Yes, I have seen that before. I looks quite good. But there are a few problems. Many motherboards do not have an SMBus header, and the thought of soldering directly to the southbridge pins on my MoBo kind of freaks me
. Also the MAXIM ic is so tiny, and almost impossible to solder. Can you imagine trying to solder 16 pins on something not much bigger than a match head
? Not to mention the problem of trying to source the IC.
The thing I like about the game port thingy is it's cheap, easy, no risk of damaging the MoBo, and easy to get at. And almost any electronics store will have the parts you need. Sure it's not as nice as the SMBus project, and there is a little lag in the temperature sensors (hysteresis I think is the correct term), but who needs to know the exact temp to the millisecond anyway.
I made the gameport version and use LCDInfo to display various temps. I am thinking about trying water cooling. Not so much for overclocking, but rather to reduce noise as much as possible. The gameport sensors, MBM and LCDInfo would make the ideal monitoring system for such a setup (if only the windows XP shutdown bug was resolved
).
Marty