It's funny ain't it, if when you were an older kid ,your dumb parents bought you this dumb IBM, that you couldn't even expand much, you'd have been outraged... but today we can see it as a nice cleanly packaged system that does what it does, and needs no apologies. Good luck with the CD and sound.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-04-21, 19:01:

It's funny ain't it, if when you were an older kid ,your dumb parents bought you this dumb IBM, that you couldn't even expand much, you'd have been outraged... but today we can see it as a nice cleanly packaged system that does what it does, and needs no apologies. Good luck with the CD and sound.

Systems like this were similar to what I used in school. I had a nice Packard Bell at home but dont remember what model. I remember either the librarian or the teacher would bring games like Hocus Pocus and Commander Keen for us to play. Good times. I recently found out another game I remember fondly was actually created by the school board I went to , so im trying to find out more about it just for fun.

As I was fed up with my K6 CPU fan noise I adapted a "silent" Socket 462 one (Arctic Cooling Copper Lite I had around since 15 years)...quite some filing on the edges to give some clearances for the capacitors but it works well!

GPU fan is the next in line...

Finished rebuilding an car boot sale build I had gotten some time ago.

Specs:

ASUS A8N SLI
Athlon 64 3200+ Venice
4x512MB (2x Kingmax + 2x Sycron) DDR400/PC3200
XpertVision Geforce 9400GT 1GB DDR2
Spire Jewel SP-ATX-420WTN-PFC 420W PSU
WD AV 160GB SATA HDD 7200RPM
Pioneer slot-loading DVDROM
ASUS DRW-1814BL DVDRW
Sound Blaster Audigy 1394 PCI soundcard
Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 cooler
Techsolo TC10-SR case w/ new plexiglass panel installed
XP SP3

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:16:

As I was fed up with my K6 CPU fan noise I adapted a "silent" Socket 462 one (Arctic Cooling Copper Lite I had around since 15 years)...quite some filing on the edges to give some clearances for the capacitors but it works well!

GPU fan is the next in line...

This is my take on cooling solutions now as well. I'm not afraid to damage the cooler if it allows me to jury rig a quieter solution.

I also like giant passive coolers for video cards that wrap around the back. It can free up the adjacent PCI slot and there is usually plenty of room towards the CPU zone of the case to tape a low RPM Noctua fan to it.

Had to do an emergency repair on my PIII-S machine. The 60GB HDD wasn't booting up at all and after I plugged it into my main gaming desktop and ran the disc repair, it sprang to life, however, I cloned the HDD to a 512GB SSD with only 1 partition (same size as the original drive), inserted it into the machine, and ran SYS D: from the 60GB HDD. Lo and behold, it boots up and it's working again. I gotta find a trim program for it so it can continue to work and use the 80GB HDD as the backup drive or clone that and go from there.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-22, 20:59:

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:16:

As I was fed up with my K6 CPU fan noise I adapted a "silent" Socket 462 one (Arctic Cooling Copper Lite I had around since 15 years)...quite some filing on the edges to give some clearances for the capacitors but it works well!

GPU fan is the next in line...

This is my take on cooling solutions now as well. I'm not afraid to damage the cooler if it allows me to jury rig a quieter solution.

I also like giant passive coolers for video cards that wrap around the back. It can free up the adjacent PCI slot and there is usually plenty of room towards the CPU zone of the case to tape a low RPM Noctua fan to it.

On that note... is there a reliable and easy way to get 12v fans to run slower? I have a huge box full of new old stock basic Socket 5\7\370 CPU coolers with nice YS Tech fans on them, and they work extremely well but they spin at an excessively high RPM for the low wattage CPUs they are cooling.

One thing I tried was using a 4 pin molex to 3 pin fan adapter that allowed me to pull the molex pins and swap the 12v and 5v. Doing this brought the fan speed down considerably, but one time I noticed that the fan actually hadn't started spinning, so I'm thinking that 5v is just too low... which is too bad, because it is otherwise a dead-simple and dirt cheap method of making these things much quieter. I have read about swapping the ground and the 5v pin on a molex 4pin to get 7v out of the 12v line, but I'm pretty sure I experienced some strangeness on one system doing this. I wish I could remember what happened now, but I just remember not liking what it was doing.

I'll admit, I'm not good with understanding voltages and how a power supply works, but it to me it seems sketchy to connect two rails together in a way that may not be intended. Just doesn't seem right.

I would love to be able to wire in a super simple resistor solution or something but I'm not sure if I could do that reliably enough and I'm not paying $8 per adapter for ones on ebay. I didn't spend anywhere near that much on the coolers themselves.

You can get a fan controller with a little knob on it and adjust it to spin as quietly as you want. I bought a bunch of these years ago to adjust down fans that run louder than I would like, and tape them to the inside of the case.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-23, 01:00:

You can get a fan controller with a little knob on it and adjust it to spin as quietly as you want. I bought a bunch of these years ago to adjust down fans that run louder than I would like, and tape them to the inside of the case.

I can't seem to find any of these cheap enough (and neat-looking enough) to warrant buying a bunch to use for retro systems. I found some that are just a PCB with SMD components and a knob on the end for around $30 shipped for 10, which isn't bad... but they don't really say how they work, and if turning them down too far drops the voltage below 5v it could still make the fans not spin up. I think since they are PWM that wouldn't be an issue but I can't say for sure.

