This build is now done, unless...

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
10/14/2018 at 21:02 • Filed to: None

...I decide to swap out the 4-port SATA controller for an 8-port unit to include some of those 6 SSDs I purchased today. The finishing touch (although it needs some touch up) was the 10-disc holder in the top bay, a nice and convenient place to keep OS, license and utility discs. Also added was a 200mm fan on the side panel; I didn’t plan on adding one , but I found this Cooler Master part in a box whilst cleaning the house so I figured ‘ WTF?’

DISCUSSION (6)

Nibby > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/14/2018 at 21:15

specs? moar pics pls

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/14/2018 at 21:39

I’m in the progress of disassembly at the moment. Figured I should switch the i5-2500 and 16GB of RAM from my old desktop into my HTPC (which has an i3-2100 and 8GB), but doing so unfortunately requires removing both motherboards to get the heatsinks off . Have the desktop apart and am working on the HTPC. Not looking forward to reconnecting all these cables though...

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Nibby
10/14/2018 at 21:51

Kinja'd!!!

It’s the remnants of my old HP Elite 8300 repurposed after a motherboard failure. I t’s a relatively low-cost build using bits and pieces found on CL and eBay, things purchased from a friend that buys used computers and parts them out, things laying around the house, and one item bought new (IcyDock 4- drive dock).

It’s not state-of-the-art by any means, but it runs my simulators just fine, and if I find a good deal on a better CPU/RAM/mobo combo at some later date , most everything can be reused. Specs are as follows:

- i7 3770

- 32GB DDR3

- Gigabyte Z77 board of some flavor

- Cooler Master Sniper case

- Cooler Master 212 EVO LED CPU fan

- Gigabyte GTX 1080

- 2X 500GB SSD

- 2X 2TB SSHD

- 1X 3TB HD

- 1X 4TB HD

- Sound Blaster ZXR sound card

- M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card

- Hauppauge HVR-1800 TV/FM tuner

- 4-port SATA/eSATA card

- USB3 / SATA III combo card

The number of sound cards is excessive given the capabilities of the mobo, but tossing them in was kind of a ‘WTF - w hy not?’ kind of t hing. I probably won’t use the TV tuner either since I already have a 5-tuner setup going on an old Dell i5 system that I use as my DVR, having dropped TiVo like a bad habit after 17 years as a loyal customer.

Sometimes throwing extra parts into a system is just to see if it can be done and to see if Windoze will have a conniption. I used to do this back in the 386/ISA slot days, and even did crazy stuff similar to this on a Mac II, running six monitors back in the early ‘90s. I even did a CPU upgrade on a first-generation iMac, complete with a 3Dfx card in the mezzanine slot. And somewhere in the piles of old machines is my beloved old Power Mac G4, its 466 MHz heart replaced by dual 1.8s (the fastest available for the G4 and an ungodly expensive upgrade when new) , a bunch of SATA drives and a GeForce 4 card, things Apple would never have anticipated.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > facw
10/14/2018 at 21:53

Tell me about it. I used to enjoy cable management when I was a network engineer, but now I just want to shove everything in the box, seal it up and forget about it...

Nibby > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/14/2018 at 23:11

That’s dope! Ivy bridge machines are still quite capable and with 32GB RAM + that GPU you’re set for years. Nice dual SSD setup... dunno if you have enough drives in that thing.

Working on a couple of Lenovo ThinkStation builds right now, one’s an older Core 2 Duo E8400 and the other is a W3680 hex core Xeon.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Nibby
10/16/2018 at 20:54

Well, if I upgrade I’ll probably have to replace the RAM since it’s DDR3, and this is just one more reason to keep this system running as long as possible, maybe even trying a little overclocking (although I don’t know if I’ll need the 3770K processor to do this).

Whilst cleaning I found my previous secondary system, seemingly complete except for the side panel. It’s a Dell Inspiron 530S, nothing fancy. The first one was the SFF version that I bought stripped out at the Goodwill Outlet for $0.99/lb. I later found the desktop version and tried to grab just a few parts, but a manager caught me and said I had to buy the whole thing which is kind of surprising since they’re really not supposed to sell computers; I usually hide them in a bag so they don’t know what I’m buying - everything is sold by weighing the cart.

I know I put an E8600 in it as well as a couple of drives, probably 500GB units pulled from DirecTV DVRs . I think I also bought another E8600 for some other project before I found a cheap i5, and the interest in the other system faded. These days I tend to focus on the newer machines, the i7 and i5 based machines, letting the old stuff sit around. My Win98 gaming machine hasn’t been fired up in ages, and even my old 17" PowerBook hasn’t been taken out of the box since I moved here in 2012. I have a couple of older Dell Xeon-based servers down in the basement, disassembled, that I’m probably never going to deal with. The CPUs are in one place, the RAM somewhere else, drives in a random pile and various guts hanging out. The RAID controllers weren’t as good as I thought so there seemed to be no point in repurposing them and the power consumption is rather high, so I never bothered to put them to use.

I’m essentially out of ports on the KVMs and a lot of these older systems aren’t worth dedicating desk space and monitors to. Even the stacks of notebooks go untouched, especially since I had to give up my position in Civil Air Patrol due to my job ; I used to do 4 on 4 aerial combat competitions on old notebooks, but without that program I really don’t need all of these; my ancient MacBook Pro is generally enough for me, although I did see a nice low-cost deal on a slightly older i7-based Asus gaming laptop with a full HD screen that I might just grab ...