www.vegard.net

VBOX has been running with the brand new ASUS AT5IONT-I for a little over two weeks now. So far it’s performing good, but at 82 degrees Celsius when idling it was running a bit too hot, and when the temperature started to crawl steadily towards 85 degrees I decided to install a fan to cool it down a little.

I found a really nice 50mm fan from Fractal Design. At 19 dBA I didn’t think it would be too noisy, but when it’s running at full speed it does sound a little like a plane is taking off in the living room. So there I was, with a heat problem once again. The original ZOTAC ION ITX F was supposed to be working without a fan, but got too hot. Now the new motherboard had the same problem and the fan that was supposed to be quiet wasn’t.

That’s when I found this – the Zalman Fan Mate 2, an excellent three pin fan controller. Price? 4 US dollars. Now the fan is running at 1600 RPM, just fast enough to keep the CPU cool-ish, and just slow enough to stay quiet. I have no idea why I didn’t think of looking for a fan controller before – instead of throwing 340 dollars out the window for the new motherboard, I could have spent 4 dollars on the fan controller.

Well, that was pretty damn stupid. But now I have a spare motherboard, if nothing else.

When you’re reading this, the site is being served with brand new hardware. The ZOTAC ION ITX F series motherboard has been replaced with an ASUS AT5IONT-I. Last week I got the memory chip I needed to upgrade the BIOS so that I could install the memory chips I wanted to use. Today I finally got around to replace the old motherboard – and the server is now completely silent. No fans, no moving parts, nothing that can possible make a sound.

There is, however, a slight problem: The CPU is ridiculously hot without the chassis fan connected. Right now the temperature is 82 degrees centigrade and the load on the server (requests per second to Apache and MySQL) is about average. The maximum temperature for the CPU is 100 degrees, so there is still some slack before things turn from hot to meltdown. What will happen when the CPU really has to do some work? I did a few tests, and that’s when it started to get interesting. Continue reading "Hottie." →

The site you’re looking at right now – this site – is being served from a server in our living room. I tried a lot of different hosts around the world until I realized I could probably do it myself; learn a lot about Linux and save a little money in the process. I’ll probably regret hosting the site myself one day when there is a complete meltdown – like the apartment burning to the ground. I’m backing up to Amazon S3 every day, but getting everything up and running will take some time anyway.

Since the server is in the living room, I really wanted to keep the it as quiet as possible. Ideally not making any noise at all. That’s why I got SSD disks and a ZOTAC ION ITX F series motherboard when I built it. Unfortunately, the heat sink on the motherboard was not good enough and I had to add a chassis fan to prevent the CPU from melting. Sure, the fan doesn’t make much sound, but the goal was to get the server completely silent.

Now a new option has surfaced: The ASUS AT5IONT-I. It’s got a huge heat sink and adds an extra 200MHz of horse power compared to the ZOTAC. I ordered the board and memory chips on Monday, and everything arrived yesterday. Gotta love Dustin. But of course there are some problems now as well… Continue reading "Hardware Upgrades." →