TheIpex wrote on 2026-01-03, 04:15:

With help of the 3D printer, I've added a 40mm fan to the chipset and a small heatsink to the VRMs

Looks nice! What did you use the 3D printer for exactly?

konc wrote on 2026-01-03, 08:59:

Looks nice! What did you use the 3D printer for exactly?

Thanks, the small black clips that hold the VRM heatsink in place are 3D printed (It's only a regular thermal pad beneath and I wanted it secure). There is also a mounting plate beneath the 40mm fan that clips onto the chipset heatsink. It's all pretty rudimentary but I'm happy with how it turned out.

I wish I'd taken some closer photos before I installed it all, here are the 3d renders:

TheIpex wrote on 2026-01-03, 09:15:

Thanks, the small black clips that hold the VRM heatsink in place are 3D printed (It's only a regular thermal pad beneath and I wanted it secure). There is also a mounting plate beneath the 40mm fan that clips onto the chipset heatsink. It's all pretty rudimentary but I'm happy with how it turned out.

I wish I'd taken some closer photos before I installed it all, here are the 3d renders:

They're perfectly fine, I saw that the printed parts are what's secured to the board but I couldn't grasp how exactly they hold the heatsink. Thanks, now I get it and it's a very nice and simple idea.

Setup 2 more "lotto miners", this time using the open source NerdMiner V2 software on a couple "cheap yellow display" or "CYD" (ESP32-2432S028) dev boards. I've got 4 of these I picked up on sale over on Amazon for various projects. Two of them I dedicated to messing around with BitMaker's NerdMiner open source ecosystem. Now that I've got them flashed, running, and mining, I just need to give them a proper home. I spent a couple hours last night designing what I hope will be a cool stand for them to sit in. I'll be printing them later today to see if I messed anything up or not.

The device shown in my post a couple pages back is also a CYD dev board, but it's running the proprietary closed source NMMiner software and it's pushing just over 1000 KH/s. I wanted to go open source this time, and the best out there for that is the NerdMiner software, but it's currently limited to about 300-400 KH/s. Though apparently, the BitMaker team has said they are working on getting full use out of the ESP32 to catch up to NMMiner and get up to 1000KH/s. Not that it really matters, these are really just cool fun tech toys, at this low-end solo mining, that 500-600 KH/s difference really doesn't amount to anything. It's just cool to see it run as fast as it can!

I just picked up a USB slitter so I can power both at once off one wall wart.

Never thought I'd have so much fun playing a lottery with a virtually nonexistent chance of actually winning. 🤣

Customized a simple case I found. Stand came out well enough. My "NerdMiners" now have a proper home to play the Bitcoin lottery. 🤣

Just need my Micro USB splitter cable that's arriving tomorrow. 😀

At that low a hash rate you can probably quintuple your odds by putting a hula hoop on your front yard and waiting for a solid palladium asteroid to fall in it.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-12-29, 07:12:

Those are solid machines. I've set up a few from the Sandy Bridge to Haswell generations. The screens on the ones I used were pr […]
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BitWrangler wrote on 2025-12-29, 05:17:

Just before the hols, I popped into a thrift and found a Latitude E6420 just sitting on the shelf, was cheap so I had no expecta […]
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Just before the hols, I popped into a thrift and found a Latitude E6420 just sitting on the shelf, was cheap so I had no expectation of it working... but it booted right up on an HP psu, having not come with one. However that was a volt short 18.5 instead of 19.5 so it was refusing to charge the battery, which is discharged but claiming to be okay. It's a little on the worn side, missing it's clitmouse cap, few dings but stoutly together. So I brung that up into "see what it's like" state, rather than full prep and it's alright for a sandycrotch. i5-2520M/8GB and 300ish of spinning rust

So yesterday I hit up the same thift to see if the dell psu or another was lurking unfound, and a good search didn't find it, but it found it's next year sibling, an E6430, same cheap price, same kind of condition. Weird. Well it's got a bigass 9 cell batt, maybe this one is dead and I can steal parts... Heh, boots, well after I set it to UEFI so it could find the boot file it boots. This one got the i5-3440M... and it was same again, run but no charge off HP PSU.

Third time lucky methinks, today hit different thrifts in search for a Dell PSU... found a universal one for cheap, only 65W though, but yes, got both of them charging up now.

