The Amp in its original, somewhat dusty, state...
As for the case of the machine, I was at a bit of a loss. I had a look around our garage and found an old Cambridge Audio A4 amp that I had blown up a couple of years ago, with some nice big heatsinks and corresponding vents already in it :)
The plan was to get the CPU as close as possible to the heatsinks and then get the heat over to them somehow. I looked at heat pipes, which is what The Hush uses, but they looked a bit complicated to build, and it seemed that prebuilt ones would be difficult to shape without breaking (I am still interested though, if anyone can help me with this I would love to hear from you). So the other obvious option was to cut a thick sheet of a good conductor (I hear copper is cheaper than silver :) and clamp it to the CPU and heatsinks. Looking at the motherboard on the net shows that the CPU is, usefully, placed very close to one edge of the board. Obviously I would need to use plenty of heat transfer gunk and I'd also been advised that I would need to isolate the CPU from heatsink.
I thought I probably wouldn't use any of the buttons on the front panel, as I didn't want anyone accidentally switching off my server.
The Amp in its original, somewhat dusty, state...
and the innards, note the lovely big aluminum heatsinks, and the empty PCB on the left, for the optional phono stage, which I thought was probably just about a perfect size for a hard disk to sit on.
The case minus the main board and heatsinks.
The case with the heatsinks.
Initial sizing up of the board, hard drive and heatsinks shows that everything fits almost perfectly, though I obviously won't be able to use the PCI ADSL modem as I was hoping I might be able to, never mind, a USB one was on its way :) The orange wire towards the top of the front panel is for the power LED, which I was hoping to use as either the power or hard drive LED for the PC.
The bit that I was least looking forward to - removong the fansink -
turned out to be surprisingly easy, I just kind of pulled it. Bye bye warrenty :)
The CPU all cleaned up. Note - I didn't use the pliers to remove the heatsink, or to clean it :)
A copper sheet that I got for my birfday. Thanks Mummy! :)
The gutted Amp and most of the other bits I would need. Clock-wise from left: hard drive, hard drive mounting plater (phono stage PCB), Amp front fascier and case, copper sheet, heatsinks, DC-DC convertor, mainboard and a few bits and pieces including the foot I had to remove to get the rear right mounting post in - recovered from the amp and cut to size - the small white posts on the amp case in this pic. I had decided that using these plastic posts it would be easier to isolate the board from the case and heatsinks rather than isolate the CPU from the heatsinks. This is VERY dodgey and NOT RECOMMENDED, obviously it would be quite easy to short everything out with a careless touch to the case :-/ (Yes, those are my homemade speakers. B&W base cones dontchaknow.)
The motherboard and heatsinks in their final positions. From this pic you can see that I need to cut the copper to a wide and shallow "T" shape. I used the hammer and a nail to knock dimples (is that the right word?), before drilling, and not out of rage :)
The copper cut to size and shape. I thought I might as well use the waste copper and bend it up in strips to distribute more heat.
The internal power lead screwed to part of the rear panel and the copper heat sink / transfer plate bent to shape. I was a bit disapointed that I couldn't keep the copper flatter while I was cutting it (as clearly the flatter the copper the more contact there will be between it and the CPU) but I didn't have the patience to cut the whole thing with a hacksaw, so bought a hacksaw blade for my jigsaw and jigged around with that for a bit.
More finally possitioned stuff. I drilled 4 holes in the phono stage PCB and screwed the hard drive to it. I had to drill an extra hole in the DC-DC convertor and drilled corrisponding holes in the front board, used a couple of nuts as spacers and bolted it in place.
And the final product, pretty much. You can see some of the (electrically non-conductive) heat transfer grease squeezed out around the original heatsink (I decided that this was the easiest and most reliable way of attaching the copper plate to the mainboard and it would add some more heat sinkiness. Though at this point the words "sledgehammer(s)", "crack" and "nut" were coming to mind :) In the end I did wire up the front panel power button to use as the power button. I realised I did need one, and besides, you can stop the power button from doing anything (unless you hold it down for 10 secs), So I took the switch apart and removed the pin which makes the switch latch, and then broke the switch with some over zealous plier use on the reconstruction.
Some careful plier use and a cable tie later all was well, and I had a power switch. Wiring up the LED and power switch was very easy, the LED already had a suitable connector and I used another connector from the amp and soldered it to the switch connectors on the PCB.
And my test setup. After I had checked and double checked everything I could think of, I plugged the PSU in and pushed the power button. Nothing happened. Quite a bit of swearing happend and I drew all sorts of conclusions about damaging the motherboard when I ripped the heatsink off, or maybe I hadn't chacked that the motherboard was propperly isolated.
The first thing I did was to check that the power button worked with a multimeter, which it did, so next I checked the connection in the motherboard hand book, and sure enough I had the connector across pins 8 and 7 rather than 8 and 6. So I pressed the power button again, heard a loud click through my speakers, which I wasn't too keen on, but the monitor clicked into life and it looked happy :) I left the PC in bios on the PC Health Status screen to watch the CPU temperature, it peaked at 61 degrees, and apparently in bios the CPU is almost under maximum load, or at least gets close to the maximum temperature. After I had installed windows another check on CPU temperature revealed that it had reached 67 dgrees, apparently maximum temperature is 70 degrees, a bit close for comfort, but it seems ok to me, and the heatsink wasn't even geting close to the temperature of the north and south bridge heatsink.
I did make a nice animated gif but it's 120k, and I haven't the patience to learn enough about flash or fireworks to get it down to a reasonable size. Could just shrink it I suppose :)
A couple of days later, once I had moved my installation of windows and set up everything the way I wanted it, I put the lid on and positioned the amPC in the only space I had available, over my current amp. I'm not sure if it was having it over the warm amp, having the cover on, the increadibly hot weather we'd been having (this was 14th July) or the updates that took almost 100% of the processor for about 8 minutes, probably all of the above, but it became extremely hot. A reboot allowed me to view the cpu temerature, which had reached 74 degrees. I quickly removed the cover and used it to fan the board :) The whole of the aluminum heat sink was hot to the touch, and the bridges heat sink was taking the skin off my fingers. I was just thinking to myself the network chip seems a bit hot, when the server seemed to stop routing internet traffic. I could still ping it, but I wasn't able to browse from any computer other than the server. I decided to take the server off the amp. After restarting all machines concerned, everything worked again, and I breathed a sigh of relief, it was a nice breeze in my, by now, stiffling room. I wasn't looking forward to having to take it all apart again to drill more holes in the bottom and top of the case, adding a fan would kind of defete the object :-/ I decided that since the bridges heatsink was the thing that was warmest, I should provide that with some extra ventilation.
The dreaded holes weren't so scary after all :)
And they work splendidly :D So this is the finished product. If you think there has been a lack of pics of its rear end, there is a reason...
It's a bit of a pig's ear :-/ but it's functional, and I do need to sort something out so that I can attach the firewire/extra USB ports for when (if!) I get an ipod (yeah I know they use USB too, but disks are up to 70% faster with firewire compared to USB 2.0).
I have had a few problems so far:
Conclusions:
I walked into my room today to find a very happy cat asleep on a not so happy server. Maybe I shouldn't have sanded the burns from the holes so well :)
The site I am serving is http://www.kitten-x.com, though I am a little worried at the prospect of the traffic I might get from this site (I am only on a normal broadband connection) so please only visit if you are interested, thanks :)
Shout outs to me muva Sally, and Pete at Steyning Motor Spares for the nuts, bolts, screws, patience and, as always, good humour :)
Now, can anyone provide a good home to some transistors and a toroidal transformer for a Cambridge Audio A4? Think you'll have to pay the postage on the toroidal though :) and if anyone would like to commision me to make an itx out of a cd player I think it would be the perfect case - cd tray, display window and buttons you can acctually do useful things with, though no heatsinks, so you'd have to have some fans hanging around.
