I just noticed on riocar.org, yn0t (or drakino) was at Quakecon, I just got back from there last night! Was anyone else at Quakecon this year? You going next year?

I have gone for the past 3 years, and plan on going next year. I go with a mod development group called Team Reaction. We have held a seminar on mod development every year I've gone.

Wish I had known other empegers were going to be there, we could have had a mini-meet.

I was the one who went (and got way behind on the forums in the process :-)

I was pretty easy to find in the BYOC area if you knew what an empeg was, since it sat playing on top of my Shuttle SS51 the entire time. Though everyones huge towers tended to block it out a bit.

And yes, I am definitly going next year, and the empeg will be serving the same purpose.

OFF TOPIC

What DO you think of the S51? @ work I built an S50 as a test setup for future machines.. I put a 75Gxp in the machine, used the included fan and a 1.8 Ghz P4, 1 Dimm. After running for 8 hours with an ambient room temp of about 75Deg the back of the drive got unreasonablly warm (left sitting the 75GXP series barley gets above room temp). Have you done any tests on your system in this regard? Have you done any cooling mods?

General comments also appreciated.

I leave my SS51 on 24/7 with a 2.26 P4, Radeon 9700 (as of last night, was an 8500 before), Western Digital 120gb 8 meg cache drive and a Plextor CD/DVD combo unit. Most of this time, it runs Distributed.net, thus the processor is pegged at 100%. Even on warm days (85-90 ambient tempeature inside) it works fine. (IE, CPU temp right at whatever I have the Fan gaurdian set to, 64 right now, and motherboard temps at 42). This could be due to the newer cooling solution in the 51 though, where the processor has a heatsync with heatpipes, and one 80mm fan with the radiator. The fan has a BIOS setting to specify when it should spin up higher, based off the internal CPU diode.

I have heard rumors of a SS50 -> SS51 upgrade, though I don't know the details.

Also, Shuttle will be releasing an AMD based box with the same cooling setup. It seems to work great, since the CPU heat is immediatly pushed out of the case for the most part.

cool, I actually didn't bring my empeg into the byoc because I just run winamp, and didn't really trust it in there (I'm not actually at my computer much, and didn't want to have to carry it around). I did see a shuttle in the byoc, it was kind of in the middle behind the NOC. When I saw it, the owner wasn't there (so neither was an empeg). Was that yours? I sat on the side closest to the vendor/tournament area.

SS51 on 24/7 with a 2.26 P4 [...] and one 80mm fan

Out of interest, how noisy is it? We've got a couple of earlier Spacewalkers (SS40?) at Empeg, and they score 10/10 for cuteness but are no quieter than a normal PC.

Peter

No, that wasn't mine. I left my empeg on mine all the time, as I was around quite a bit. If I wasn't, one of my hotel roomates was, so I didn't worry that much.

The one in the middle behind the NOC I believe was one of the admins of Viahardware.com. I talked to him for a bit while I was there.

I was on the opposite side of the room from you, towards the back part. Remindme before next year's event, we will have to reserve a spot for empeg owners :-)

It's pretty quiet compaired to the other PC I had. It's a bit louder then the iPaq desktop, but not by much when it's spinning the fan at low speeds. You do definitly hear when it kicks up a bit though.

Some people have already started work on quieting it down as well, but nothing huge yet.