Wesley's Tool-Box

• Adding PCI Cards

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.

• Temperature Sensor Install

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.

• Let There Be Light (cont.)

This is how the case logo looked like when it lit up. You can see the official name of the system, 'XPPort-II'. It didn't look as good as I had wanted, and the adhesive didn't hold the logo and the light together properly, however. So I took it off after a day. I'm going to try EL lighting instead someday.



I didn't like how the exposed wires looked, so I planned to wrap them up. I created a sheet of patterns from Paint Shop Pro and printed them out.



This is how it looks like after the wires were properly wrapped. Notice that the LED lights that were used for the case logo now lights up the middle of the case, located near the central case fan.

• Let There Be Light

This is the close-up of the tabs where the bolts are screwed on to lock the case closed. I noticed that LED lights could be installed on the lower area to illuminate the innards.



To keep things simple, I used two sets of four high-brightness LED lights connected to 12V rail. One set is blue, and another is green. Maximum operating voltage of a LED used here is 3.3V, so having four of them on 12V rail would give them at least 3.0V, and would not exceed tolerance up to 13.2V, so this is more efficient than pairing them with resistors and connecting them to 5V rail. Each tab would have two LED lights, so six of them would be lighted up from the top of the case, while the last two would be used for lighting up the case logo.



You can see that the LED lights' wires go to the power connector and get powered.

• Points of Interest

Immediately noticeable of this case is the multitude of fan holes on it. There are five in total, with three at the side and one on the front and back, each. All are cut for 60mm fans. The rear fan supplies air to the power supply. I've taken out all the fans that were on the power supply because they were 40mm ones, which aren't so powerful yet noisy. The three holes on the side are for the video card, northbridge chipset, and CPU, in the order of left to right. The video card has a fan directly on the heatsink right now, but should the heatsink change later on and it won't hold a fan on it, I can simply attach one on the case. All fans operate at 5V to ensure silent operation of the system. I used four 25mm thick 60mm fans from Zalman Tech for all fan holes except that of the video card to maximize air flow rate while keeping the noise down to minimum. This is possible because they are the same fans used on the CNPS5100-Cu cooler. I'd like to thank Zalman Tech for providing quality components for this project.



Let's see the inside of the case this time. To simplify the maintenance of the system, I used two hinges originally used in the TabletXP project so that the case would open and close like a book. You may have seen similar design in a few computer cases. Come to think of it, it's ironic or fortunate that most of the failed project's components found its way to usefulness; now the microATX mainboard used in that project is the only thing left out.. big apologies go to Ronald Hanaki of Tech-Report who provided it for me. You can see that the power supply's cable is just sufficient enough to reach the mainboard even in the open configuration. While the position of the power connector on the mainboard may be less than optimal for normal cases, it is quite appropriate for this case.



Due to the way the components are positioned, practically all wires converge at the middle of the case. This isn't particularly good because, as it is shown in the picture, it gets a bit thick and can hinder a proper closing of the case. I've eventually sorted the wires out later on. Another thing to note is how the drives are positioned. The slim size CD-ROM drive and the floppy drive are attached on the side panel of the case, while the hard disk drive is attached right below the power supply. Because power supply components generate electromagnetic fields, and hard disk's storage method is also electromagnetic in nature, this configuration can be frowned upon. However, I could not find any better place to put the hard disk on, because the hard disk is actually quite big (the 3.5" hard disk drive is actually the second biggest component in this project, volume-wise; I almost contemplated a 2.5" hard disk used in laptops) and there isn't a room in such a compact case. That spot was the only viable location. Fortunately, I have not encountered a single problem in hard disk operation despite such unorthodox positioning.

• Building the Case

Unlike the original, the new Portable Athlon was not to have a schematic or even a simple layout sketch. I only had a list of dimensions for the panels to be cut out for the work. The master layout was in my brain, and I cut and drilled the holes according to it. I realized that, if I were to only make one masterpiece out of the work, it would prove inefficient to make a schematic first.



My only tools were the cordless drill and a coping saw. If I had some specialized tools, it would've save me a lot of time, but I decided to trust my skills on the generic tools. This is how the back panel of the case looked like after working on it for some three hours.



After about 50 near-straight hours of work, the case had finally been completed. This was to be my first-ever fully independent creation, which is quite in contrast to the original Portable Athlon, which the case was done by a professional craftsman with me only pointing out where to drill the holes. I was quite proud, but extremely tired at the same time.