Well after having a weeklong gap from home having to do some work related travel I was back at it with the MotoMadness build. It was so close I could taste it. I picked up some additional fans, RGB hubs, and the like to troubleshoot the back fan issue. My fear is that it was the pins on one of the USB ports on the motherboard but prayed it some something simpler.
I first swapped the RGB hub with a new one and still got the same issues. Which pointed me in two directions either the fan was bad or it was an issue with the onboard USB connector. I decided to replace the Corsair LL fan first. It was indeed spinning, and lighting up, it just would not take the color configuration – but I have had bad RGB in fans before. So I pulled out the fan, disconnected it from the new RGB hub and the fan port on the motherboard. Grabbed another Corsair fan and installed it into the case. I plugged the RGB into the hub, and just for fun plugged the fan into a different fan port.
I pressed the power button and *POOF* all fans lit up as expected including the newly installed one. I don’t know what makes the RGB components in fans to fail, but it seems to happen a non-insignificant amount of times across different vendors. I probably should have started there.
With the hardware seemingly complete I moved into the burn-in phase on the machine. This is mostly comprised of me putting the machine through its paces for 24 hours. Running programs like Cinebench, Afterburner and the like.
Up until this point the machine had had no issues, but about one minute into testing – Boom! We lost all power and the machine went dead. After a reboot, looking through the event logs, I could not really see what might have caused the issue. So I started the tests again this time watching closely. Again about two minutes in, down she went. I started to suspect that my overclocking might be at fault, but just in case I changed out the power with a different (better) quality of conditioned power and ran it again. It is summer in Florida and one cannot truly trust the power when all of the Air Conditioning kicks in. But alas, we went down again.
What followed was a fairly long period of time involving me tweaking and re-tweaking my overclock settings until finally she would work without dropping power during a run of the load testing. This can get tedious and probably not worth talking about or probably more correctly would take a lot more words to write than you are likely willing to read. After a time this was all settled – I could run the tests for a full 24 hours.
The MotoMadness Build passed with flying colors ultimately scoring better than most machines on the ranking charts in its class. This should work out perfectly for him and give him a long initial life from this build. All the remains now is the final clean-up, some final trim and port work (like putting customer USB covers on those ports), removing the smoked glass sides for re-packing (I put them on to see what it would look like), and ultimately a special delivery for the little guy. I am also trying to find some good educational games, software based board games, and the like. But that task is proving harder to do. Steam doesn’t really have a ‘kid’ section per se, and some of the games that do come up on relatively innocuous searches were enough enough to make me blush.
I did install a cute little game called Eggcelerate where you try and drive a car through a racecourse with an egg on the top of your car. I also grabbed him the Hot Wheels Unleashed game. But I am struggling to find even the most basic games (Candyland, Life, etc). I have a few weeks to figure all of that out and I am excited to get this baby delivered so he can use it.
I have gotten a bunch of direct messages on this build and promised to let folks know how it all goes down. Until then, here is a what it looks like before the final clean-up and waxing.
\Mm
