Dustbunny Eviction

Ok well yesterday evening I spent about 2 1/2 hours tearing down my machine and putting it together correctly. Before this endeavor I stopped by best buy and picked up a 80mm case fan, and a tube of thermal gook for the CPU.

Upon the onset of this operation, this is what I was working with:



Among the things done during the rebuild:

• Removal of front panel and removal of about 2 lbs of dustballs.
• Unsocketed the CPU and removed the cooler from it. Removed the old thermal paste and reapplied a new layer.
  
• Moved the Graphics card to the lower positioned PCI-E slot and the RAID card to the upper one to improve airflow.
• Added a 80mm blue LED case fan to the front bottom of the case to pull air into the case.
• Added another 80mm case fan inside of the hard drive bays, utilizing high-tech wire ties. Also blowing into the case.
• Removed a 500GB drive that was just extra space for the moment and shelved it.
• Wrapped all of the power and drive cables to improve airflow.

In the picture above, just to the left of the lower most drive is a blue vertical bar. Thats the main chip of my mother board, and it is very obscured by cables and the 120mm fan on the far left of the picture is the only case fan providing airflow. And its pulling air out, so that poor chip is getting no cooling. Even worse the 2nd chip for the mother is underneath the GTX260 card.

So after my time spent cleaning it up. This is the end result. And so far (knock on wood) no more lockups and the computer has detected the RAID card without fail. Stay tuned to see if this lasts.



And a shot of the improvised fan in the drive cage:





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Ok so now I am off to finish watching the Battlestar Galactica webisodes, and then to see the first episode in the return of the series. Got a lot of great documentaries I've downloaded and they just keep coming. Faster than I could ever hope to watch them.