Anyways... remember the Elitebook 8640P I got a while back? Yeah I bought an i7-2760QM cpu to go in that, then a bunch of nonsense happened and computer playtime curtailed and it didn't happen yet. Also got 16GB in DDR3 SODIMMs. Bringing that to mind because...

I have had a period of attrition in 2nd tier machines and the workshop beaters, they have been breaking down and win7 installs are no longer supporting browsers capable of doing much online now. The workshop beaters were in horrible states to begin with, taped with makeshift fixes, complete wrecks got running with luck and poor judgement, stuff that came free or for pennies. Turion and Core2. The second tier machines were nicer, but have just aged out for "being on the internet" in other than retro ways now.

So it is quite fortunate to have a sudden cheap bonanza in sandybridge and better, able to run win10, units that will take some upgrades, RAM/SSD and do some donkey work. By amazing coincidence, I picked up a Dell dock that fits them some time ago.

Now then I guess what I am getting around to is the question, which i5-2520 deserves the i7 most? Latitude E6420 or Elitebook 8640P? They both have models in the range that take the quad, so it should work.... and I don't need the lecture about cooling again thanks, not first rodeo, unless one is known worse than the other.

They are both partially rugged, the Elitebook is slightly better cosmetically, but slightly larger. The Dell will dock. I guess really, I am coming down on the side of the Dell unless there is a super good reason why not.

By the way are we allowed to mention the H-word boot CD yet? Latest versions claim to be fully freely distributable software. It was real useful to insert new passwords and take a look at machines before potentially letting virussy trojans into the network or something, and also figure out some hardware details and otherwise recover their installs.

So yeah, trailing edge modern stuff going on here really, windows10 wrangling, gonna be fitting SSDs and all the RAM I can scrape up.

Those are solid machines. I've set up a few from the Sandy Bridge to Haswell generations. The screens on the ones I used were pretty horrid and low-res, but that was really the only downside to them.

I would put the QM in whichever one has the best screen or has any other distinguishing features above the others.

It's funny, reading your post made me realize that my personal laptop (which very very rarely gets used these days) is so old that it's actually a really stout Windows XP system if I wanted to dual-boot it.

That machine is a good story, so I'll take a little stroll down memory lane for a sec...

Being a desktop guy, the first actually usable laptop I ever owned was one that was given to me by a relative in ~2012 because they didn't want it anymore. It was an Acer Aspire (model number seems lost to time) with a 14" screen, a Celeron 420 (single core 1.6Ghz Conroe-L), Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics, GL40 chipset, 2GB of DDR2 and a barely adequate spinning drive running Windows Vista Basic. It was so cheap to upgrade a machine like that (since it was basically the worst of everything) that I had some fun upgrading it to... I think... a Core 2 Duo T8100, 4GB of DDR2, bigger\faster hard drive and even an extended battery. It was a surprisingly useful little machine. If it had a higher res screen and an SSD it would have been totally usable for many many years. It was also hilariously thick and "round"... I really wish I could find a picture of it or figure out what model it was, but I can't find anything like it right now.

At this point I was finally finding uses for a "mobile computer" and decided to look into getting something newer in late 2013. I was waaaay too poor at the time (new family) to afford anything new or high end. But... my wife had an HP HDX18 with a backlit keyboard and a 1080P screen and I knew I wanted both of those features (though it was unlikely to be 18 inches...).

After much searching and deliberating, I decided that the Asus Q500A line of laptops was basically what I wanted. They were only about a year old in December of 2013, but I managed to find one on ebay with a broken screen for right around $200, which was a steal! It had Windows 8, an i5 3210M (35W Ivy Bridge dual core + HT, HD4000), 6GB DDR3-1600 (2+4), a 750GB 5400RPM hard drive, 3-level backlit keyboard (still looks and feels awesome 12 years later), 15.6" 1366x768 screen (broken), lots of black brushed aluminum and very solid construction... definitely a step above what you'd find at wal-mart. That config was $600 retail normally. My main reason for going with this machine was that I absolutely wanted a 1080P screen and the Q500A line also had a higher end config with an i7 and a 1080P screen.

This was a pretty big gamble for me since I had basically no experience tearing deep into modern laptops to do upgrades, but I did some digging and saw that some higher end Thinkpad laptops seemed to use the same connector placement as this Asus, and they used some very very nice AUO panels, so I decided to track one of those down. I found a used AUO B156HW01 V4 1080P panel from a Thinkpad on ebay for $50. I did what seemed like brain surgery and the screen upgrade actually worked! The specs don't look like much now, but this TN panel looks more like a VA or IPS without the downsides of either of those, and the 95% NTSC color is a huge improvement over others I'd seen in 2013. After all these years it is still so vibrant and easy on the eyes and gets sufficiently bright as well.

