The Second Portable Athlon (8/10)
Posted by Wesley on
By using a PCI riser card, I was able to put three PCI expansion cards in addition to the PCI LAN card next to the video card, for a total of four possible PCI expansion cards in the system. The original Portable Athlon system had PCI slots occupied by the power supply, so this is a great improvement, and now I became free from reliance of on-board subsystems. Here is a picture of Sound Blaster Audigy sound card on the PCI riser card after it was separated from the mainboard.
This is how it looks like when all four possible PCI slots are occupied. Three cards on the PCI riser card comfortably fit into the space. The cards are secured into place by bolts and/or L-shape brackets. The leftmost card is the 100Mbps Ethernet LAN card, and the cards on the riser are SB Audigy sound card, OnAir TV II television card, and FireWire-USB2.0 combo card, from top to bottom. The television card was temporarily installed for watching FIFA World Cup 2002 Korea/Japan broadcasts.
Monitoring ambient air temperature is necessary to properly measure and predict the performance characteristics of the air-cooling system. It's like measuring the water temperature at the radiator or reservoir in the water-cooling system. I attached the temperature sensor on the air hole above the CPU cooler, so that I can see what the exact temperature of the air the CPU cooler is taking in. This way I can properly measure the temperature delta of the cooler and predict how much temperature change was occurred in various clockspeed settings. The measured temperature is visible from the front of the case via the LCD readout, seen at the rightmost side of the picture.