugging the CPU fan. The idle temperature only went up about 4 degrees and leveled off. When the system is completely idle, the front display hovers around 29 degrees (85 degrees F)! I don't know what readings others are getting on similar systems, but I don't mind a CPU that idles at a temperature 30 degrees cooler than it is outside here in Arizona at times. Taking the on die reading and case temperature probe reading differences, I am guessing the CPU will max out at 45 degrees C (113 F) under a full load. Not too shabby.

The BIOS is not as full featured as some, but still allows me to overclock the Front Side Bus from 166MHz to 199MHz, bringing my CPU from 2.33GHz to 2.79GHz. Because I won't be doing any gaming on the machine at the moment, I will probably run it at stock speed for now. Since it runs so cool, I would unplug the CPU fan to make the system quieter at the expense of a slightly warmer chip. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do any good. I can't hear any system fans over the constant whining of the sideways-mounted 40GB IDE hard drive I have in there right now that I salvaged from my Dell.

The Windows install went pretty smoothly. Since I don't have the CD that usually comes with the board, I took the drivers (Graphics, sound, chipset, and LAN) off the MSI website. These all installed fine except the LAN driver, which looks like the download didn't finish because the menu only shows "Release Notes" when I open the installer. I took the latest drivers from the Intel site today and found out that the versions furnished by MSI are mostly outdated. I will update all the drivers again and, hopefully, I can get my LAN ports working with these updates.

All in all I am very pleased with the motherboard and case I am using. When Ben and I finished the build, I even got a "How much did that computer cost? That really was a good deal" from my wife.

So $175 and just a few drops of elbow grease later, I have a system running with a 2.33GHz Core Duo processor, with 1GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, and Windows XP Pro. I love opening the task manager and seeing two cores at work after. This will be a welcome feature when I start some photo and video editing on the system. Best of all, I have the potential of having a small form factor system in the future running a Core Duo at 2.8GHz, 4GB DDR2 667 memory, multiple terabytes of storage, TV tuner cards, and any graphics card I choose.

Thanks for visiting!