Some Cube upgrades this week. I just go through completely dismantling the Cube and even now I’m typing this on the half assembled Cube.
The first upgrade was the hard drive. After some attention and consideration I realized the noisiness came from the hard drive and not the fan. A spare 160 gig drive was surrendered to a 128 gig fate and cloned from the existing one. Unfortunately, it seems that 9.2 won’t boot on it, but I don’t have any 9.2 applications. Small loss. The previous drive was date 120 gig Western Digital dated 2003. The replacement is a Western Digital dated 2007.
The next upgrade was huge. To replace the 500 MHz CPU with a 1800 MHz. This requires disassembling just about everything, pulling off the old CPU in the core, and putting it all back together. Lots of chances to break something, which I was able to succeed at. The base fan was plugged into the DC to DC board and I ripped out the plugin from the circuit board. Oops.
Which brings up the final upgrade. A Panaflo fan was already installed. The CPU upgrade came with another. I removed the old one, cut the connector off, stripped the wires, attached it to the DVD ROM power connector, and crossed my fingers.
Everything came back together and I have a much snappier and quieter Cube. First impressions are surprising. DOSBox works better. Firefox is oddly crapping out. It’s actually slower. PandoraJam just won’t run at all for some reason.
Update 10/27/2008:
The Cube has been running for days and in use almost the whole time.
Firefox is very annoying. It’s significantly slower compared to Safari. I’m also looking into other browsers. FireFox plus Flash just won’t run. So, no Pandora. Except it works fine in Safari, but I lose my AdBlocking.
DOSBox still consumes a lot of resources. This surprises me since the box is about 3 times faster. For Colonization I have to drop the resolution to 800 X 600 and run it windowed. Just too slow for full screen.
The video card runs hot and cool. You can’t always tell. Low resolutions are cooler, but low resolution with DOSBox is hot.
The CPU fins don’t seem hot. Neither does the hard drive.
The GeForce 6200 card needs a slow fan. Preferably, one that blows “backwards”. That would normally be into the computer. For a Cube that is blowing up and out. Any other direction only blows against a wall.