Total Noob with a Qbic

[BikePilot]

Laptop HD was getting full and I really needed a better system for picture/data storage and backup. It seemed a desktop would be the least expensive option and its nice to have an extra computer in the even my wife and I both want to compute something at the same time:) I know its old/slow compared to what most of you probably run, but its my fist desktop (I've been a laptop type for ever) and will be used for picture storage and MS Office duties.

Snagged this thing on craigs list for $225. Its got:

Qbic EQ3901-300P Mania
1gb ram
160gb SATA HD (will be replacing it with 2 400gb drives)
AMD 64 3000+ processor
CD/DVD-RW (Dual Layer)
128mb ATI Video Card (will be replacing it with 256mb nvidia card)
err, umm dunno what else.

I've got a pair of 400gb hard drives  (WD4000YR) waiting to be installed as well as a 256mb FX5600 video card (I don't game at all).

click fo biguns






















I turned it on and verified that it works at a friends house, but can't use it at the moment as I'm waiting for my keyboard and mouse to be delivered (S510).


Now the plan is to yank the 160bg hard drive and put in my two 400GB hard drives (with one backing up the other via second copy, goast or RAID-mirror - undecided there...), stick in the bigger video card and perhaps mod it a bit for better cooling.

 Any recomendations on how/where to mount the hard drives and cool them as well as the system? I will not be overclocking at all, but worry that the drives may get a bit hot. Stability and longevity are the primary concerns.


thanks,

Josh

[Rayzor]

I've been a Soltek Qbic (3401, with the gorgious mirror front) user for 3  and I'm trying very hard not to commetn on the aesthetics of your Qbic...

If you only use one optical drive, I'd suggest you get a pair of el cheapo 5.25 to 3.5 inch brackets and install one of the harddisk in the lower 5.25 bay and one in the lower 3.5 bay. That way there is some extra room between the two hd's.


I've seen people cut out a big hole out the bottom of the drive cage to enabled better heat dispation for teh lower HD.

I tested with a 80mm fan blowing against the side of the drive cage but that didn't help anything. Maybe it would in combination with the aformentioned hole and maybe some added holes in the side of the drivecage. Off course that fan should not run full speed if silence is important

But all in all the Qbic had been very good to me and I think you can safely install the HD's without extra cooling measures (and thus extra noise). My HD's managed to run smoothly for 3 years in there and one of them (a 10.000 RPM raptor) is still doing it's job in my new rig.

As for other cooling measures. I cut a hole in the chassis where the fan of my Radeon 9800Pro would sit. That card ran really hot and I didn't want to take any changes as I gamed al lot in those days. Don't know how hot your card runs but seeing the purpose of the PC I'm guessing your okay. You even migth wanna think about controlling the videocards fan with a controller because often the videocard fan is the most anoying sound coming from a PC.

Fot the CPU there are plenty of reasonable silent options. Just make sure it will fit before buying one. Good luck.

[BikePilot]

Thanks for the info! I'm still not sure how much I like the looks of the Mania - but I couldn't pass up the deal on it and I think its growing on me:)

I was just looking at the box with the cover off and think your right about mounting the HD's in the lower 5.25" bay and lower 3.5" bay to give some room between them. I do only have one optical drive and have no need for another nor do I have any need for a floppy drive. Do you think there would be any benifit of using sort of hard drive cooler/isolator for the drive in the 5.25" bay? Like this?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835199002

or this?
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=872843&CatId=495

I was thinking that if I could somehow mount a ~80mm fan on the side in front of the video card so that it sucked cool outside air in and blew it in the area of the drive cage/south and north bridges that it might work well. The only mounting option I've come up with though would be to cut out the inner aluminum of the cover so that it sucked air from the gap between the plastic and the aluminum and blew it in, but that might make it really hard to get the cover on and off.......

Its still got the stock soltek CPU heat sink/fan as well as the stock IcyQ fan. It looks like a bit of porting around where the IcyQ air exits the case would improve air flow a little bit as well.


This is my first computer I've tried to mod/fiddle with, but I've lots of experence moding motorcycles of all sorts (not very similar I know.....)

Silence is sorta importaint. I'm used to a nearly-silent laptop at the moment but not super picky about the noise I think.

