Drea – Page 5 – Tech Leopard

Project Gandor (Mac Mini)

19 Apr 201309 Feb 2013 by Drea

I’ll keep this little introduction brief for now and just give you a bit of back story about this little fella. This is Gandor, my early 2009 Mac Mini. He was bought a week after the early 2009 Mac Mini refresh from Apple directly in March 2009 and came with stock everything. On his first … Read more

Gaming PC: Antec Case Swap

19 Apr 201316 Dec 2012 by Drea

After a hectic few months, I’ve finally made the time to sit down and get post prepared. In October, after growing tired of the shear size of my gaming PC and the dangerous urge for a change, I ended up making an unexpected decision. I’ve loved my Antec 1200 case to bits, I’d still like it to go to a good home where it’ll hopefully get a proper kitting out & make someone very happy, but after having it since July 2008, I seriously felt the need for a change. Granted a huge part of this urge for change is feeling the beating call of a new-build on the horizon, but I don’t want to give in to this too soon.

My gaming PC is over 4 years old, it’d hardware’s dated and needing an upgrade, but when I do cave in and upgrade, I want to do it right and have the budget for it. A part of me is just so satisfied squishing every last bit of power out of a dated system and Starfury still meets all of my needs without struggling noticeably. After taking all of this into consideration, I decided to swap out my Antec 1200 case … for an Antec 300!

Antec 1200 PC Case — Antec 1200 just before being emptied.

RamblingEpic’s Dying Graphics Card

27 May 201327 Nov 2012 by Drea

A little while ago, I swapped out RamblingEpic’s old PC case for a Bitfenix Merc Alpha & added a new power supply when the old one split up the side (never good, right?!) and started making a God-awful vibrating noise! Since then, we’d done everything we could to source and solve the small whine from his graphics card. The culprit has eluded us to this day, but currently at best guess, it’s something on the inside of the small fan included on the cooler attached. I’ve had the heatsink off completely, the fan’s been painstakingly cleaned out several times until completely spotless and yet the noise remained. We were happy enough leaving the card in as performance wasn’t being affected and it was apparently something RamblingEpic could live with – not so sure I could’ve done the same if it had to sit right next to me!

At the end of October, completely randomly, the whine suddenly evolved into an all-out mechanical cranking noise! Fearing any sort of proper damage, we removed the graphics card altogether and finally caved in on buying a new card. Time to say a fond farewell to the Asus Nvidia ENGT 220 1GB DDR3 and welcome the next phase of RamblingEpic’s gaming!