BluBawx Mod by E.E.L. Ambiense

Testing the hardware

And the heatsink was then popped back on. After I got into BIOS and let it sit for a while to warm up and idle. The BIOS was reporting that the northbridge was running around 52ºC with a fan gently blowing over it.

That seems consistent with others who have this board, but at this point I hadn't been able to flex the system's muscles just yet, so I had really have no idea how it would perform - let alone inside an acrylic box!

I really hoped the PSU I'm thinking of going with could handle this system, but I didn't get to that until later.

Installing the G.Skill DDR2 SO-DIMM memory: angle insert, then... click! Let's install the AMD Athlon 5050e 45W CPU too:


And some TIM of choice, although Arctic Cooling, not Arctic Silver. Here's the CPU cooler I've tentatively chosen too: the Silverstone SST-NT07-AM2 1U cooler for up to 65w CPUs. It seemed to fit the bill for what I needed just fine.


I needed to fit it on the CPU to see if I had any clearance issues around other motherboard components. Everything looked fine - there was no need to worry here, thankfully. It's certainly snug: looks like it'll fit like a glove in there. At this point I wasn't overjoyed with the stock fan though, and was already considering replacing it for a thicker 25mm, 80x80mm fan like...

Fan Dressing

Some of these! I finally got a hold of the fans I searched around and ordered: Noiseblocker Black SilentFans. They fit the build theme perfectly, as you can see, but the bonus is that they are really quiet while moving enough air to keep things cool.

Let's sleeve these. I figured blue sleeving with black shrink to keep things even more in theme. Not that it really matters though; you won't see it much.