System All Green

I have fixed up the hardware (less harddisk), seems to be working fine. This is the screenshot of my system.

Click to enlarge

Here is the hardware:

Click to enlarge

I am really happy with the casing, it is really spacious inside, there are plenty of space below the HDD rack (>1 inch), between the PSU and the CPU fan (~2 inch). I am sure that there will be no problem putting another 3.5" HDD under the rack if I want to, and making it into a 7-bay NAS, after all the MB and PSU is capable of handling 7 HDD.

There is a little problem that I noticed immediately, the CPU fan seems to be running at full speed for the whole time. I touched the heat sink after I power down the system, it is cool cold. Probably because I connect the CPU fan power to the wrong port, will look into it.

For my initial test, I attached an old 160GB HDD, everything seems to be fine. Next step, purchase a 3TB HDD for testing.

BTW, I would like to talk a little about the underclocking/undervolting before ending this post. Basically underclocking and undervolting is similar to overclocking, except we are doing it in the "opposite direction". It is a well-known fact that there is a positive correlation between voltage, clock speed and power consumption. The processor is running at 3.6 GHz so there is plenty of room for underclocking and undervolting to reduce power consumption. Because this is an unlocked processor, we can adjust the processor clock without changing the clock speed of other component.

To do:

1. Investigate the problem with the CPU fan
2. Test a 3TB HDD
3. Underclocking/Undervolting (have to install an OS for this)
4. Measure the system's power consumption (before and after underclocking/undervolting)