First Boot
The first thing to do when you boot your newly setup VapoChill for the very first time, is check that your temperatures are OK. Your BIOS will hopefully indicate a successful negative temperature on the CPU, otherwise use of the provided external temperature probe somewhere on, or near, the CPU core will do that. On a recent system, you should be OK with a BIOS indicator of low CPU temperatures, indicating you're cooling it properly.On my first bootup, the evaporator wasn't making 100% contact with the CPU core, so CPU temperatures in the BIOS were higher than I was expecting, for the booted CPU speed. A quick check that the mounting clamps were tight fixed that (they weren't fully tight on one side).
With temperatures reading OK, both in the BIOS and on the evaporator temperature readout from the ChillControl display, you can move on to setting your ChillControl settings.
With the ChillControl hooked up to a serial port on your motherboard (make sure it's enabled, I usually turn mine off), you can boot the system with the ChillControl bootdisk and the system set to boot from your floppy drive. A couple of keypresses later and you're presented with the ChillControl software interface.
On the left hand side you have currently monitored and programmed settings, on the right you have an area where you can change any user modifiable settings. You have a fair range of control over the evaporator, the fan on the condenser, the other fan header on the ChillControl PCB and some ChillControl display settings like temperature format (C or F) and what display the ChillControl display should show when it's booted. You also have a setting to control the pin heater load, although it's advised you leave it at default (80%).
The ChillControl can display 4 different settings; evaporator temperature, external temperature, a user supplied CPU speed and the fan speed on the condenser. A fifth setting just loops through all four, with a pause in between each. The reset button on the front of the case cycles between the five modes. To use the button to actually reset the system, you hold it down for a couple of seconds.
It's simple to manipulate any of the settings from the software, but it would be infinitely more handy to be able to adjust the settings dynamically from Windows or your other OS, especially the condenser fan speed. To this end, Asetek are in the middle of developing software that can do just that. Chip-Con provide Windows based control software for Prometeia, so Asetek's move is a good one. With parts of the software supposedly to be open sourced, you can also expect to see control software for the VapoChill on other operating systems, should Asetek follow through on that.
Asetek let me know that the software will be ready very soon, and to that end, I've got a few screenshots that I'm not sure have been seen anywhere else. It works in Windows currently, and supports all SE, PE and XE models.
With your ChillControl settings entered, a simple press of F4 in the software writes them to the ChillControl memory and they are set until you manipulate them again.
That's it, your VapoChill is ready for proper use. How does it perform?