I now had a fantastic laptop with a better screen than it was ever supposed to have for only $250. I used it that way for a couple years but eventually upgraded it to Windows 10, 8GB DDR3 (4+4) and swapped out the hard drive for a Samsung 840EVO 250GB... then after seeing the news about those being flaky I switched it to a 512GB ADATA SU800 SSD in ~2018. I almost sold it when I found a cheap HP gaming laptop on clearance at Wal-Mart, but I actually ended up selling that instead because it wasn't as nice, even if it was faster.

A year or two ago I was thinking about getting a newer laptop again, but when I realized I could grab a quad core i7 and 16GB of RAM for this one for like $40 total (they were smoking deals...) I decided to go for it.

So, at the end of 2025 it now has an i7 3632QM (35W Quad core with HT), Adata SU800 512GB and 16GB DDR3-1600. It still works as well as it did when I got it, which was 12 years ago this month. It's on only it's second battery, and that is also getting a bit weak, and there is a small flake of something loose inside the LCD panel but it isn't much of a bother and it's been there for probably 7-8 years now. I think the fan runs a bit more now with the quad core despite them both being 35W TDP, but it's a bit hard to tell because I just don't use it that much and it has to install Windows updates almost every time I do something on it. If it seems too noisy I might try one of the new fangled phase change TIM sheets I picked up recently to see if that helps.

Anyway, maybe I'll try dual booting XP with it some time. It could be pretty interesting, and I think the HD4000 graphics running along side this CPU would probably manage 15,000-20,000 in 3Dmark 2001SE, which is plenty for some decent XP gaming on a 60Hz display.

EDIT: After arguing with Google's stupid AI chat bot for 10 minutes I finally was able to get it to stop gaslighting me on whether my orignal Acer laptop even existed. It suddenly came up with the Acer Aspire 4330 series, which is exactly what I had been describing the whole time. I'm about 90% sure that's what I had. Strange though... most of the search results are from outside the US. Who knows where this thing originally came from. 😅

Yeah just got the 1366x768 screens on these unfortunately, but to my eyes they seem bright and sharp enough. I dunno why everything seemed to get stuck at that res for a few years, up to 2010ish the res was climbing, there's some "volume" laptops from around then have higher res screens, then we were locked in a basic 1366x768 for 5 years or so. Annoying. It does seem like though that some of those older machines might have stealable panels for later machines.

I have some solid acer built models in the fam, though less premium so the cases have been taking damage. They're running good in the main. Also have this Asus one which is annoying in that it's fastish, work perfectly apart from the wifi keeps locking up and dying. Now I've had 3 internal modules in it by now and the same thing happens and only way to fix it for a little while, is reinstall the drivers... then it works perfect for a couple of days, then drops occasionally, then goes off and won't return without a reinstall, very frustrating. There's also a couple of troublemakers in the wider circle of fam and friends that seem to do the same thing. Some kind of weird endemic fault in a chipset part it feels like. Though I have also suspected dry joint on the PCIe mini slot, or elsewhere. Anyway, a PITA niggle that seems to ruin perfectly good machines. I am next going to investigate as to whether it might be a harmonic of RAM speeds or something.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-05, 04:44:

At that low a hash rate you can probably quintuple your odds by putting a hula hoop on your front yard and waiting for a solid palladium asteroid to fall in it.

Heh, yeah. The odds these things running at 1000KH/s hitting a Bitcoin block are astronomically low. Not zero, but so low it may as well be zero.

It translates into roughly one block every 4,900 years!

So, yeah. These are toys. Just something fun to play with. 😀

But... I'll try the hula hoop, just in case. 🤣

StriderTR wrote on 2026-01-05, 22:26:

Heh, yeah. The odds these things running at 1000KH/s hitting a Bitcoin block are astronomically low. Not zero, but so low it may […]
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BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-05, 04:44:

At that low a hash rate you can probably quintuple your odds by putting a hula hoop on your front yard and waiting for a solid palladium asteroid to fall in it.

Heh, yeah. The odds these things running at 1000KH/s hitting a Bitcoin block are astronomically low. Not zero, but so low it may as well be zero.

