Blast from the past - passive Rage Fury Maxx

[SebRad]

My long and rambling style follows below but the short version is: prise off old heatsink/fans, cut replacement heatsink in half, glue half to each chip, find one’s not contacting right, re-do it, now OK, see pics.

I’ve been working on an older system for a customer and it’s primary used for game playing. Older games that is as the spec of 1GHz P3, 256MB RAM and Voodoo Banshee isn’t up to a lot. The thing came to me as it would only power up for 1 – 5 minutes before shutting down for no apparent reason. I cleaned out the CPU cooler that was somewhat choked with dust and discovered its (irremovable) clip was quite loose. I couldn’t really bend it so I packed it out a little between the base and clip. This seamed to help, a little. The machine was pretty loud, the 50mm CPU cooling fan was running ~6000rpm and the fan in the PSU is a little lower in pitch but still equally loud. There was also distinct electrical hissing coming from the PSU that could be heard despite the other noises. The HDD, fortunately, is a relatively quiet 10GB Seagate (the rubber cornered one!) but slow. The Banshee is passively “cooledâ€

[Beyonder]

There must be some error; this is Silent PC Review, not Antique PC Review

[autoboy]

Wow, that guy needs a new computer.

[Candor]

Interesting. That card is pretty old. The amount of time and effort to make modifications (or money, if you have someone do it for you) hardly seems worth it.

I'm not much of a gamer, so it doesn't matter to me, but you can find passively cooled cards online for way less than it would cost to have someone mod something so old. This seems like delaying the inevitable.

Of course, any excuse to silence hardware is good enough for me.

[bsdie]

Lovely mod! Its great to se someone actually re-use old hardware.

[SebRad]

Hi all, indeed it's not really worth the effort, as was pointed out a really cheap passive modern card would out perform it far and away. Thing is I had the card and no use for it and seamed like a good project Maybe card is a museum piece but I'd rather see it get used. Obviously I wouldn't let anyone pay me do such a mod, just not worth it.
Yes they do need a new computer, I'm building them one (when the CPU finally finds it's way to me) so I will get to play with some new hardware and make a little money
If anyone want's to know how AM2 Athlon 3500 + Asus Nforce 6150 + 2x DDR2-667 512MB works out just ask in a few days. May well make a thread on it somewhere anyway as it's very difficult to find info on performance of integrated graphics and effects of single channel, dual channel, memory speed etc. Should give enough performance for now, target game is "Sims 2" and has PCI-E 16 slot so can be upgraded easily unlike their less old rig. Athlon XP ~2000, Integrated SIS graphics, SDRAM and only PCI slots Does anyone else get the urge to quieten/silence every PC that comes their way
Seb

[BillyBuerger]

Does anyone else get the urge to quieten/silence every PC that comes their way

Yes.... Yes I do. I've gone through most of the PCs that have come through my workplace and re-routed cables to make for better airflow at least. I talked my boss into letting me buy some lower speed case fans too. But unfortunately, we have some prescott CPUs and all have stock Intel heat sinks which are definitely not quiet. Some day I may have to try and sneak some better heat sinks in when I'm buying other computer hardware or something.

And there's nothing wrong with old hardware. Usually pretty easy to quiet as it's not as hot but many times still noisy due to laziness and cost-cutting of the OEMs. If anything, old hardware makes for good parts. I've got a collection of old Socket 8 and Slot 1 heat sinks with large widely-spaced fins. Great for cutting up and throwing on other stuff to replace whiny little fans. Just like Seb did.