Review.

Aesthetics: It looks quite neat and has a pretty small footprint on my desk.

Performance: It runs TF2 at 1920x1200 at around 20-40 FPS which is fine by me. Maya loads a lot faster but Photoshop only marginally more. It seems to run fairly nippy but then a fresh Windows install always feels nimble compared to a stale one.

Noise: It's extremely quiet, but that's all pretty subjective isn't it? Well, I can only notice the noise when it's the only sound being made in the room. Low volume music drowns out the hum pretty well. My PS3 is an order-of-magnitude-and-a-half louder. Never hearing data being accessed from the hard drive is bliss! The 'crunking' sound of a HDD really ruined the tranquility of my previous PC.

I worry about being far too obsessive about noise, but something about silent stuff attracts me. I might buy some acoustic padding for the inside of the case and see if that helps at all (without affecting the thermal conductive properties of my case too much).

Heat: Most of my case is lukewarm, the only real source of heat is my graphics card. My HSF is lukewarm to the touch most of the time (I used good thermal paste and applied it as appropriately as I could). My PSU is very efficient and doesn't need to draw that much power either. SSDs emit no real heat at all. I'm no expert though, so I plan to do a stress test on it sometime and see if it all survives.

Problems: For some reason my PCI wireless network adapter isn't working anymore. I hope it isn't the PCI slot that's not working! I've ordered a new card and am using a spare USB adapter meanwhile.

Conclusion: So-so. I'm generally pleased with the results. I'm trying to convince myself that it's OK for my PC to emit a whisper of noise. I can play TF2 at 1080p adequately. If I were to build another PC I wouldn't go for mATX again, it's just too small for a real PC. I don't regret making it though, I think I've actually got what I wanted!

Construction.

My desk fell victim to my efforts and looked a good mess.








Initial fitting of mobo, CPU and HSF. However, my case uses a strange bracket holds the DVD drive and has a hole for the HSF to protrude from. The question is, is the hole big enough?






It might not be clear from the photo but the HSF is too large (by only a few mm) to fit through!







Good job I have a dremel, otherwise I'd be truly stuffed. I bought it many months to cut open a padlock and it's had many uses since!

I marked off 5mm with a pen and cut it off in the garden. It took about 10 minutes and was extremely noisy to do! Not bad for a noob. :)



The picture shows the new larger hole and the strip of removed metal standing in the middle.







This is what it looks like with everything fitted and running. I doubt I'll ever have anything to do with mATX again since it's a maintenence nightmare: Just look at how cramped it is!

Let's build a PC.

For various reasons I ended up building a PC. These were my motivations:

1. I want a faster PC. TF2 took 3 minutes to load and could only run decently at 800x600.
2. I'd never built one from scratch before so it'd be interesting to do so. I've swapped bits and pieces around before but that's about it.
3. I like quiet PCs and wondered if I were given full control over the components: How quiet could I make it?
4. I want a smaller PC that looks smart since I don't like things that take up loads of space and is also an eyesore.

Most of the time was spent deciding what components to use. This isn't too surprising since most of my motivations contradicted each other: Fast PCs are less likely to be small and quiet, and given my experience of building PCs I wondered if it I might as well not bother! As a compromise, I settled on the following:

• Case: Lian Li PC-A01 (Looks nice to me and got some good reviews)
• PSU: 625W Enermax MODU82+ (Apparently very quiet)
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (Good balance between performance and heat output)
• HSF: Zalman CNPS8000 (The only low-noise HSF I could find with even a hope of fitting inside my mATX case)
• Mobo: Asus P5E-VM (Fanless)
• RAM: 4GB Crucial Ballistix
• VGA: Geforce 9500GT (Fanless)
• HDD: OCZ 60GB SSD (No noise of course since it's a SSD)

The only sources of noise are the PSU and HSF. There's not much airflow at all, but the design of the case is such that it uses the HSF as an exhaust. The case is made of aluminum which is said to itself act as a giant heat sink.

Views

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471578142/
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/c/cpu/part-1/cpu1-1.html
http://fms.komkon.org/EMUL8/HOWTO.html
http://www.atariarchives.org/mlb/
http://e-tradition.net/bytes/6502/
http://www.6502asm.com/

After reading most of the above, I've decided to start by emulating the 6502 CPU as a standalone code module. I've no idea if this is the best way to begin but it sounds logical to me and would give me a base to work from! Additionally there are a bunch of 6502 emulators from which I could test my results from.

Bit by bit

So I decided to make a NES emulator. I've glanced at emulation a few years ago but didn't have a clue how to start. My reasons for giving this a shot are:

• Understand better how computers work.
  
• Be more familiar with assembly.
• To feel better! It's nicer when you know how things work.
  

This is definitely not an attempt to make the best NES emulator! It's more about extending my knowledge rather than anything else. It'll be dumbed down in C++ with code clarity preferred to performance. Optimisation could be done later (sounds like fun) but may be considered another project.

The goal of this project is:

• Create a NES emulator that can run at least one game working video.
  

Doesn't sound like much but it'll help keep me motivated and likely to keep going! No doubt if I complete this, I'll extend it to something else.