Ipex convergence manual

I also didn't want to hit it with the heat gun for fear of melting the plastic retention clip. After a bit of gentle easing it sounded like the thermal gunk was starting to let go - unfortunately this was not the case, rather the sound was of the CPU getting ripped out of the socket!

After citing several profanities it turns out the pins on the CPU were all straight and there was no apparent damage to the socket either.

The CPU still sits in the socket fine and doesn't fall out. I cleaned up the old thermal goop with Isocol. After that I got on to replacing those dodgy caps. These guys around the CPU socket gave me heaps of trouble. It looks like they are connected to big copper planes on the back of the board, which seemed to draw a lot of the heat away.

While trying to remove the old caps a couple of their legs snapped off and were stuck in the hole. I ended up having to hit them with the heat gun and solder sucker several times, it took me quite a while. Anyway, finally got all the caps replaced, and reassembled the system. I'd also been digging through my box-o-bits and found a pair of MB CL2. This brings the total up to 1. Finally the moment of truth - hit the power button and it whirred to life!

So it looks like we're good to go with the OS install, I need to dig through my box-o-bits for a few odds and ends first.

DonutKing , Dec 17, Nice work - de-soldering those suckers that have their legs in a big chunk of material is always a pain. The system is finally coming together now. First up is a hard disk, as the original was long gone.

This board does have SATA1 ports. I have heard that early SATA can be a bit troublesome, but thought it would be worth a go. It should offer good performance given that this SSD would have been orders of magnitude faster than anything on the market back when this system was new. Less time waiting for windows to boot and games to load can only be a good thing! The lower power usage of the SSD compared to a spinning disk is a positive too, given my concerns about the W power supply.

The other issue was that the SSD is 2. The SSD is going to be the only 'period incorrect' part of the system but given the advantages I reckon I'll still sleep soundly at night. It lacks good DOS compatibility but that isn't a big worry as I've got other rigs for that purpose. IIRC I actually had one of these cards around that time as well. This will also give me hardware audio and EAX support which was pretty common for games in that time period, and is something that has gone the way of the dodo in the present time.

I'm pretty happy with this as it's more period correct and I had a similar video card myself at the time. The fan was pretty filthy so a quick brush was in order before sticking it in the PC, where it booted up first try!

We've made good progress so far so now it was time to install the OS. I would have otherwise used Windows 98SE but given that iMic recently put together a massive update compilation CD I figured why not give it a bash. So this turned out to be an exercise in frustration. First up, since its a GB disk it's too big for ME to see properly.

Then I started off installing the Intel chipset drivers, all went well; then tried installing the ATI Catalyst drivers and things went south. On every boot I got an error message that there wasn't enough memory to run the application and couldn't go any further.

I couldn't even boot into safe mode, the mouse and keyboard would stop working as soon as explorer loaded. So round 2, wiped the FAT32 partition and reinstalled. After doing that and restarting, then installing the rest of the updates, I tried the ATI catalyst drivers again and didn't have any problems this time! I then wasted a bit of time trying to install the unoffical AHCI patch. Well, I couldn't get it to work using the instructions provided.

So there was no need to install this patch after all. The Audigy 2 ZS drivers were a a massive pain in the arse. First up the driver installer wouldn't recognize the card at all. So I tried manually installing by adding hardware through the device manager and pointing to the INF files on the installer CD. I didn't have any problems immediately but I found that in DOS games I would get loud popping after every digital sound was played. This worked a treat, the only issue I had was installing the audigy DOS drivers, the installer kept telling me it needed windows 95 or I removed a suspicious looking checkOS.

With that I finally had a fully working working Windows ME install! I gave 3dMark SE a run, it went through without a hitch: During this process I was keeping my eye on the CPU temperature in the BIOS hardware monitor, it was idling in the high 40's and getting up to high 50's after heavy load. The system only has the one fan in the power supply which it relies on to draw cool air in from the other side of the case across the northbridge and CPU heatsink. I'm not normally this fortunate when I'm trying to find bits; maybe I should buy a lotto ticket The drive bracket inside the case only had a screw hole on one side.

On the other side it had a screw hole on the bottom rather than on the side. I drilled a hole on the underside to line up with the hole on the drive bracket which solved the problem: I think it looks a bit naff but it does seem to have helped lower the CPU temperature by about 5 degrees. Most of the air will be blowing on the GPU which is only a good thing, I hadn't really given the GPU a real workout yet so presumably it would get pretty toasty under full load.

I'm thinking to take the drive blanking plate down to the paint shop and get it colour matched then paint the front of the fan module; that can wait until after christmas though! And now on to windows XP. Last edited: Dec 21, DonutKing , Dec 21, BistecConBigote , adz , aleckon and 3 others like this. Well the IPEX system itself has been working beautifully I went with SP1 because that matches with the time period I was aiming for with this system.

I also don't want to be nagged by the windows security centre that was added in SP2. I didn't have any issues with drivers, and it detected Windows ME and setup a boot menu automatically.

The whole thing was pretty smooth. It's an awesome monitor! It's noticeably bigger than the 17" I was using and a lot heavier too - according to the spec sheets it weights 25kg! The 17" monitor only weighs 15kg. I ended up moving it off the top of the system because I was worried about it bowing in the top of the case, or making contact with the graphics and sound card. Once all the drivers were installed I gave it a run with 3dMark SE. Then it was time to enjoy the fruits of my labour and play some games!

I played through a couple hours of Call of Duty and was getting artifacts. Left it overnight and had another go, more artifacts and then a crash no video but sound was still playing. I also had a weird intermittent issue where the screen would wobble horizontally, and the edge of the image wasn't straight but was going wavy. Opened up the case and the Radeon was super hot. I decided to change over the thermal paste in the hopes this would fix it. Here's the card with the heatsink removed, the old thermal paste was almost like chalk: Cleaned it up with isocol, put on some new paste and refitted the heatsink.

This seemed to help a lot. The card was still getting really hot though almost too hot to touch but I wasn't getting the artifacts like I was before. The wobbly screen issue was still happening intermittently though. I'd mentioned before that I was worried about the W power supply, but I'm fairly confident that its not an issue. I haven't had any hard lockups or reboots like I would expect with a power supply issue. Voltages all seemed to be stable under load. Hopefully this will be a big improvement over the stock heatsink.

I am a bit worried about the lack of vertical clearance inside the case, I might have to bend or trim some of the fins on top of the cooler to fit inside with the lid closed. I figured the wobbly screen was related to heat but it seemed to be getting worse to the point where it wouldn't stop. I swapped over the VGA lead and this didn't help.

So it was a problem with the monitor, not the graphics card! The deployment of 5G networks, along with their connected devices, will demand more from current connector structures. This investment in connector technology, for high-volume manufacturing, will have to be balanced between performance, size, and cost to thrive in the market. Technical drawings vary in different companies.

This article will help you better understand I-PEX connector product drawings, making your design and development work, and communication with your production line more efficient. What is 5G? The standard for mobile communication systems changes about every 10 years, and the 5th generation standard is 5G 5th generation mobile communication system.

Connector Locking Features. Connectors with locking functions can strengthen the mating retention force, which helps prevent disengagement of the connection. There are various types of locking methods for connectors.