Saturday, June 16, 2012

My current PC, A IBM M52 part 2

Hello again. today i'm going to talk about the insides of this computer. First a picture of it with just the top cover open:

It with the cover open, in this picture you can see the PSU, DVD drive, PCI fan and a bit of the motherboard.
to get access to the CPU, RAM, hard drive, floppy drive and front fans you need to tilt the whole front section up like this:

The front drive bay tilted all the way up.
In the drive bay we have the CD/DVD drive on top of the hard drive and next to them is the floppy drive.

The PSU is in the top left corner in the above picture with the motherboard being across the bottom. Starting from the left we have the PCI riser card with one PCI port and one ADD 2-R port that can also work as a PCI-E 1x port.

As you can see i have a PCI slot fan in the top PCI slot which is held up by a piece of metal from a video tape. This case doesn't come with any screws to hold PCI cards/fans in place so hence i used that.

Then we have the two RAM slots to the right of the PCI riser card slot. It can take a maximum of 2GB of RAM in each slot making a total of 4GB. I currently have 3GB of RAM in it which makes it a fairly quick machine.

Above the RAM we have two heatsinks, one smaller one on the left and a bigger one on the right. The smaler one on the left is over the north bridge chipset and the bigger one is for the Pentium 4 CPU. We then have the two case/CPU fans on the drive bay to the right of the CPU heatsink. These are right in front of the front grill. A bit of info about these fans:

Make: SUPERRED
Model: CHD6012ES-AH(E)
Power info: DC12V 0.30A
Connector type: 4 pin
Dimensions: 6cm - width, 2cm - depth

A close up of the two fans:

The two case/CPU fans.
I plan on replacing these two front fans with more efficient/quieter ones soon. See if i can get it to run a bit cooler and quieter. I'll finally leave you with another couple of pictures of inside it:



If you have any questions or comments about anything on my blog feel free to email me.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

My current PC, A IBM M52 part 1

Hello all. Today i'm going to talk about my current PC which is a IBM M52 8215-CTO. There will be several parts to this as i keep upgrading it and i will write about my experiences with it. First a overall picture of my PC:

My Desktop and monitor on my computer desk. Yeah it's a mess.
As you can see i have a HP 1740 17" LCD monitor connected to my M52. I have a Logitech K120 keyboard which is pretty good seeing as it's a fairly cheapish one and a GAME brand mouse, again fairly basic but does the job. You can also just about see on the left a BT Voyager 1500 wireless router that i mainly use for experiments.

Next i'll show you a close up of the front:

At the bottom left is the grill for the two CPU fans, Top left is the floppy drive,
At the top right is the CD-RW/DVD Drive, At the bottom we have the headphone and microphone  jacks,
To the left of those is the two front USB 2.0 ports, the power button and the power and HDD indicator lights.
Next a picture of the back:

On the back starting from the left is the PSU fan grill, power socket, under that is the voltage switch,
Then we have the old keyboard and mouse ports, next to them is four USB 2.0 ports, A parallel port, Line in and line out audio ports, A VGA video port, two more USB 2.0 ports , a ethernet port and two serial ports.
There is also two PCI slots at the top right. As you can see the bottom one is not in use and the top one has a PCI slot fan mounted in it. Some of you may have noticed that there is small piece of metal on the right side of the PCI fan grate. I'm using that to keep the PCI fan in place. Without it the front would fall down as it doesn't fit overly well. More on the insides later though.

Finally i shall leave you with the specs of this PC as it is:

IBM M52 8215-CTO
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz HT SL7Z9
Motherboard: Custom BTX motherboard with the Intel 945G chipset
RAM: 1x Crucial 2GB DDR2-SDRAM PC2-5300 and 1x Kingston 1GB DDR2-SDRAM PC2-5300
Hard Drive: Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 series 80GB (HDS728080PLA380 40Y9028LEN)
Optical Drive: TSSTcorp CDW/DVD TS-H492C
Graphics Card: Intel(R) 82945G Express Chipset Family 212MB
Sound Card: SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio
PSU: Delta Electronics DPS-225HB A 225W
Monitor: HP L1740 LCD Monitor
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Pro (2600) SP3