I purchased a used Dell PowerEdge 500SC server from my friend Craig Voisin.\u00a0 It came with a 1.1GHz Celeron, 1GB of RAM, and three 120GB hard-drive connected to a Dell PERC RAID board.\u00a0 As I learned when I set it up in my studio, it’s also got a great bloody loud case fan.\u00a0 Probably all that cooling helps it achieve server-class reliability.<\/p>\n
I saw an Antec<\/a> Sonata<\/a> PC case at the local Best Buy, and thought it was really cool:<\/p>\n I simply had to have it.<\/p>\n Installing the Dell motherboard in this case was not entirely a trivial operation, however.\u00a0 There were three major difficulties:<\/p>\n I read (there are many sites on the web) that Dell has done something really stupid: they make many of their “ATX” motherboards with the standard ATX power connector, but using a non-standard pinout.\u00a0 A standard ATX power supply will plug right in, but you’ll fry the motherboard, or the power-supply, or both.\u00a0 The incredible stupidity of that design decision boggles the mind.\u00a0 There should be laws.<\/p>\n You can get special adapter cables to fix this problem.<\/p>\n However, Dell has not done this stupid thing on all their computers.\u00a0 I spent a fair bit of time searching the web to find out if the PowerEdge 500SC suffered from this defect.\u00a0 Never found out that way.\u00a0 I ended up checking it myself with a voltmeter.\u00a0 The PowerEdge 500SC actually has a normal connector with the normal pinout.\u00a0 So, the Antec supply, or any proper ATX supply, will power it without trouble.<\/p>\n Dell builds the 500SC with only a single case-fan, running fairly fast, and using a duct to pull air through the CPU heatsink. The CPU has no cooling fan of its own.\u00a0 This was a problem, as the duct would not fit after I transplanted to the Sonata case.\u00a0 I had to replace the CPU heat-sink.<\/p>\n Since peace and quiet was the whole point of this exercise, I was careful about what heat-sink\/fan I used.\u00a0 I really wanted a Zalman CNPS7000A<\/a>, but it doesn’t fit on my Socket370 Celeron.\u00a0 I ended up with a Zalman CNPS6000-ALCU<\/a> “Flower” heatsink from NCIX<\/a> (a very professional operation, I recommend them.)<\/p>\n This particular heatsink\/fan is a little weird: the fan is not attached to it.\u00a0 The fan attaches via a weird metal bracket to the PCI board retaining screws.\u00a0 The fan comes with an electronic speed-control module, so you can dial it down to the lowest speed you can get away with.<\/p>\n Before I installed the heat-sink, I had a little mishap which resulted in an ugly scratch on the mating surface of the heat-sink.\u00a0 That’s a Bad Thing, the mating surface needs to be polished perfectly flat to make a good thermal connection to the CPU.\u00a0 I used very fine grit wet sandpaper to sand out the scratch, and then lapped it flat on a 4000x Japanese water stone.<\/p>\n I installed the heat-sink using Artic Silver heat-sink compound.<\/p>\n To determine the lowest safe fan speed, I used a “CPU Burn” utility, and a temperature monitor program.\u00a0 It was hard to find a temperature monitor program that would work with the 500SC motherboard.\u00a0 It seems to use a sensor chip that’s not very common.\u00a0 Motherboard Monitor<\/a> didn’t recognize it.\u00a0 But Hardware Sensors Monitor<\/a> did.\u00a0 I found the CPU temperature only barely rose while burning, even with the fan at the lowest possible speed.<\/p>\n I determined the pinout of the front-panel connector on the motherboard by reverse-engineering Dell’s front-panel PCB.\u00a0 Here it is:<\/p>\n\n
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Power-supply Compatibility<\/h4>\n
CPU Cooling<\/h4>\n
Front-Panel Connector<\/h4>\n