Acreo Aeneas

Well so here I thought I had narrowed down the fan whine to the 9600GT. Apparently, that wasn't the only fan whining; the CPU HSF was whining at full speed. Why? Because for one reason or another, two of the pins on one side became unseated and thus the Pentium DC E5200 became overly hot at an average temp of 98 C. I finally reseated and reapplied some fresh AS5. Though I'm worried I did some bad damage to it having not realized this until some two days later after having it running all night the day before.

I found the cause of the vibrating front fan. One of the impeller fins broke off. Still don't know what happened to the plastic fin, but replaced it with a sleeve bearing brushless I had laying around from a old case. So far so good. No more rumble when I thottle the fan to full.

Now, I onto the second problem: sound. Foxconn seems to be as bad as ECS was back 5-6 years ago. Their support site with their drivers are down more-than-half the time. On top of that, all the drivers I downloaded for the G31MX-K mobo are corrupt. Every one of them from XP though Windows 7 drivers. None of them will install either on Vista Business x86. So without working sound (Windows drivers don't work), I'm resorting to ordering a cheapy sound card. Going to pull the trigger on one once I find a good one for less than $10 and that isn't going to put some super heavy load on the bus during gaming sessions (not that the rig will do much of any serious gaming).

The MSI WindBox is mostly up-and-running. Just have to install Office and printer drivers. Unfortunately, text is blurry and I can't seem to fix it (Cleartype is on and configured).

As for my own rig, just ordered the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Rev. 2 to replace the stock Intel sink. The stock HSF just doesn't cut it. With all four cores going full ahead, every core is just a degree or two away from overheating. Otherwise, idle temperatures vary anywhere from 18 C to 26 C. Not exactly pleasing as my old E8400 idled at around 20/22 C and on peak load only hit 62 C.

Edit:

Reapplied some fresh AS5. Although the idle temps are now down by a few degrees, it still overheats once all four cores are active. Looks like no gaming for me for a while until the new cooler gets here.