Tag: CyberpowerPC

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CPU cooler upgrade

A couple months ago, the CPU cooler (one of those closed loop liquid cooling systems) started making weird noises intermittently. Being one of the few original parts left in my computer, I figured that meant it was time for a replacement. There’s not much of a selection for LGA1366 sockets left out there, but I managed to find a NZXT Kraken 120 that worked.

Replacing the cooler was also a good opportunity to give the computer a long overdue cleaning, so out came the air compressor and out went the dust bunnies.

Inside my computer after blowing out the dust. Visible is the power s upply at the bottom, video card, hard drives and the CPU cooler.
Inside my computer after blowing the dust out.

Undoing the four screws releases the retaining ring that clamps the cooler to the CPU, and out it comes. Pretty easy.

The removed CPU cooler and very dusty radiator
The removed CPU cooler and very dusty radiator
The uncovered CPU
The uncovered CPU

After removing the retaining ring, the old thermal paste got cleaned off and fresh thermal paste was applied. The cooling block went on and the radiator was attached.

New cooling block and radiator installed
New cooling block and radiator installed

(Yes, there are two fans on either side of the radiator in a push-pull configuration.)

Unlike the original cooler, the pump for the new one looks to be embedded in the radiator. The CPU cooling block has RGB lighting on it, but my motherboard doesn’t have any headers to plug it in to, so I just zip tied the wire to the hoses to keep them out of the way. Total installation time was about 30 minutes once I figured out which bits I needed to use.

The cooler works pretty well. Under load, the CPU temperatures are about 10°C cooler than they were with the old cooler. I’m quite pleased with the way the new cooler is working.

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Computer upgrades

The computer got another hard drive upgrade when the 1TB drive holding my home directory started throwing errors and disappearing from the system. After causing a small amount of panic and a few reboots, the drive managed to stay stable enough for me to get it backed up to the LVM partition. Now it’s been replaced with a 1TB SSD which has given me a nice speed boost.

The nearly 10 year old mid-range (at the time) video card, a GTX 260, also got an upgrade to a much newer and higher end GTX 1660 Ti. The GTX 260 was getting pretty old, and I was starting to get some weird errors with the nouveau driver, so I figured it was time for an upgrade. The new card is about 2/3 the length of the GTX 260, which gives a little more room around the SATA ports and hard drives to work. Hopefully I’ll be able to put the GPU to some number crunching work at some point, and later maybe get into a bit of gaming (after the PhD of course).

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Hard drive upgrades

One of the hard drives in my computer had been spitting out errors for a little while now, so over the weekend I revamped the storage in my computer. I’m also expecting the simulation work I’ll be doing for my PhD will require a decent amount of storage, so I picked up a couple 4 TB WD Blue hard drives from Newegg. They were a decent price, and brought my computer from a total of about 3 TB up to just over 10 TB of storage.

The failing drive (1 TB) got replaced, and I also took out an old 250 GB IDE drive that I was using as a place to temporarily dump files. That left a 1 TB drive, two 500 GB drives, and the 250 GB SSD.

After doing a bit of cable gymnastics in the case, the two new drives got installed and plugged in. Current configuration now has the SSD as the boot drive and root partition. I made the 1 TB drive my home directory, and decided to lump the 4 TB and 500 GB drives into a single LVM2 volume group for my primary storage. I considered a RAID 1 or 10 configuration, but with time and brain space constraints, a JBOD setup seemed like it would be easier. I might change my mind later on though.

If it turns out I need even more storage, the case still has one empty drive bay that I can stick another drive into.

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CPU transplant successful!

The Xeon W3690 transplant was a success!

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A Xeon CPU upgrade for the computer

I picked up a used Xeon W3690 CPU from eBay to upgrade the Core i7-930 currently powering my computer. Browsing around eBay, I found several for under $80. For two extra cores and a few hundred more MHz, it seemed like a pretty good deal to me so I picked one of them and bought it.

The existing CPU still works fine, but after seeing a few friends talking about computer upgrades, I did a bit of research to see what I could put into mine to give it a bit of a boost without having to do a complete computer replacement.

My choices were dictated by the motherboard revision (a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 Rev 1.0) and BIOS version (F7e). The best CPUs supported by this combination were the Core i7-970 and the Xeon W3690.

Doing my quasi-semi-annual computer cleaning and replacing the CPU will be a good weekend project. With luck, this computer will be up and running with a “new” and faster brain.

Xeon W3690
Xeon W3690
Xeon W3690 Bottom
Xeon W3690 Bottom