It translates into roughly one block every 4,900 years!

So, yeah. These are toys. Just something fun to play with. 😀

But... I'll try the hula hoop, just in case. 🤣

Good old scratchies are better.
Classics, that's what works 😀

I finally got round to buying the backup solution I've wanted for my NAS/server that I've been meaning to put in place for several years.

I picked up an alternative SAS/SATA controller, one with external ports (Adaptec ASR-78165/1gb) in place of my basic LSI card (running 5x 8TB SATA drives at present)

Also got a SAS enclosure and a LTO-6 tape drive.

Intention is to do a level-0 backup of my various content (music, photos, website, home directories etc) every quarter, and run incrementals perhaps weekly or fortnightly.

LTO-6 tapes are now so cheap (£10-£30 depending on if you accept used or new) that it's almost worth buying them as one-shot storage devices for different content (as long as said content is under 2.5TB uncompressed). I think the only content I have which is more than 2.5TB for a single directory are my game downloads/archives, so that one I may have to shuffle around a bit (split by genre, first letter or similar).

I guess that's the downside of a single drive versus an autoloader, but this is for a home office environment, not a server rack...

megatron-uk wrote on Yesterday, 08:00:

I finally got round to buying the backup solution I've wanted for my NAS/server that I've been meaning to put in place for sever […]
Show full quote

I finally got round to buying the backup solution I've wanted for my NAS/server that I've been meaning to put in place for several years.

I picked up an alternative SAS/SATA controller, one with external ports (Adaptec ASR-78165/1gb) in place of my basic LSI card (running 5x 8TB SATA drives at present)

Also got a SAS enclosure and a LTO-6 tape drive.

Intention is to do a level-0 backup of my various content (music, photos, website, home directories etc) every quarter, and run incrementals perhaps weekly or fortnightly.

LTO-6 tapes are now so cheap (£10-£30 depending on if you accept used or new) that it's almost worth buying them as one-shot storage devices for different content (as long as said content is under 2.5TB uncompressed). I think the only content I have which is more than 2.5TB for a single directory are my game downloads/archives, so that one I may have to shuffle around a bit (split by genre, first letter or similar).

I guess that's the downside of a single drive versus an autoloader, but this is for a home office environment, not a server rack...

Just curious, but is there a benefit to using these tapes versus just buying SAS hard drives? Ebay is filled with used SAS drives for dirt cheap... 3TB for under $20, 4TB for ~$25, etc.

The barrier to using those is, of course, having an SAS interface (I don't currently), but if you've already got the interface then hard drives feel like a super cost effective and fast storage option, while avoiding the limitations of using tapes.

If you're talking about filling them and then sticking them in long term (decades) cold storage, I guess that could be better, but at that point you are relying on the tape drives themselves being reliable enough to read TB of data in the distant future. I think hard drives will be more likely to still work at that point.

I have personally never used tapes for backup, so I am genuinely curious about this. 🙂

Today I got back to work on revamping my HP Z420v2 Workstation, which will allow me to do some local, private experimentation with AI models.

Here's the 2TB NVME to pair with the 2TB SSD already in the system. The NVME uses a PCI-Express adapter. I had some minor issues securing the card to the adapter, as the locking screw was too short and would give way, causing the memory to pop out of the lock. I tightened it as much as possible and secured the lock with a drop of superglue, just to be safe. Currently, the adapter is mounted in the slot above the GPU. Subsequently, I confirmed that the operating system was correctly reading the NVME storage, even though the workstation's BIOS doesn't see it directly, as expected—no boot from here, obviously. The system's data portion will go on this storage; everything else will go on the SSD. The thermal pads are thick, which causes the board to flex a bit, but without any major issues.

Another thermal paste from Noctua, a guarantee of quality and performance. Using thermal pads instead of quality paste is strongly discouraged: I was thinking of using "premium" pads, since they practically never dry out, but the performance of the paste (especially from a top brand like Noctua) is unmatched. The pads are effective for MOSFETs, VRAM, etc. - not for CPUs. I'm also looking at some small Raspberry Pi-style heatsinks to place directly over the MOSFETs at the top of the CPU socket, but since I've reassembled everything, I think I'll leave those aside for now. I hope the HP fan shrouds will ensure decent airflow over the RAM and this section.

