Thx And Bye

I've looked at the A2000 card but unfortunately it's not short enough. I did have to trim some of the metal from the shroud. Otherwise the GPU would not fit into the shorter envelope of the bottom "bulge" of the PS2. Max length is around 150mm for the card. Fun Fact: The card is cooled by a A2000 fan now as I had the space left and it has better pressure:

It all started a while ago. If I remember correctly I've set out about 10 years ago to put a fully working ITX system into the shell of a original PlayStation 2. At the time this was completely out of the realm of my possibilities and thus the project got shelved quite quickly after buying a defective PS2 and gutting the shell of the original components. I've started to pick up the project about a year and a half ago and purchased the hardware destined to go into the PS2: - i5-13400F - 32GB Corsair LPX RAM - ASRock B660M-ITX/ ac - XFX RX 6400 Speedster (it was the smallest current-gen graphics card I've found at this time) - HDPLEX 300W GaN PSU - 1TB NVMe SSD First of I had to get the BIOS to a compatible version as I got a "last-gen" board for the CPU and it wasn't compatible out of the box. Mom can I have BIOS flashback? Mom: No we have BIOS flashback at home. BIOS flashback at home: Having compatible hardware now and booting the system successfully for the first time, I've immediately hit the first roadblock designing the mounting for the mainboard: The location of the original power and eject button. It was right where the mainboard was supposed to go and also exactly in the same spot as one of the mounting holes of the ITX board. The board had to be inverted to fit the PS2 (with the PEG slot at the very top of the system). As I still had a couple of mouse switches around I've opted to solve this problem by location the switch a few centimeters back and then connect it mechanically with a small brass rod. To get light to the button, I've used a optical fiber and located the LED at a different location too. This wouldn't be the last time when I'd wish I just had a single millimeter more to work with. Due to space restriction I've uploaded the video as a YT short: https://youtube.com/shorts/Ucw280vG34Y I also had quite the struggle to find a good PCIe riser, as the RX6400 is a PCIe 4.0 card but only uses a x4 link I had to find a PCIe 4.0 riser, even if I'd only use four of the lanes. I've bought two and failed to get them to work mechanically, but then I've found one from ADT-Link that fit and worked nicely. As as you can guess there wasn't much space left to spare: Also this was the first time I tried a game on my new "console"; I "only" had to tame the mess still present: First up I had to get a permanent place for the PSU and GPU to not just loosely layer them on top of each other. Apart from the mainboard tray this is the only other part I had to epoxy into the case, everything else uses the original screw holes and no additional holes that would be visible from the outside had to be cut. Taming the mess of wires from the PSU was the next task. The PS2 shell does offer the required (and only the required) 17cm for the ITX board but due to lifting the board up a few mm to fit the riser beneath there wasn't much space if the flat front area (where the original controller and memory card slots and the ODD is located on the PS2) so just plugging the 24-pin would not fit no matter what. So I had to design an adapter for the 24-pin. What I ended up with is probably the slimmest 24-pin connector currently in existence (correct me if I'm wrong though). It's a 0.8mm PCB with a 24-pin connector from one of those 90° adapters soldered into it. All the cables are also attached from the MB side to reduce the height. This barely fits and is quite difficult to plug and unplug but it works reliably when successfully inserted: At this point I had tamed the hardware into the space of the original console in a state where the system would boot up. Next up I had to sort out the cooling. In the current state It would recycle all the hot air and I also had no way to attach the bottom shell to the case. This was about 1 year after I've bought the hardware due to working only on the project when I could build up enough motivation. I've designed a midplate that would screw into the CPU cooler and separate the intake from the exhaust air. It also is the part with the four of the six mounting points for the bottom shell screws. As the passive PSU was getting quite warm when sandwiched between lots of plastic I had to cram a small fan in there somehow. I managed to fit a Noctua 40mm fan in there and redirect the airflow so it would pull some air though the PSU. I haven't noticed it reaching uncomfortable temperatures anymore since. Lastly I wanted to get the original USB ports working and had to close up the back. Sine where was basically no more space left to get the USB to the ports with any standard cables I had to design a fully custom solution for the ports consisting of a flexible PCB and a ridged PCB to mount the ports. They do work, but I still think that there is some sort of issue with the signal integrity. As I've struggled with them quite a bit already I call it good enough for now, especially since they are reliable for USB 2.0 devices. With a dolphin bar I am now able to play Wii games on my PlayStation 2. I also got a original PS2 keyboard (yes Sony actually build those for a official PS2 Linux distribution) to complete the build for now (I haven't gotten one of the PS2 mice ... yet) With this I've finally completed this system. I've left out a few details here and there but I hope you liked the build log and if you have any questions or improvements I could make to the system please leave a comment. Thank you for reading all the way to the end. Any ideas for the next project that seems impossible at first?

Might be a bit late but I wanted to add this: Really depends. Are the terminals from that channel connected in series or in paralell? Series makes no sense since then if you'd connect only one speaker, it wouldn't work so it must be in paralell. If the speaker are in parallel, the total impedance of two 6 ohm speaker will be 3 ohm. You could look up Ohm's Law but I won't bother you with it here. Thats why you need at least 8ohm speakers if you connect two of them to one channel, since in the end it will be a 4ohm load for the amp. And 4ohm is the minimum that the amp is rated for.

With my UX31E there was only a "void warranty" sticker on the screw of the hard drive. Not sure how its with your model.

Well if the manual says that you need 8-16ohm speakers if you connect 4 of them, then connecting four 6ohm speakers isn't really something that is supported.

Just put ant traps in your room.

Do you have more then one monitor connected or a TV that is currently off? If yes turn every monitor on.

Don't use adaptive mode then. Or lower it by the amout you are over your target.

On idle it should always get back to low voltage if you set a max multipier for the boost and the CPU goes back to its idle state. At least thats now it always worked for me.

You could try a complete reinstallation of Windows. Thats probably a good thing to do with new notebooks anyways. If a new Windows still has all these problems, just RMA the notebook, because then there should be something pretty wrong with it. Get GPU drivers from Nvidia and Intel respectively (you need to install both, if you have this dual GPU switching stuff) All other drives you could get from MSI or look at the manufracturer of the chip if they have a newer version. Optionally you could look for a new BIOS version. There is also a Firmware tab, never have seen it might help? All MSI downloads are right here: https://www.msi.com/Laptop/support/GE62VR-6RF-Apache-Pro.html#down-bios NVIDIA driver: http://www.nvidia.com/download/scan.aspx?lang=en-us Intel GPU driver: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/graphics-drivers.html

Well if the drives perform similar on different devices, I don't see a problem with your system. I'd say that either your one harddrive is slowly dieing or just can't keep up with the speed of your other drive. You could check the S.M.A.R.T values of your drives with CrystalDiskInfo. Also you could try to connect the slow drive via sata (take it out of the case) and see if it gets higher transfer rates. (that would make the one USB 3.0 case the culprit)

Does the affected drive hit higher transfer speeds on other computers or is this only affecting your setup?

Still, if its a low profile PCIe card, there are adapter for that:

If its a low profile PCI card, there are adapters for it: (if its full height PCI, you are out off luck)

Pull will always be the best thing for easy dust cleaning since on push the dust would collect between fan and radiator. But since there is a big air filter in the front, just mount the fans where they originally belong and mount the radiator on the other side. Thats at least how I'd do it, just try it and look what works / looks best. Shouldn't affect performace anyways. So that I can see you repied, you can either @Thx And Bye or quote me. Otherwiese I won't be notified.