The Second Portable Athlon (1/10)

Sunday, July 7. 2002

The Second Portable Athlon (1/10)

Death and Rebirth

The original Portable Athlon was signalling its retirement. The highly overclocked GeForce2 MX in the system finally failed, probably due to extensive operation under the cramped environment. The card seemed fine at first, but it invoked hard drive errors during booting (I thought the hard disk had gone bad at first). I think it was sending unstable signals and risking the stability of the system. Also, the case design had very limited expandability, with no PCI extension cards installable, and without a room for a floppy drive or a CD-ROM drive. I was sort of getting annoyed by that. I decided to get over this, and started building a new version. I'll show the journey around with lots pictures.

This is the EPoX EP-8K3A mainboard with KT333 chipset, supporting PC2700 (166MHz operation, 333MHz effective speed) DDR-SDRAM and 166MHz FSB. You can clearly see the markings on the surface. Like the original Portable Athlon, this mainboard is full ATX, not the smaller microATX that is commonly used in small form-factor or slim-size computers. Back in the original, though, there wasn't much benefit of using a full ATX mainboard in terms of expansion because it was blocked by the power supply sitting all over it. Not this time; those PCI slots would have real use. Here, I'm removing the default northbridge heatsink.

The default heatsink would be more useful somewhere else. I'm going to replace it with Zalman Tech's beautifully gold-coloured ZM-NB32J northbridge heatsink.

The new heatsink is now in place. Next step is to install a CPU cooler. I am to install CNPS5100-Cu, again from Zalman, which does not use clips, but four supporting bolts. Therefore, I needed to put the studs on first.

Posted by Wesley in Tinkerings at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (3)

< New Content... Finally | The Second Portable Athlon (2/10) >

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Portable Athlon Reborn
It's already been more than a month since a new system had taken place of the Portable Athlon. It was replaced by none other than its descendant, XPPort-II, a.k.a. Portable Athlon II. I still have some improvements planned for the machine, but I decided t

Weblog: Wesley's Tool-Box
Tracked: Jul 11, 22:56

The Heatpipe Mod on XPPort-II (1/11)
Escape from the Low-End The single most annoying thing that bothered me in designing the series of Portable Athlons (First & Second) is that I could not use a full-height video card. This is because the system's internal dimensions

Weblog: Wesley's Tool-Box
Tracked: Jul 11, 22:56

Heatpipe Madness
Heat problems have plagued the XPPort-II (a.k.a. Portable Athlon II) due to the high-performance components that make up the system, while having too cramped a space to have sufficient cooling applied. The solution was to use heatpipes to move the heat to

Weblog: Wesley's Tool-Box
Tracked: Jul 11, 22:58

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

No comments

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry