Computer Case

After a lot of experiments with my home mini-pc and enjoying it so much, I decided to build a similar one for my office. As I had no good idea what extension card to use, I decided to go with a smaller case this time, which does not accept any extention cards at all. Needless to say that I use Suse linux in the office, as well as at home.

I chose Morex Cubid 3688 case reviewed on several sites, so I save space here. Comparing this case with the one I use for my home PC (iStarUSA S3), I have to say that the fan in the new case is smaller and noisier, so I will need to work on silencing it down. Since the new case is smaller and the computer parts are placed closer to each other, there is much less space for the natural air circulation, so the fan is really needed. The motherboard in the small case gets noticeably hotter than in the old bigger one.

I used the same slim design (laptop style) DVD drive as at home (SONY NEC Optiarc AD-5540A), as I am very happy with this model. The HDD used is Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ST9100828AS 100GB 5400 RPM, which is equipped with SATA interface. Theoretically, this makes the drive faster compared with PATA, but frankly, I have not noticed this for my applications. The new 100Gb drive has 2 platters instead of just one used in 80GB models, but the drive is also virtually silent. One can only hear it being just several inches apart from the computer. An annoying clicking sound caused by a pretty aggressive HDD power management that puts the disk heads into the parking position, can be eliminated by entering the command

hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

if you attached the drive to the first SATA channel on the motherboard. I used a standard 19" SATA cable, whereas a shorter 6" (or even a 4" one) can be used for astetic purposes.

A known issue with Suse Linux 10.2 is that it does not boot even from the installation DVD, if one uses a SATA HDD in combination with some hardware. This was my case. A solution is to provide a boot-time parameter

maxcpus=0

after which everything runs flawlessly. What is strange is that it boots from Suse 10.1 DVD without any hacks. Hopefully, this issue will be fixed in further releases of the OS. One also has to set the on-board SATA mode from its default value RAID to IDE in the BIOS.

The memory is 533Mhz DDR2-4200 from Kingston, 1GB, which costs only $52 online this days. Two out of 4 on-board USB ports are connected to the front panel connectors, and the other two are berried under the cover: there is no place for them on the case back panel.

Here is a view of a completely assembled system. The LCD monitor is DELL 2407WFPb running at 1920x1200 resolution. I use the OpenChrome video driver for Suse Linux 10.2 available here. Installation of the RPM package is just a one click event. After it is installed, check this link for configuration instructions.