Builds, builds and more builds

Pulling the covers again and redoing the heat sink. It ran for a little while then shut down due to temps I think. Temps really bounce up and down. Going to use the stock cooler again but with AS5 paste.

Seeing the price tag on this Just inspired me to do a mini itx build something similar to what you did and run freenas on it.

Netgear is really high if they think people are dumb enough to pay that for essentially a mini itx build of those specs...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1495587&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

With the combo deal on what I got the motherboard and cpu is only 210 plus shipping.

On line with the little beast right now. I took it back apart and looked at the factory paste that was pre-applied to the heat sink. What a joke, it didn't even fully cover the CPU. I cleaned all of that off and put Artic Silver 5 on it. Holds around 50c right now. It does spike to 80c every now and then but that has to be a mis-read because 74c is shut down temp. I has been on for over 3 hrs straight. Going to do some light gaming tonight and start a few bench marks.

This is what the X25 is pushing, It's SATA 2 so a newer SSD later on should have a nice jump in performance.

Ill benchmark the sata 3 sandisk i just installed in the i5 tomorrow.

SanDisk Ultra Plus SDSSDHP-128G-G25 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD):


Keep in mind the bios was being a pain so I loaded factory defaults and I am pretty sure the sata reverted from AHCI which I had it set on to IDE mode so the results probably are not as good as they probably should be. By the time I realized it I wasn't going to start loading it all over again. For day to day office tasks which is what this pc is going to be used for the difference wont be that noticeable.

Overall its still not that bad.

I had to load mine twice. First time I loaded I had it under the windows 8 type bios, it's all on legacy now, lol

On double wide video cards what are the shortest ones? The little beast won't fit cards like my 250GTS but has a double wide slot? Any ideas? Worse case on this build I may have to look at a different case.

460gtx is pretty short. But then again the 550ti seems to be the same length.



Something like that would probably do well in your build.

http://valid.canardpc.com/1dxs68

Still playing with it, lol. I am still waiting on the cooler to get here so I can really push it harder.

And thus ends the i5 build, It was delivered today and the customer seems pleased.

I see the new R7 260x come in a shorter card.

http://www.hwcompare.com/15504/radeon-hd-7770-vs-radeon-r7-260x/

Its rough but its mine. (sort of like the trans am)



Did I mention i just bought a pack of metal cutting discs for the dremel? lol

The motherboard is in for the i7, so I am out looking for a case now. The other case I have is the wrong layout. Either going to get a new case, or make a really bad ass gateway 200 since I have that case hiding the the attic, lmao. "might, have to upgrade the power supply, LMAO








Also my DIYPC case seems to be also a Rosewill Legacy V3.

I use to have a few of those cases myself. The ones I had were setup for atx boards. Don't think it had a 2.0 cutout though. The port shield was integrated into the case.

One of the "new"heatsinks I ordered came in today. For low profile I got a stock AMD FX cooler. The large one that looks close to aftermarket for the 8 core processors. The temps at idle are down and speccy was showing it shoot up from there back up to the 74 to 80. 74 is suppose to be the shut down temp. I installed AMD overdrive today and it shows the same temps for the motherboard and GPU that speccy does, BUT shows the temps down to about 22 / 23 at idle then when I hear the fans surge up when I start a video they slowly go down from a higher temp and stabilize. I have heard that on the APU that many monitors don't work right but AMD one does, so it looks like I will be using it to keep tabs on my cpu temps.



This is my old cpu cooler, AMD really dropped the ball on this one. Small, and the main part doesn't even fully cover the CPU. Just have some fins on the edges.



New CPU in place. It doesn't float in the middle like the small one did, it fill up the slot and I get to keep the stock hold down.

Height is about the same, have about the distance as the stock cooler does from the fan on the power supply. The fan from the power supply blows on the motherboard, the CPU fan sucks air from there into the heatsink.

Temps still holding good. After running and doing low end tasks most of the time 31 deg low with 53 deg high with videos, and lots of programs running. Installed second hard drive. 320 gb 2.5" 7200 rpm toshiba. Good used drive I had saved up. Boots fine with it. When I first had both in there with the original setting it hug up on windows installs. After the fact adding it, it works fine. Loading up some steam games on it. First fear, fear 2, fear 3, duke nukem forever to see what she can do on the intergraded graphics with ddr 3 clocked at 1600.

Silverstone fortress ft02 with half baked matrix orbital mod. He gave me all the oem drive bay mounting hardware for both matrix orbital displays.



With some cobbing it could look something like this



These are a different model though. The bezel does not look as clean and when I tested them the backlight on them seemed to overpower the font on the display. I am sure there is an adjustment though.

Another challenge will be finding a piece of metal the right gauge and welding it in the hole he hacked out of the drive cage. I wanted a case to take the dremel to, I sure did find it.

If it comes out respectable enough I may resell it as part of a higher end workstation / server type build. Also will give me an excuse to buy a cheap welder although I suppose I could always pussy out and go the jb weld route or something similar.

They turned out to be sure eletronic screens not matrix orbital as the guy claimed.

Case is cleaning up ok with the exception of the hole hacked in the drive cage. I could probably just fab in the drive cage out of a different case. There was a lian li one floating around on ebay too.

If you have a spare alternator you can MAKE a welder. You could run it will a push mower engine for a portable rig. I think pirate 4x4 has some plans, if not should be a ton on google.

http://voices.yahoo.com/diy-homemade-lawnmower-alternator-welder-3489893.html

http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/portable-dc-arc-welder-zmaz80ndzraw.aspx#axzz2nlod3d3Y


I know I have plans saved somewhere. I plan to do this, and convert a old ac compressor for onboard air on my 4x4 later on.

Played a couple of chapters of Halo last night on the PC at high, holds well on the older game. Lower 50's on temps. After steam updates, etc I am putting bioshock infinity on it soon. That should be a real stress test for it. Also got a pack with Crysis on it, still haven't played that game yet.

I find myself working on two odd older projects tonight. Both are CF-M34 toughbooks. First one is Mk3 with 700 mhz P3 and 256 ram. I looks like you just took it out of the box. Had windows 2000 pro on it sp2. Installing sp4 and then the unofficial service pack 5 on it, browser updates, etc. The other is a Mk7 Pentium M 1.0 ghz, 1.2 GB ram, windows 7 sp1 install. Going to see what I can do with both of those, just to see what I can do, lol.

I recommended the gobook to somebody I took linux with this past semester who was looking to get a tough book. They got it right before the end of the semester and had it in class. Looked like a nice well built machine. Was a core duo with 1.5gb of ram.