Testing the Noctua NH-U12S chromax.black tower cooler: not compatible with re-installing the HP fan airflow shrouds, but compatible in terms of dimensions and especially distance from RAM memories. Unfortunately, there's another problem, which convinced me to reinstall the stock HP air cooler for this workstation, after thoroughly cleaning it and applying quality thermal paste. Here's the problem:

I had underestimated the problem: damn proprietary standards from the big companies! The high-performance Noctua heatsink fan has a 4-pin connector; the HP motherboard requires a proprietary 5-pin connector, which can't be fixed with universal adapters because the pinout is specific (for example, the Dell adapter cable won't work). Adapter cables for the HP 5-pin connector aren't available, so I had to reinstall the stock heatsink, as the BIOS's failure to correctly recognize the fan would have caused some issues, such as the fan speed profiles always being set to maximum, the fan not being recognized, and the related alarm not being disabled, etc.

Here's the "home" air cooler, cleaned and with the correct fan connector. I hope one day to find the right adapter to replace it, but for now it will do the job.

This is the adapter for installing aftermarket power supplies other than the in-house one, which are more efficient and quieter. Of course, HP couldn't help but bother us with a non-standard power connector on their motherboard. I received the BeQuiet! Dark Power 11 model, but I haven't installed it yet, caught off guard by the problem with the Noctua heatsink.

The workstation's BIOS diagnostic screen. Unfortunately, of the 128GB of RAM estimated to be installed, I installed 96GB (16GB*6 sticks in pairs), since the eBay seller made a mistake and didn't have the required amount.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 20:45:

Just curious, but is there a benefit to using these tapes versus just buying SAS hard drives? Ebay is filled with used SAS drive […]
Show full quote

megatron-uk wrote on Yesterday, 08:00:

I finally got round to buying the backup solution I've wanted for my NAS/server that I've been meaning to put in place for sever […]
Show full quote

I finally got round to buying the backup solution I've wanted for my NAS/server that I've been meaning to put in place for several years.

I picked up an alternative SAS/SATA controller, one with external ports (Adaptec ASR-78165/1gb) in place of my basic LSI card (running 5x 8TB SATA drives at present)

Also got a SAS enclosure and a LTO-6 tape drive.

Intention is to do a level-0 backup of my various content (music, photos, website, home directories etc) every quarter, and run incrementals perhaps weekly or fortnightly.

LTO-6 tapes are now so cheap (£10-£30 depending on if you accept used or new) that it's almost worth buying them as one-shot storage devices for different content (as long as said content is under 2.5TB uncompressed). I think the only content I have which is more than 2.5TB for a single directory are my game downloads/archives, so that one I may have to shuffle around a bit (split by genre, first letter or similar).

I guess that's the downside of a single drive versus an autoloader, but this is for a home office environment, not a server rack...

Just curious, but is there a benefit to using these tapes versus just buying SAS hard drives? Ebay is filled with used SAS drives for dirt cheap... 3TB for under $20, 4TB for ~$25, etc.

The barrier to using those is, of course, having an SAS interface (I don't currently), but if you've already got the interface then hard drives feel like a super cost effective and fast storage option, while avoiding the limitations of using tapes.

If you're talking about filling them and then sticking them in long term (decades) cold storage, I guess that could be better, but at that point you are relying on the tape drives themselves being reliable enough to read TB of data in the distant future. I think hard drives will be more likely to still work at that point.

I have personally never used tapes for backup, so I am genuinely curious about this. 🙂

Bare drives are cheap, but not really particularly robust, so factor in cases or enclosures to run them. Drop a drive and you're fairly likely to damage it. Tapes are much more robust.

Also the cost of LTO6 tapes are hovering around £10-20 for used/recertified ones, up to £30-35 for new parts. Disks, like most electronic components like a steady state; IE to be powered on and running. It's the constant on/off, spinning up and down that kills them... that's not a great recipe for backups.

I've been living dangerously with 40TB of data of various types for a few years now and it has gotten to the point where the impact of the loss of that would be just too high (photos of the kids growing up, holiday videos etc). I just want something robust. There's always the backwards compatibility of new gen of tape drives that will allow me to hop forwards to newer hardware to restore, should I need to replace the drive in the future.

It's probably not an option for everyone; the initial outlay for drives, controller, cabling etc is fairly steep when you compare it to buying individual drives, but the per GB/tb cost after that, for extra tapes is one of the lowest available.