Summer Has Arrived

Hot and humid weather has at last arrived in southeast Minnesota. Hopefully it will help the late planted crops, but a lot of farmers in area valleys accepted crop insurance payouts rather than plant. At least the corn is visible and we'll see if it can get to "knee high by the 4th of July."

It's been a long week due to my health. Allergies, wet weather aggravating my back, and problems sleeping combined to keep me at low ebb. I probably had a cold or other bug on top of all that to make things annoying. Yesterday was the first day I was up to doing anything real and grocery shopping took that out of me. I swear it wasn't sticker shock -- there were actually some bargains.

Looking at the forecast made me get the old air conditioner out of the garage and installed. My father and I took the badly battered thing apart to check if it would still run after a fall onto a large rock. It did, so he cleaned it and I jerry rigged new "wings" for it from an old plastic political sign. One of these days we'll insulate the garage walls with leftovers from many a defunct campaign.

A new computer case to transplant the media center I built out of spare parts (and occasional cheap upgrade) arrived on Monday. Today I finally felt well enough to undertake the task after days of temptation to mess with the project. There's nothing quite like a beautiful piece of computer equipment standing on the dining room table calling out to be used -- the sirens of old have nothing on the Rosewill Challenger.

Elegant and refined while being affordable, this mid-tower case looked to be the perfect solution to a grinding fan on the previous case. A broken access door didn't help things with the older case that came from a throw-in Celeron based PC when buying a used monitor several years ago. Great reviews at Newegg convinced me the Challenger was a must have and I have to say it wowed me out of the box.

Meanwhile, you may be wondering what a new PC case has to do with summer arriving. I'll get to it, I promise.

Everything about the case is designed around ease of installation and movement of air. Being a late convert to mid-tower cases, I know now that bigger doesn't necessarily mean more cooling. In fact, you need excessive amounts of fans to prevent dead zones where heat builds up. Besides that, flow control is important because fans can cancel each other out if you aren't careful.

The Challenger is half ventilation holes, I swear. Looking at the front, it is micro perforated nearly from top to bottom. All the removable inserts front and back are made that way too. A large 120mm fan draws air in at the bottom front and my only knock on it is that it has blue LED's. I might replace it later, since I'd rather have a darkened room when watching movies. A non-bling 120mm fan exhausts out of the upper rear and so does a massive 140mm fan from the rear top causing a perfect diagonal flow of air across the motherboard.

The case puts the power supply at the bottom which is new for me. Having it suck in outside air instead of hot case air is a very nice change. An easy to remove and clean air filter will keep cat hair out of it, I hope. Cable management is easy with the layout and I spent more time on figuring that out than anything else. Most of that was managing the IDE cable, since the PC it cobbled together from now ancient parts.

Best thing about the whole project? I got everything together right the first try and it fired up like always. All I had to do was make sure the drives and audio worked before sealing it while still running in place. That's the smoothest build I've ever experienced.

With bigger fans came less noise, so that is a huge improvement. Did I mention you don't use screws to mount the drives? Brilliantly designed is how I describe the Challenger. If I get to build a new rig, I'll be getting another one.

So what is the summer connection? Since the living room where the media center is located in does not have air conditioning, proper cooling is a must. I'd rather not have the PC fry during hot weather. Heat is the enemy of all electronics!