Okay! I thought it may benefit myself and others to post on how I plan on upgrading my
intellistation M Pro 6225-1SU; since OEM computers are a lot more tricky and follow non-standard guidelines at times. After I sell a bunch of junk, hopefully I'll have enough money to start buying parts (and then take some pictures of the finished product). For now, this will act as a series of "to buy" guidelines.
POWER SUPPLY:
This is the power supply in question, a "
nice" delta electronics one:
So, as you can see, it needs a very long power cord to connect to the motherboard (and one fairly long one for the Nvidia quadro fx 3400 which I can hopefully replace). As well as front to back venting. The other cords don't have to be as long, in fact, modular would be nice, but since I'm old skool, I'll stick with non-modular. One issue I have are the dimensions of this thing, I'm ASSUMING it's standard.
The one I wish to replace it with is a, get ready for this,
Corsair CMPSU-450VX 450-Watt VX Series 80 Plus Certified Power Supply:
A useful thing is that it sucks air from the BOTTOM opposed from behind:
That means it'll suck air out of my SCSI drive, which, I would assume provide some cooling. But the question is, whether or not it will be compatible of course.
EDIT: comparing the photos (which is a silly idea I know), I think that power supply is too WIDE to fit.
RAM:
I already have 2 GB of PC2-3200E installed, and I will simply buy two more sticks from ebay, that's easy enough. Better hurry and buy some before the listing goes away... and that RAM is very annoyingly hard to come by.
GRAPHICS:
Zalisithix suggested a
Radeon 5570, however, the thing probably only has PCI-E 1.0, so, if it DOES work, it will be severely bottle-necked. Better than the Nvidia quadro fx 3400... it spews a lot of ambient heat into the case.
CPU COOLING:
The Prescott is cooled with one of those BXT fans (or whatever you call them):
I might buy a spare and see if I can simply mod the fan to perform better. Otherwise, I was thinking of something like a corsair A70; although I never did CPU heatsink work before, nor do I have any experience in such area.
EDIT: I took a good look at the Corsair H50 water cooling system which is compatible with LGA775. It would actually be very possible and probably give the best possible temperatures, here's a quick diagram (again not a photo of mine):
#1 is where the radiator fan could go (and the tiny circle at the bottom is the CPU fan plug).
#2 is obviously where the cooling sink would go.
I guess I could have it shoot the air OUT of the vent backwards lol. Or let it get sucked by the back fan, but I'm not sure if that would be wise. However, I'm unsure where any power plugs are on that motherboard, it's confusing and has many pins and pin covers.
Well, for a test run, I could always install the H50 on a 300PL or something...
I can't really think of anything else, I'm fine with my hard drives. There are other 6225 intellistations with a 3.6 Ghz P4, I could always scout one of those and see if I could install it if I wanted an extra 200 Mhz (whoop-de-doo).