...the Cube, some thoughts.

Like I've said before, this is more of an online-journal for me more than anything. So when I have experiences like I had this weekend, it only behooves me to write them down, for maybe i can be a helpful voice for someone in need, or myself again, should I forget what I did.

That said, I SPENT ALL WEEKEND WORKING ON THE STUPID CUBE.

And now that all is done and working here's my findings...

First, if you want to avoid problem after problems with a computer when you change motherboards, here's a piece of advice... A change in motherboards, should result in a FULL reinstall of the operating system. Sure it may work, even for days, weeks, or months, but in the end, it will come back and bite you. Like it did me.

Another issue that crops up with those who build their own machines is heat. Actually, this may happen more often to those who try to build there own boxes. As you can tell from the pictures below, I only have one fan acting as an intake fan in the front of the box. The only other fans are sitting on the CPU (the processor AMD, INTEL) and in the PSU (Power Supply). I'm using the onboard video and audio on this motherboard (more on that later) and after seeing a lot of discoloration and weird things happen on-screen and after touching the North and Southbridge chips on the motherboad, I decided that those puppies need cooling down.

For once, my pack-rat ways prove awesome. I had 4 or five fans that were perfect size for the chips' heatsinks. One I semi-professionaly screwed onto the heat-sink. The other I zip-tied on, decidedly un-professional, but functional. I also velcro'd the IDE ribbon cable coming off of the CD-Rom drive to the ceiling of the box, which proved to be a nusance earlier. Now the Drive sits snug in it's lair and doesn't pop out once I push the motherboard tray back into the cube.

So far everything is working awesome. I installed some games to gauge the onboard video. It's based off of the AMD 690G Chipset. I gotta say, it has impressed me immensly. I installed older games of course, but it plays Prince or Persia: The Sands of Sime pretty awesomely (and this game is made of pure awesome as well), as well as the first Splinter Cell. These are 4~5 year old games, but still required a dedicated card int their day to get any playablitity out of them. To see onboard graphics handle them, like a spoiled-red-headed-step-child is handled by swift discipline, is pretty exciting to see. I was able to watch a semi-HD movie (courtesy of Andrew) without any skips or hops. I am really curious to see what else this will handle. It also handles x264 encodes very well. I am in the process of re-encoding all my Simpsons (done) DVD's (though I only have the first 6 seasons) and all 10 seasons of Friends and they look and handle as good as I can expect.

Tonight, I think I'm going to finish setting up my game pads and cleaning up all the cables around the house and then hopefully I won't have to deal with this anymore... but I gotta say, gaming on a 32" lcd beats the 19" lcd hands down, and all from the comfort of my sofa.