Brain Transplant

The others at the Academy thought I was mad--mad!--when I said I could transplant a brain. Well, I showed them now, didn't I?! Mwahahahahuahua!!!

Keywords: media PC, CPU, hardware dorkery

My office had a spare unused machine--a Gateway P4 "desktop replacement" laptop with a broken screen. A big brick of a machine--17 inch screen; it's hard to imagine hauling it through airports. But the cracked screen is no impediment for a machine that will be used to spin iTunes and send web videos/media files to a TV screen. My office was glad to give it to me, and to have somebody get use out of it.


I first did my usual maintenance--hard drive cleanup, OS check, upgraded memory. Running it in the living room, I quickly realized how annoying the CPU fan was, cycling on and off every few minutes. A quiet machine is pretty important in this application. Now if I valued my time more, and enjoyed hacking together kluges less, I would just buy a quiet media PC off the shelf and be done with it.

But noooo... instead I decided to start tweaking the machine. Initial exploratory surgery revealed that the machine has a 3 GHz P4 processor.


Unfortunately, this step revealed to me that the bond of heat sink grease to the CPU can be stronger than the socket grip strength. Thus resulting in ripping the CPU out of its socket, and bending some pins. Oops. Some delicate maneuvering with a jeweler's screwdriver fixed it.

But this discovery got me thinking... my desktop machine is a P4 also, albeit slower (2.6 GHz, vs. 3.0). So hey--I have a laptop that I'd like to run cooler and slower. And a desktop that could use an upgraded processor. I wonder if...


One brain transplant later, I powered them up--both of them still worked! All right!

So the CPU temperatures/fan cycling at idle went from this:


To this:

Cool! Bad pun! Sorry.

(To give credit where it is due: this display is from the MobileMeter utility).

Anyway, I think I will try experiments in undervolting the processor next.

But what I really want to try is installing a heatsink large enough that it might cool passively, without running a fan. For instance, imagine one of these hanging out of the bottom of the laptop, like the supercharger out of the hood of a hot rod.


The Scythe Orochi. 10 heat pipes. 1.1 kg. Oh yeah. Check out the headers on that baby...