Also looks like they don't have a power connector so I'd have to add one myself.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/195650849909

If they were just a little bit more complete it would be really nice. I don't think I'd be able to sell a motherboard + CPU + fan combo with one of these in case the person left the PCB dangling unprotected and it shorted out.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-04-22, 23:49:

On that note... is there a reliable and easy way to get 12v fans to run slower? I have a huge box full of new old stock basic Socket 5\7\370 CPU coolers with nice YS Tech fans on them, and they work extremely well but they spin at an excessively high RPM for the low wattage CPUs they are cooling.

If you're OK with a constant (but slower) speed, you can either rig an adapter or otherwise modify the fan connector to swap a 5v wire to where the 12v wire would normally be, so the fan will only be getting 5v of power. Totally safe and relatively easy, not to mention free.

Brawndo wrote on 2023-04-23, 02:45:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-04-22, 23:49:

On that note... is there a reliable and easy way to get 12v fans to run slower? I have a huge box full of new old stock basic Socket 5\7\370 CPU coolers with nice YS Tech fans on them, and they work extremely well but they spin at an excessively high RPM for the low wattage CPUs they are cooling.

If you're OK with a constant (but slower) speed, you can either rig an adapter or otherwise modify the fan connector to swap a 5v wire to where the 12v wire would normally be, so the fan will only be getting 5v of power. Totally safe and relatively easy, not to mention free.

I talked about that in the next paragraph of that post. heh

After my mother passed away, I gave most of her collection of DVDs and VHS tapes to a Goodwill store, but I saved a few and I'm watching one on my PPChips M520 AT box.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-04-23, 01:49:

I can't seem to find any of these cheap enough (and neat-looking enough) to warrant buying a bunch to use for retro systems. I f […]
Show full quote

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-23, 01:00:

You can get a fan controller with a little knob on it and adjust it to spin as quietly as you want. I bought a bunch of these years ago to adjust down fans that run louder than I would like, and tape them to the inside of the case.

I can't seem to find any of these cheap enough (and neat-looking enough) to warrant buying a bunch to use for retro systems. I found some that are just a PCB with SMD components and a knob on the end for around $30 shipped for 10, which isn't bad... but they don't really say how they work, and if turning them down too far drops the voltage below 5v it could still make the fans not spin up. I think since they are PWM that wouldn't be an issue but I can't say for sure.

Also looks like they don't have a power connector so I'd have to add one myself.

If they were just a little bit more complete it would be really nice. I don't think I'd be able to sell a motherboard + CPU + fan combo with one of these in case the person left the PCB dangling unprotected and it shorted out.

For only a few pennies, you can customize the voltage to a fan with a resistor and some heat shrink. The downside is that it requires a much larger investment into a soldering iron before you can even begin. I've done this a few times where I ended a small fan speed adjustment within a confined space.

Here is a photo of the fan speed controllers that I'd bought in quantity years ago. I tried to do a search for you but couldn't find these anywhere. The cheapest I saw is similar but very expensive at about $5 + shipping, which I think is a lot for a fan controller.

These used to be so ubiquitous. I'm very surprised.

This is the closest I could find:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/133728722113

Here's an old guide to getting twelve volts, seven volts, and five volts from your molex connector: https://www.overclockers.com/forums/threads/g … fan-mod.372297/

Picked up a fairly interesting PC last week. Modern Case. P4 stickers on it, windows 98COA and a very high end socket 775 motherboard?
Had a look around it and made some plans on what to do with it

https://youtu.be/B7ezDxb96Ts

Back in the day before PWM technology became widespread, which was the Socket 462 era which I had, knew this from having PII machine was noisy so I set out to make a high current voltage regulator with large capacitors bank and a potimeter allowed me to spin fans slower. Worked well.

Cheers,

Finally replaced the case for my Pentium II build.

The old one was falling apart 😁

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-23, 20:28:

Back in the day before PWM technology became widespread, which was the Socket 462 era which I had, knew this from having PII machine was noisy so I set out to make a high current voltage regulator with large capacitors bank and a potimeter allowed me to spin fans slower. Worked well.

Cheers,

I hate fans that run off of PWM. I can often hear their distinct whine and it drives me crazy. If there is no way to disable it, will sometimes clip off the yellow wire and adjust the speed manually with a fan speed controller.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-23, 21:31:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-23, 20:28:

Back in the day before PWM technology became widespread, which was the Socket 462 era which I had, knew this from having PII machine was noisy so I set out to make a high current voltage regulator with large capacitors bank and a potimeter allowed me to spin fans slower. Worked well.

Cheers,

I hate fans that run off of PWM. I can often hear their distinct whine and it drives me crazy. If there is no way to disable it, will sometimes clip off the yellow wire and adjust the speed manually with a fan speed controller.

Did you try quality fans like Noctua, Sanyo etc? Cheap fans are not made properly.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-23, 21:46:

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-23, 21:31:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-23, 20:28:

Back in the day before PWM technology became widespread, which was the Socket 462 era which I had, knew this from having PII machine was noisy so I set out to make a high current voltage regulator with large capacitors bank and a potimeter allowed me to spin fans slower. Worked well.

Cheers,

I hate fans that run off of PWM. I can often hear their distinct whine and it drives me crazy. If there is no way to disable it, will sometimes clip off the yellow wire and adjust the speed manually with a fan speed controller.

Did you try quality fans like Noctua, Sanyo etc? Cheap fans are not made properly.

Cheers,

That's not always an option; in laptops, for example.

I also have a fan speed controller on a lot of my Noctua fans where I want a quality, quiet bearing, but I don't need as high of an RPM.