PCI-E question

[Wallaby Dan]

My last platter died in 93. I gave the records up somewhere between Maine and Arizona.

 

[ikonix360]

I have no cassettes, but have 45's 33's 78's 8 tracks and reel to reels.

Used to play my 78's until I forgot some were sitting on top of a console radio one day and went to tip it forward and heard them hit the floor and break.

 

[Wallaby Dan]

yep, it happens, shame. Not sure but i think i gave them to my uncle. A lot of those were from Korea era. Think i had a round 15 78's. I had 45's from my era, late 60's. * tracks from the early 70's and cassettes till about early 90's then the move to cd's. Now. I use usb's. I have a bunch on usb sticks. Only way to hear my old stuff. No cd players anymore. they have am/fm usb, bluetooth and Xm. Nothing ever stays the same.

 

[ikonix360]

I have several of the one sided 12" 78's

 

[Wallaby Dan]

Suprised they still play! Cannot remember what 30's or 40's when they came out?

 

[ikonix360]

The one sided ones were earlier I believe.

Tempted to go ahead and do the mod most of the way as I have a good antek power supply from an xp computer that I think is maybe 500 watts, but i want one with a 120mm fan though.

 

[Wallaby Dan]

Antek is a very good PSU. Not sure what watt supply that they started using 120mm fans. Mine is a 650 watt with 120mm fan.It was on sale when i bought it. May never use the full 650 watts but never know.I have this one used 24/7 and is 4 years old now. Mine is also a gold80 so pretty good

 

[ikonix360]

Here's a picture of the supply.



Here's a picture of the high speed fan I bought from Radio Shack many years ago. Makes a heck of a racket on 12 volts, but runs much quieter on +5Vdc while still moving enough air.



Now I did power up the supply and verified the voltages were the same as what the PC needs. So I will remove the large 20 pin connector and splice in the 10 pin connector. The supply has a four pin that is long enough and the same pinout so I won't need to splice in the original four pin. It does follow the standard power supply wire color scheme so it's as simple as connecting the same colored wires to each other.

Also the supply has some SATA power plugs so I won't need the molex to SATA adapters the original supply used and it has two 6 pin PCI-E connectors and one 8 pin connector.

I do think I'll do this at work tomorrow where I have access to better soldering tools and the proper heat shrink.

Now normally I would go inside a power supply and remove all unused wiring, but I don't want to do that with this supply.

I also have a +5 volt powered USB hub. I'm thinking of either using a male molex connector from a Y splitter and connecting the hub to that or just directly wiring it into a +5 volt wire. That way I don't need the small power brick it came with.

This is just a start. Once I get the money for a suitable video card I will finish it up.

The supply itself ran for the most part 24/7 for maybe 9 years with no problems whatsoever. The main reason for the high speed fan was to keep the supply as cool as possible. The reason I like Antec is because of how reliable that power supply has been. In fact if the replacement hard drive had not given me a problem in 2017 that I so far haven't been able to fix, the XP pc would still be running right now. At the time when I got a better laptop I had pretty much relegated the XP PC to more of a server role as I had important folders shared to the network and it worked fine for that.

EDIT:

It's a good thing I opened the power supply to make sure all the dust is cleaned out of it as I noticed two bulging caps.

Will have to get their values and voltage and order them.

The supply itself has a whole board dedicated to filtering the incoming AC supply.

For the fan I connected it temporarily to the built in thermal fan controller of the supply just to see how fast the fan would run. It is at 3.9Vdc and has a pot to I guess control the sensitivity of the thermal sensor. I set it to where the max voltage would be output which was about 3.96Vdc. Seemed to move a decent amount of air.

When I get the caps replaced I'll try it as is and see how hot the supply gets. If it runs what I think is too warm I'll try running the fan on +12Vdc with a resistor to reduce the voltage to around 7Vdc if I can do so safely.

Now because I didn't want to be without this PC, I pulled the supply from the PC needing a backlight driver and cable and I cut the 10 pin connector off it. The supply in this good PC will go in that one.

All wiring for the external supply will pass through the hole where the IEC jack is now.

 

[ikonix360]

Now the power connector for the DVD drive is different so I will need that adapter, but what I will do is splice that cable into the SATA power cable the external power supply has so that I'm only needing to run three cables inside the computer.

Concerning the cables I'm going to splice, I may put heatshrink on the whole length of the cable to make it look better, although that would make the cables rigid which I don't really want so I may just use some lacing cord to secure the cables.

The unused cables I'll figure a way to secure them out of the way. I'd like to completely remove them, but having them there is nice for if I ever do need the cables for something later on.

Eventually when I get the case finished the cables will exit out the rear of the case instead of the side.

Too bad about the capacitors as I want to use the supply tomorrow afternoon, but refuse to put it back into service as if one of the two caps completely fails it can cause the power supply to shut down completely or cause other damage and I don't need that.

 

[Wallaby Dan]

It was kinda old so caps going out is the way psu's die. I wouldn't trust it. If you are going to goe on with this build a old half beat up psu is not the way i'd go.