The Acer Desktop was small and was prone to getting very hot inside which caused the CPU Fan to jump from 998RPM to 4500+ RPM which meant it sounded like an Aircraft taking off. You could argue that UK does not get Hot that much but the room were the computer are was very hot indeed – even with Desktop Fans blowing onto me – it was still like living in a Sauna.
I had a spare box complete with ASUS P5N-E SLi NF650i 775 Motherboard but the only issue I had with that was there was no fixing plate for the CPU. I ripped apart the Acer and worked out how to get the holding bracket from the CPU Holder and re-attached this to the ASUS Board and now started to build this machine. The case was your pretty standard iCute case I got some years ago for free:
Once finally all back in one piece, I booted it up to make sure it worked and as expected Vista failed to boot. I stuck in the WIndows 7 RC1 64Bit DVD and proceed to install that instead. Now the number of fans went like this:
- CPU Fan – Spinning at 2200RPM
- Front Case Fan – Spinning at 900RPM – Cooling HD’s
- Back Case Fan – Extracting Air out of the Case.
- Top Fan – They say Heat Rises, fitted to MOLEX Connector – Spinning at full Speed.
- Side Case fan – Never understood these – blowing onto Ram, Molex and Full Speed.
Now instead of pure silence and then Bang – Full RPM, this was now at a medium hum all the time but I noticed the CPU Temp was 40c even at idle. I finally removed (un-plugged) the Side Case and top Fans, on the grounds that they made the most noise due to been on full speed all the time and the system went down to a very low hum – this is now workable and I am happy and even better, the CPU went down to 32c.
Was it all worth it?
The Acer motherboard defiantly had some problems, streaming via ProCaster would Hold back the data for some reason, copying files were slow (GIGABIT Network remember) and now this mad Fan problem even though the CPU was cool. Not all is lost with the Acer, I can buy a new CPU Fan (Cheap one) and it already has a C2D 1.8GHz CPU in there along with Spare GeForce 7600GS – so I can make a new machine out of it over time.
