Weird-looking PCs

Here are some pictures of some Olivetti machines (as I said not actually weird but really cool design I find):


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p203-1.jpg
 
Maturin said:
Here are some pictures of some Olivetti machines (as I said not actually weird but really cool design I find):


View attachment 24076View attachment 24078View attachment 24079
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The do-it-yourself computer - that one looks an awful lot like a cash register machine, complete with a receipt printer - you see those in brick-and-mortar grocery stores all the time, so I personally dunno if it qualifies as exactly 'weird'.

What one person sees as 'weird', another person can see as normal, logical, and everyday-boring. And sometimes, it helps to remember the old adage that form follows function.
 
my_cooler.jpg


My target in spring this year was to reduce noise of my workstation.
I could, maybe I should write a longer paper about noise reduction and cooling. Including to explode myths about cooling paste. But for the last one some measurement effort was needed to put it onto more scientific feet. I don't know yet, if I write something about it.

However, without going too deep into details:
The idea was:
With watercooling more fans are possible. With more fans I could reduce the rpm of each, thus reducing the noise.

What you see is a be quiet! watercooler I modified slightly: 6 140 mm fans "Silent Wings Pro" (those things are really silent) in push-pull config.
The result was actually a noise reduction, but not as much as I hoped for.
Errors I made (didn't really scientifically studied all details in the first place - the whole project was part playing, of course):
- The fans need some minimum rpm to do a steady job, and not running up and down in waves. (The graph rpm vs liters air per hour of a fan ain't linear but exponential; you need to run it at least ~50% to get any useful airflow at all.) So of course the fans don't run totally quiet at all.
- In underestimated the noise of the other devices: My Mainboard has a small fan, too. And of course the GPU.
For some of those is also watercooling available, but only for the premium products. Unless I win the lottery I will keep the church in town.:cool:

There are also a few complete passive CPU coolers available, but this ain't help with the GPU issue.
And of course there are really quiet machines with no fans at all (Beware! There are some computers advertised as 'fanless' while in fact they are not.) But those are either pretty low on computation power, you have to dipense on many things like not having more than one storage drives. Or they are very, very expensive.

So, bottom line:
With watercooling you can reduce noise a bit.
All you mostly get is a pretty cool machine.
At low loads my CPU is at 27..28°C, and when compiling larger jobs from ports for example, temp does not exceed ~55°C.
Nice.
But that was not my target. 😂
 
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Crivens said:
How long do you think the hardware will hold out at the required temperatures?
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This depends on you priorities:
If you like your chicken wings really greasy you could fry at lower temps.
If you want your chicken fried more tasty and crispy,...well, you better do a lot of crypto mining in a very short time 😂
 
Yeah. Cool! (Well, with ~85°C I don't mean the temperature; that's quite at the hardware's limit. But still.)
As I said: It's possible, but with some compromises, and at higher costs. The price for the heat sink alone is significant.
And you need to do a proper job on engineering, so calculating. With a fan you just roughly estimate and size well over, doesn't matter.
With passive cooling you want to hit the target as close as possible. Oversizing costs significantly more. And undersizing may bring your machine quickly to a kind of a KFC deep fryer.
I bet on this machine of yours you did accurate calculations with a really sharp pencil.
 
covacat said:
i actually had one of this when it wasn't totally obsolete
disk spininng up sounded like a fighter jet
the ciss driver (or one of its ancestors panic-ed) so i hacked it to boot
it had pentium pro and eisa buss
the ciss was an eisa card
it also had some token ring eisa card which i kicked out
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I haven't seen a DLT tape drive since the nineties...I just remember how expensive the drives and media were.
 
Maturin said:
Here are some pictures of some Olivetti machines (as I said not actually weird but really cool design I find):
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I remember a really strange olivetti printer I saw once, that was unlike any other printer I've ever seen. The print head was a kind of stylus or pencil that drew the characters onto the paper (almost like the oric MCP40 alps mini-plotter). But the part that did the writing was a kind of carbon stick. I remember watching it printing something out, it was fascinating to watch. I think that was around the early 90s, I saw it at a trade show. No idea what model it was, but it was very unusual.
 
blackbird9 said:
Try under-volting the fans to reduce noise.
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I am very careful about any recommendations to tinker with some one's computer electronics hardware, especially when I just picked something up on the interent which I don't have any expecience myself with.

If I would try a stunt like what this guy did, I would add a resistor into the wire, but don't just switch them. What this guy also don't respect is there are two kinds of fans: analog and PWM controlled. Especially with the latter one this will not work at all.
Better don't try that.
Better buy another fan. There are some optimized for lower noise, which work pretty well (example):
Cost you a few bucks, less work, no danger to kill your mainboard, and full cooling power still available.

My BIOS provides "Smart Fan Control." Besides automatic mode I can set 4 points rpm or % for a temperature for each fan connected to my mainboard.
Of course that was the very first thing I dealt with - a lot. You always need to reboot, go into BIOS, play with the values again, check it out again, reboot again...again and again.
A tedious job, but worth it.
Most noise reduction you gain by chosing a silent fan, and setting your fan control values in your BIOS right.

And of course each 3er group and the pump of my watercooler now are also rpm controlled by the BIOS.
The don't run all at the same constant speed all the time, but turn up in steps when CPU's temp exceeds certain limits.
Presumably I could keep my CPU to 1..2° above room temperature all the time even at full load when they all ran full power all the time. But for what?
earprot.jpg
was also a way for noise reduction, but not my target neither 😂
 
... and after all that work you suddenly have that redneck across the street finding his passion for tuning his truck...
 
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