[Adrock]

Hi

Ive been running Solteks for over a year now, and I really like them! Ive done a lot of chopping and changing around tho, swapping the motherboards, cabling and even front panel LEDs between them. I would definately put one HDD where the existing one is, and put the second one in the lower 5.25 bay through the use of an adapter. It sounds like you got a really deal with ur Soltek, the mother board is one of the best Soltek did before going out of business and of course being socket 939 you can easily drop in a dual core in if you want to go down that route. Cooling is important however..Ive found a good tip to enable increased airflow is to remove the PCI slot blanking plate if you have nothing plugged into it. To try and keep the fan noise down, make sure you enable Cool and Quiet on the CPU (this really does work), and up the throttle level for the case fan in the BIOS to the next step. I did both of these and the fans rarely get past their first level even running an X2 4600 overclocked to 2.6ghz (i.e. almost an FX60).

Hope you enjoy the Soltek as much as I do!

[BikePilot]

Sweet. I will do all those things. I may need help when the time comes (no keyboard or mouse at the moment...) with the BIOS stuff as I have never messed with the bios of anything before. I don't have anything in the second (inboard) PCI slot so running that open would work just fine.

Any tips on how to monitor temps? If I understand correctly the soltek software will let me see CPU and "system" temp, but is there any way I can keep an eye on hard drive temps and such?

[BikePilot]

Do you think I could use something like this (zalman HDD cooler) to mount my hard drive in the 5.25" bay and cool it a bit at the same time?
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1588

[MrbLOB9000]

if you don't game, you have no reason to upgrade the video card unless you're going to vista and want a DirectX 9 card to have Aero Glass support.

http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/ seems like a pretty cool app for HD temp monitoring.

[BikePilot]

I don't game at all. Only reason I was going to upgrade it is because I have the 256mb card sitting on my desk......

I'll try that app out as soon as I have the system up and running, thanks!

Oh, and I just snagged a zalman HD cooler/5.25" mount/isolator on ebay, will find out if it will fit in the Qbic shortly:)

[DennisOlof]

It is better to leave it as it is. Instead why one use external harddrive cases ? It won't give you the "speed" you want but it you don't need it. Why not. If you are using them as storage for data etc, USB2 is fast enough, not for copying lots of data but I take it you are not going to do that.

Besides you can swop out the harddrive in the Qbic for a 300-500Gb drive. Using raid is not worth it. And with two external USB harddrive of 500Gb you will have plenty of space. Or if you have one. I tried using two harddrive in my qbic, no good thing there. Vibration problem even with harddrive suspended with straps.

You could probably do with one interlan 500Gb and one external USB2 500Gb. That should be enough. Do get a better graphics, say, passive cooled Geforce 6500.

Anyway do what you like.

[BikePilot]

I had been using external drives for backup of my laptop and was just frustrated with how slow they were which is why I wanted to go with an internal setup....I already have 2 400gb 3.5" drives so either one of them will go in the Qbic and another in an external enclosure or both will go in the Qbic (and in both cases the 160gb will be removed from the Qbic and probably stuck in an external enclosure for laptop backup duties)....

[CrystalCowboy]

I have some QBic EQ3704s. I was somewhat concerned that the blower was not getting the job done, and thought about adding a fan for extra ventilation. I never got around to it, and they seem to be holding up OK. I thought a 60mm fan would fit on the back panel, the center spot for extra D-sub conenctors that never get installed anyway.

[BikePilot]

http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/ seems like a pretty cool app for HD temp monitoring.

That is a cool app, just installed it on my work computer. Any idea how it knows the HD temp? I'm a noob at this sort of thing and didn't realize the HD even had a temp sensor built into it (or perhaps it doesn't). Anyway, curious how the app works:)

[DennisOlof]

BikePilot you can do what you like.

But I would suggest you only have ONE harddrive in the Qbic becaus of poor ventilation. Besides if you have no need for gaming, why not sell the other 400Gb drive.

And instead get a Promise SATA300 TX4302 PCI card

http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID%20HBAs&product_id=168

And then just get a external storage for one or two harddrives, that supports eSATA.

Boom, you have 1Gb external storage that is just as fast as the internal harddrive. By far the best way to add stuff to SFF systems. And they are comming down in price too.

There are external raid systems, lots of different cards too.

[BikePilot]

That is a good option. It looks like my keyboard and mouse were deliverd today so I can start playing with the computer this evening. I think I'll run it as is and see what the temps actually are. If they are scary and I can't easily get them in check I'll do just what you mention, that's by far the best external setup I've seen. But if the temps are resonable I might just get crazy and try the dual drive setup, keeping a close eye on temps of course.

BTW I only have MS paint on the office computer, but here's a rough idea of what I had in mind to keep the drives cool if I go the double hard drive route.

