"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
10/07/2018 at 19:54 • Filed to: None
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"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
10/07/2018 at 19:54 • Filed to: None | 0
| 3 |
Found this old Cooler Master Sniper case on CL and bought it instead of the L ian Li I wanted . It was a bit of a drive to get it, but I’d been meaning to get up to this town for some time. Everything seems to fit, and it can slide under the desk.
Like the USB3 panel, this case has an eSATA port, so there’s one more SATA port taken up. I put in yet another expansion card to give me more SATA ports (I’m running two optical drives again, as well as at least three hard drives plus the SSDs), and it almost works; one drive isn’t being recognized for some reason. I haven’t tested the opticals, but I’ll get around to that eventually. And this card slows down the booting process but, well, whatever...
There seems to be plenty of room in here and I could have gotten fancy with cable routing, but for the most point I just don’t care about that stuff. As long as everything fits inside and doesn’t get chopped up by the fans I’m good. Thankfully I can also turn off the lighting on the fans at the touch of a button, and I’m good with that.
The ATX backplate came in the other day, so the timing of the newer case couldn’t have been better. Once I iron out these last few bugs I can sit back and just use the dumb thing instead of troubleshooting and upgrading.
The funny part was that all of this started as an attempt to build a cheap Hackintosh using and old HP workstation and now I’ve basically replaced everything and made it Windows only, and will have to rebuild the HP into a slightly lesser Hackintosh (less memory, lesser CPU, fewer drives) but it’ll be OK since I really don’t planning on using the Mac for simulation.
TheRealBicycleBuck
> Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/07/2018 at 21:30 |
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It’s been a long time since I built a system. My son has been asking for a desktop since his school-provided laptop is locked down. I’ve been thinking about having him build one. Mind posting your parts list?
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Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
> TheRealBicycleBuck
10/08/2018 at 15:49 |
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Well, I’ll give you the parts list, but the system has been assembled from various bits and pieces over the years, and from systems that had died. I really started out with an HP Elite 8300 CMT workstation since a friend of mine said this could easily be converted into a Hackintosh. For $200 I found a system that had an i7 3770, 8 GB RAM, and a 2TB hard drive. Thanks to a friend of mine I was able to add a decent Intel SSD ($40), 32GB RAM ($50) a Bluray burner and 4 TB HGST HD ($100) and a 1000W Antec modular power supply ($35 and an Acer Ferrari monitor). I also added a 2TB Seagate SSHD ($60).
The power supply needed an adapter since HP uses way too many proprietary parts; at first I was using a small secondary power supply to drive the old GTX 670 video card. The manufacturer said the adapter was wired correctly for my system, but it didn’t boot and so I did a little research. After rewiring it per some instructions found on Amazon the computer fired up just fine.
Later on I bought a returned GTX 1080 from Micro Center ($$$, even after rebate), and the system worked great and did everything I asked of it. When I came back from vacation I found that the machine would no longer boot, just giving me error messages. Thankfully I had ordered another cheap 8300, this time with an i5 processor, so I could do some parts swapping and discovered that the motherboard had failed; the drives, RAM, CPU etc. were all OK. Tired of all of the proprietary crap in the HP I went on eBay and found a decent Gigabyte Z77-based motherboard and transferred all of the parts over into an old case, although it didn’t all fit very well.
The CPU fan was yet another proprietary HP component, so that needed to be replaced. The Cooler Master unit I bought turned out to be too tall for my case, so it prevented the side panel from closing properly. Micro Center had two units on sale, almost identical except that one had some stupid red LEDs. The price was usually the same for the two units, but with this sale the one with the LEDs was actually $3 cheaper. I bought it, saved $3, and just snipped the wires to the LEDs.
I found the case on CL and transplanted everything yesterday. It all seems to fit just fine, although I still have a little debugging to do as mentioned in my original post. There are a few nifty little parts I picked up, like a module that fits in one 5.25" bay and lets you hot swap four 2.5" drives; I keep different operating systems on different SSDs and can change over in seconds. I’ve also installed in the only PCI slot the trusty old M-Audio Audiophile 2496 professional audio card that I bought at Goodwill a decade ago for a whopping $2.
So as you can see, there really isn’t a parts list that could give you a dollar figure of what a system like this will cost. I got a lot of very good deals from CL and from friends, and you’d be hard pressed to find the pieces at the prices I paid. It’s not exactly state-of-the-art, but it is quite powerful and seems to run my various flight simulators quite well. The CPU is as good as it got for Socket 1156 (except for the slightly faster, unlocked ‘K’ version), so any future upgrades will require replacement of the CPU, motherboard and RAM. Until some screaming deal comes along on those parts I’ll continue to run what I’ve got which should still be good for many years to come.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/08/2018 at 15:55 |
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That sounds a lot like what I did with my first build, many, many years ago. A piece here, a deal there. It’s been a long time since I built one, but this may be the year for it.
Thanks for posting the parts and process!