Wesley's Tool-Box

• Phase 2: The Flat Panel

Up to now, you've seen the phase 1 of the system. Had I went on to show you up to this, this article would've ended here and be released much earlier. However, it would have the shortcoming of requiring a separate monitor to use the system, which would negate the purpose of this WDS-APX-0 somewhat, despite the fact that the system does already fit in a school bag. Thus I waited for a month after the completion of the phase 1 to make enough money for buying a dedicated monitor for the system. It had to be, of course, one of those costly LCD flat panel.

Another picture can be found here. It's pretty evident that the two things go nicely together. You might notice another flat thing on the back, which is a slim scanner from Canon that is meant to be carried with the system when necessary. Speaking of the scanner, I also bought a RICOH burner with 12x10x32x8DVD capability with it, but it's not pictured here. This can be attached via 'extension cables' that comes out from the side of the case, which you might have noticed from the case pictures. I could have opted for a USB burner, but the current mainstream standard, USB 1.1, is bandwidth limited, so the drive that gets attached to it will show lackluster speed(USB burners top at around 4x burning). I also needed DVD capability like the old system I had, so the RICOH drive was perfect.

One problem, though. I cannot carry this panel with its base that huge and must be done away with. (Suppressing a bad All Your Base Are Belong To Us joke here....) But I can't have the flat panel hang along freely as if it was a tablet, either. What would have to be done?

• How it Looks

As the first phase of the system is complete, I gave it the name of WDS-APX-0, APX standing for Athlon Portable Experimental and 0 meaning prototype. Here is how the case looks on a more closed-up manner. I'm sure some of you have already seen the pictures of the coming pages, as I've already revealed these from time to time. Note that the arrangements and the looks are that of version 1.0. I've made some changes as saw fit since the pictures were taken.

• Revising What's Already Done

The changes were mostly from the overclocking, as expected. The system by itself runs perfectly fine at default settings, but I couldn't let it sit like that, now that it has my T-bird CPU, meaning this would have to take the place my main system. I gave it my Corsair PC133 256MB RAM and took the KingMax RAM out because the hard disk passed over the RAM with enough space in between and I needed the extra 128MB. Running a 750MHz CPU at over 1GHz posed some heat problems, and I had to give up the 1113MHz, 1.85V setting I'd been using, and instead tried to find the highest speed that ran stably on default 1.70V setting, which was 1034MHz. That still didn't solve the heat problem completely, so I replaced the 60mm fan to a Sunon 2.6W one. It was more noisy and my roommate hated it, but I didn't have much choice.

Then there was the video card problem. The card came with only a black square heatsink without a fan. I tried on a 40mm fan on it, but it didn't help much on overclocking, as I was pretty much stuck to the default 190MHz core speed. So I decided to take the heatsink off. Shockingly, the heatsink was just loosely attached on the core by a double-sided tape and fell off with relative ease. It was just touching the corners of the chip. I guess it was small wonder the card was so cheap. I put a lapped Pentium cooler that's been rolling around my collection of old components onto the core instead, and tied it with a fishing wire. It was a lot better, but the fan was old, so it made grinding noises for about 5 minutes of turning on the system, which was often annoying.

• Zalman Helps Out

Having shown the case to them, the people at Zalman were quite interested and decided to help out on the cooling and noise issue. The noisy CPU fan was twice replaced with the ones that's been in the lab. Many variations on the attachment method was tried out and initially, the two-fan design won out due to lower noise and good cooling. The Sunon fan was attached to the side of the heatsink with an adaptor that is screwed on the side of the vice that holds the fins. A low-profile Adda fan was placed where the Sunon fan was originally put (the top part of the case). A couple of weeks later, they were readying a new cooler design and a prototype was tried on my system. However, because of the design of the case being unusual, and because it was a prototype, it didn't fare well when the case was closed. The fan used on it, however, performed well, and now the two-fan design was replaced with the single-fan design again, this time with the new fan.

Meanshile, on the video card side, they were producing their new copper video card heatsink, ZM17-CU. I had the priviledge of attaching this on my video card, replacing the noisy Pentium cooler. Afterwards, I put the 60mm Adda fan that was taken off the duty of cooling the CPU onto this video card heatsink, since ZM17-CU does not have any fan attached by default.

• The Case Becomes Reality

One of Dad's friend runs a synthetics company that makes all sorts of things from sign boards to commemoration plaques. He told me that this should be a suitable place to make the case I designed, and made an appointment to do so on the 17th. I showed my dad's friend the design, and he noted that some 5mm-thick acrylic boards should be used so that it wouldn't become brittle. He chose a white board for the bottom and some transparent boards for the rest of the sides so that it would become see-through. I thought it was a wise decision to do, as a see-through design is cool to look at(yes, I was impressed with an iMac).

Instead of using my measurements though, he marked the places to cut out or drill as he put the parts upon the board. Maybe I shouldn't have spent the whole night measuring and recording... After about 4 hours of work, the case was near completion. The speaker wire fell off as it was getting attached, but the problem was quickly solved with some passes of soldering iron.

After the top transparent part was completed, the necessary parts such as the power supply and the hard disk was attached on it, and everything was connected as it should. There was a bit of trouble closing the case as so many components are cramped into such a small area, but after a bit of shifting wires around, it was successful; the design worked and everything did go in. The four bolts that binds the upper and lower parts were fastened and all was done. The portable Athlon became a reality. Here's the commemorative photo shoot below, with the maker and the designer. Yes, that's me on the right.

