Specs/Stats:

Custom built laminated pine wood case
Antec 300w PSU
ASUS A7v266 Motherboard

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor
Zalman CNPS6000-Cu Heatsink (with 92mm fan)
256MB Generic PC2100 DDR RAM
Creative SoundBlaster PCI 16 sound card
Adaptec AHA2940U2 SCSI Controller
Intel PRO/100B NIC
56x Artec CD-ROM
ASUS 64mb v8200 GeForce3
IBM DDRS-39130D SCSI Drive 9GB 7200rpm ULTRA2-LVD
Seagate ST34502LW SCSI Drive 4.5gb 10k RPM
Western Digital WD200 20GB EIDE Hard Drive
2x 120mm Global Win fans (87 cfm)

October 13, 2003 - Locust gets more storage space. With the release of Steam from Valve software, a 9gb drive just wasn't enough for OS files, plus a gangload of game files for Quake ][, Quake ]I[, the various Half-Lives, Unreal Tournament 2003, Medal of Honor - Allied Assault and Army Ops. So I plopped in a 20GB IDE drive I had around, using the same technique I used for adding another drive to Earthquake.

The guts of Locust now look like this:

June 17, 2003 - Locust back up. I just finished editing the pics of Locust's hardware upgrades and second round of mods to its case. I'll be running some cooling tests on it to see how a Zalman cooler performs as compared to watercooling, which I'll make sure to post here.

For now, check out some pictures from the project here.

June 1, 2003 - Locust reborn. In making an entry to the Locust pages, I just noticed that It's been about a year since I've done any mods or anything to it. Wow.

Anyway, I got to feeling antsy about my hardware so I bought a new mobo/processor combo off of ebay for dirt cheap and dropped it into Earthquake. EQ's mobo and processor are now headed for Locust, along with a new look to its woody, giving it a cherry stain so it will match EQ's case.

The plan here is to turn Locust into my secondary gaming box and turn Plague into a dedicated server that will live in a colo facility somewhere, serving up Quake 2 Devastation goodness and these web pages. In that vein, I'm also taking the Asus V8200 graphics card from Plague to run here.

I'm also rekindling my original watercooling setup for Earthquake, so I may be watercooling Locust or I might save the parts for my new Canterwood-based computer that I'm spec-ing out.

June 11, 2002 - Locust gets a woody.

I finally got around to tossing that old cheapo CompUSA case and built Locust a wood case. I used Locust as my test because I wanted to make sure that, if I screwed anything up, it would be on a computer that I don't really use for anything other than testing stuff.

The case meets my expectations in that it looks nicer than the old beige piece of crap, it runs quieter with only three fans running at 7v, and much cooler than it did.

In fact, with both 120mm 102cfm fans running at 7v the K6-2 processor with the stock heat sink posts the following results:

Check out the details here.

April 2, 2002 - Diamond Viper v330 R.I.P. I finally got around to rebuilding Locust, and in the process fried my v330 vid card (hence the crappy 2mb PCI graphics card in the specs). I was switching the blow direction of a fan while the machine was on and dropped a screw onto the v330. As I picked it up, it must have shorted out the card, because the screen suddenly blacks out and starts to flicker all weird-like.

I cycled the power, and the machine wouldn't boot. Dead vid card for sure. Bummer that.

At any rate, Locust is now a SCSI machine with a 9gb drive for system and a 2.5GB drive for swap. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this machine just yet, but it's fun to have.

Background: Locust is a collection of spare parts left over from various boxes I've built over the years. I use this box as my scratch computer, primarily using it to try out new operating systems and various tweaks. At any given time it's being rebuilt or is having a new OS installed. It's had many operating systems on it, from Corel Linux, Red Hat Linux, and TurboLinux to FreeBSD to OS/2 Warp.