I plan to vent the inner aluminum case so the fan can draw in cool outside air and blow it over the HD rack and north/south bridges. (click for bigun)

[Rayzor]

I tried that once too, but I had the fan on the other side and no extra venting. Did absolutlety nothing for the HD temps. Still I left it for a while thinking it would at least benefit memory cooling. But I don't overclock so in the end I didn't think it was worth the extra noise and removed the fan.

As I said in my first post, it maybe help beter if you cut out some holes in the drive cage to let the airflow pass the entire HD. But in the end I don't think it's worth the trouble.

[BikePilot]

Yeah I think holes in the drive cage would help as would drawing in fresh, cool air rather than pushing around already hot case air.

Anyway, my keyboard and mouse were waiting for me when I got home. I fired the computer up, installed speedfan and check out the temps - HD hung around 35°C, case around 40°C and CPU from 50-60°C (CPU fan kicks on at 60, case fan at 40 IIRC). With lots of use I got the HD up to 38°C. Overal I think the temps are quite reasonable and feel like it wouldn't be totally foolish to go ahead and see what happens with the 2 400gb drives so I'll probably try installing them this weekend if my bracket/cooler is here by then...

If anyone has already figured out which sensors are which in speedfan for the Qbic please point me in the right direction:)

[BikePilot]

Here's what I get in speedfan with the computer at idle



Any guesses as which number is what?

thanks,

Josh

[wernst]

I know this thread is getting a little old, but I'll add something.

My main gaming rig is still a Soltek 3401, which uses the exact same chassis that you've got. I can suggest the following to help cool things down.

First, get a Dremmel or nibbling tool (Radio Shack has them) to remove the bottom of the lowest hard drive cage. Leave enough aluminum to allow you to mount the drive, but remove the useless bottom plate. Doing this allows for lots of cool air to enter through the bottom vents (in the "floor" of the case), then pass over the exposed hard drive, as it heads its way out of the case. This can lower HD temps 5 or 6 degrees right there.

Second, use some tape on the inside of the case to block off the vent holes on the right side wall, just "behind" the ICY-Q fan. You want air to be drawn through all the other vents of the case so it can cool other things. Otherwise, the ICY-Q just draws air from behind itself, cooling nothing.

Third, and this is my personal touch. Add an extra fan on the outside of the power supply, sucking air THROUGH the PS. The PS fan is extremely weak, and doesn't do a good job of drawing air through the Soltek, or even cooling the PS itself. Adding this fan will dramatically cool the PS and add to the ventilation of the whole system. I have a photo of the first version of this mod at: http://www.warrenernst.com/node/82

My latest version of the external fan mod uses a "wall-wart" power adapter to directly run the fan, so it even cools the computer after the power is shut down.

Since this also cools the PS, it runs more efficiently, and is better able to deliver power to hungry things like a high end video card.

If you do all these things, a Soltek can run very cool and quitely too.

Hope this helps,
Warr

[BikePilot]

Cool, thanks. I think I will add a fan on the powersupply and cut out the drive cage as you suggest. Good point about blocking the vents behind the IcyQ as well, I hadn't thought of that.

Right now I'm using the Qubic to post this, it has the two WD4000YR drives (RE2), one in the lower drive mount and one in the extra 5.25" bay with the middle 3.5" bay empty. Temps aren't bad - highest I've seen has been 41 deg C and that was with it quite warm in the house and copying a lot of data from one drive to another. Only current issue is that I've been getting file missing/corrupt erros on bootup, but oddly enough if I hit escape rather than repairing the error it boots up just fine. I formatted the boot drive and installed XP-Pro fresh and still get the same error. Perhaps its because I've got raid edition hard drives in a non-raid configuration? Whatever the case, I plan to set them up in a RAID 1 config sometime soon.  

I also swaped out the ATI card for an Nvidia card which didn't make a difference on the boot up issue, but the nvidia card is I think a bit quicker. Only downside is its got a cooling fan that is kinda annoying. Perhaps I can figure out a way to make the cooling fan spin a bit more slowly.

thanks and have fun,

Josh

[BikePilot]

Just an update. Computer has been working well. Turned out the file corruption issues were because the raid edition drives didn't like being in a non-raid configuration. I used the soltek raid controller to put them in a raid I config and no problems since. I finally swapped out the old CRT for a 216BW samsung which is a huge improvement (mostly required because I moved from a house in VA to a tiny apartment in cambridge MA for school....). I still haven't done the cooling mods yet - been really busy putting a motorcycle together, moving and now started school (law). Probably some cold dreary day this winter I'll tear into it, for my current useage the temps are staying quite reasonable so I'm in no hurry:)