Some photos of the case coming up...

• Duron Becomes Thunderbird

A slight problem hit me at this point. The Duron CPU that my friend and fellow discussion board moderator at MadOnion.com, M.Pierce had problems sending the Duron and was not going to be ready till March. Since the other parts had already been prepared and the case making was scheduled for February 17th, I couldn't wait for this and decided to change the initial plan. Despite the huge power consumption, I pulled out the T-bird 750 in my main system and put it into this. And so the portable Duron project took a turn and became the portable Athlon (T-bird) project.

I hesitated on this a bit because, like many of you who used an original 'classic' Athlon, the power consumption of the CPU supposedly brought down most low quality 250W power supply and needed a good 300W one. This belief generally holds to this day, and AMD CPU users generally opt for 300W PSU most of the time. My 235W Enermax power supply shivered before my classic Athlon 650, and had replaced it with a 300W Seventeam one ever since, for example. The power supply used for this project was 150W, as mentioned before, and if past experiences are any indication, it would fizzle upon boot as the T-bird sucks out at least half of the total power. Since the 3.3V + 5V rail maximum output is rated at 80W, and CPU's 1.7V power is derived from this rail, it would be pretty much hitting the maximum right off the bat, with hardly a room to spare for other components. However, throwing out the PSU meant throwing out the whole project, so I took the risk.

• The Trial Run

 

I tried to be conservative, as lot of money had already been put into this and don't want the whole thing to blow up in a smoke. Thus, I underclocked the t-bird to 500MHz and connected everything except the hard disk. Hard disk is a mechanical device by nature, and the motor is bound to pull some power off, so it was excluded at first. I used the Flatron monitor I had hooked up to my main system so that I could see how thing went. I took a deep breath and push the power button.

And it booted! No signs of troubles were present, and all things seemed to work fine. I went to BIOS setup and watched how the power supply voltage rails and CPU temperatures were doing. I noticed that 12V rail was about 4% higher than normal, but other things looked okay. The CPU was doing mid-40's (in celcius) so I could see that the aluminum flower cooler wasn't doing very great when it is used with a 60mm fan. It was to be replaced with the gold-plated copper one for better cooling.

Seeing that the first trial run went without troubles, I attached the hard disk and a DVD-ROM drive. The DVD-ROM drive was not to be included in the system, but for the purpose of simulating the optical drive I was planning to buy for the system later on. Anyhow, the second run also booted fine. Therefore, I partitioned and formatted the hard disk, then installed Windows 2000 on it. Windows setup will encounter troubles if there was an incompatibility of the components or if a certain component was not performing stably, but the setup went pretty well, so I concluded that the configuration was okay.

That being confirmed, my overclocker's habit kicked in and tried the 1.1GHz setting I was using for the T-bird before. The PSU got a bit hotter, but nothing broke. It was good to know that the system ran without a hitch in such power-consuming settings, too. However, the CPU temperature was approaching uncomfortable levels. After the second run, the cooler was switched. The next day, this system would get a house to settle in.

• Getting the Parts (cont.)

To keep up with the portability theme, the good old 106-key Windows standard keyboard (this is the case for Korean keyboards; one key for English-Korean conversion and one key for Korean-Chinese conversion are added to the default US keyboard layout)was not to be used. If you've ever used a notebook computer and complained about the tight keyboard it has, you know how huge a normal keyboard can get. Those 'natural' keyboards with twisted key arrangements or those wacky 'internet' keyboards with superfluous buttons are even bigger. BTC was selling some 'specialty' keyboards such as mini-keyboards and wireless keyboards, so I got myself the mini-keyboard from them. Not surprisingly, this keyboard's characteristics were remarkably similar to that of a keyboard integrated in a notebook, and the Logitech TrackMan portable trackball I've been using with my old 486 notebook (not the one pictured in the first page, though) clamped perfectly to the side of the keyboard.

Then it occured to me that, in order to make a computer case, I needed some LEDs and buttons and the dinky beeper-speaker. Since these come standard when you buy a computer case, I never gave much thought to them, but now that I'm the one making the case, I needed to supply these on my own. Fortunately, the Yongsan electronics market is chock full of all computer parts, and I effortlessly obtained the necessary parts from a store that sells computer cases as 'replacement' parts for a couple of bucks.

For the heatsink, I bought a Zalman CNPS2005 flower heatsink, as a website was doing a group purchase on these coolers and got it on a good deal. However, I couldn't use the 80mm fan that came with it because it would be too large; I pulled out a 60mm fan I keep for testing for use with it. The Duron CPU has not been arrived at the time of the photo, so my t-bird CPU was shown instead.

• Designing the Case

With most parts pretty much on my hands, I needed to revise my original thoughts of the casing with actual measurements and positioning. Though the measurement I had did not differ significantly, the positioning of the components revealed that my initial design had some flaws. Also, my dad hinted that my design was rather complex, and told me to make it as simple as possible so that it won't be so difficult to make or become fragile. His words were to be taken seriously, as he's an engineer. I took my original design and simplified it so that it could be made from just six panels, not the original eight. Then I somehow needed to visualize my design. I needed a CAD program. I downloaded a freeware CAD program from the web, took a 30-minute crash-course on using it with the internal tutorial, and came up with this.

Would this design survive? We'll see...