Future Project, further Education

There is a little pot of money that I have talked about before, it is the proceeds from selling off older technology, making profits from thrift store finds, pin money from my hobbies. The generator is one example of a purchase that could utilize "real" money, but I chose to use accumulated "free" money and oddly, buying stuff that might not be used, or for a future project, has zero guilt when procured with the free chuckles.

Yes, it is all chuckle money, but it is just a bit of fun, a game we play.

This beauty is a Dell PowerEdge T110 II 

I bought it a week before the generator, for fifty dollars of my self-imposed pocket money. I'd like to let that sink in for a moment, fifty dollars...

Ok, moment over. The specifications on the machine are Xeon E31220 V2, 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz with two Terrabyte HDDs driven by an LSI SAS2008 Raid Controller. It is licensed for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and perhaps other operating systems.

The machine is in near mint condition, even better now I have blown out the dust bunnies and given it a little polish.

It is the first server machine I have owned of this generation, and I really have no idea what I am going to do with it, I am not educated about the various nuances of RAID and twin drives or how to set up a server for that matter, at the current time in the house there appears to be no reason to have it running, but that is probably as I have no clue of the capabilities of the little box. 

It may become a Network Attached Storage, media server, or perhaps I will dabble in Red Hat Enterprise Linux if I can get my hands on a copy, but what it does present for me are opportunities in the New Year to further my computer education in different directions than I am versed in.

I will certainly keep you posted when this one sees the light of day once more.

All I want for Christmas...

As the parents are no longer around, it falls on our own shoulders to buy Christmas gifts, and as we had a power cut several weeks back, the thoughts of a Christmas generator have been in my mind. 

Last Monday was an exciting, yet slightly stressful day, such is the nature of the Facebook Marketplace, as in the past I have been "sniped" after a verbal agreement to buy, usually at the listed price, and then the seller breaking the deal because someone else came along and offered more. In this case, the seller, who was about 45 minutes away honored the deal that we agreed on the previous night. I woke during the night with that trepidation of someone stealing this away from me.

The excitement was quite disproportionate to the actual object, as I have been waiting for a month, and attempting negotiations with other sellers, too late many times as someone else has beaten me to a bargain, or faced with sellers who expected too much money for generators that are often relics from another age, unwilling to negotiate.

However, this was not the case and the seller was true to his word, and for one hundred Canadian dollars, we are now the owners of a Champion 1200 Watt Generator. It is the Christmas gift that we have all been waiting for and we have made sure that Tiny Tim will keep warm this year.

Merry Christmas everyone, here's hoping that 2022 will be a year full of hope and happiness.

The Five Hundred Buck Gaming Machine

It has been a month or more after the disappointment of the previos aborted attempt at a Ryzen build and I subsequently purchased a brand new MSI motherboard for the project, and as I had decided to build my "most modern" computer for my own daily driver, I wanted to use a larger, obsolete, used Antec case I had been saving which of course immediately goes against the most modern label.

I believe the project was completed today, I say that as I will know better when I've done some stress testing over the next week or so and monitored temperatures, memory timings, etc. I know now that at times, when a project appears to be finished, there may still be a few hurdles to vault before the end.

I'm interested in the total build cost, so without further ado, the new motherboard is an MSI Proseries, B450M at $83.99, the boot drive, a 500GB NVME M.2 Western Digital, was $53.75 and they were both from Amazon and include taxes and shipping. Interestingly, the M.2 was "open box" from Amazon Warehouse deals and arrived in perfect shape, twenty percent lower than their already low price.

The used items were the Ryzen 3 1200 and heatsink, at $70.49 and the 16GB G-Skill DDR4 at $61.96 and the Power supply, a new Corsair CX450M at 59.49 although it could be a used CX450M that I bought for just $15, however, I will record the higher price.

Additional items, the used Antec case with DVD and a Gigabyte WiFi card. I would estimate conservatively at $30 and that Asus Nvidia GTX 960 Mini 2GB graphics card was the most expensive item at $140 which I believe to be the most I have paid for a graphics card in the last year or so.

The Antec case included a couple of 120mm fans which I may add back in to this build, however, as I want a quiet computer, I will wait and see. They will not represent extra cost. It was apparent that one more system fan was rquired to keep the GPU temperature at a reasonable level.

I think that's it, so total cost for my "most modern" computer is $499.68 which I think is quite the bargain in these days of rapidly accelerating GPU prices, the GTX 960 is a native DirectX 12 card and it will easily handle the games I will be playing. In addition, the motherboard will handle several CPU upgrades over the next couple of years, when prices inevitably drop.

All prices in Canadian dollars.

Note. I added a single 120mm cooling fan to exhaust from the back of the case, it is a 4 pin PWM fan that is controlled via the motherboard, it is quiet and the overall sound level from the PC is very good.

Garage Worthy

One time consuming aspect of the last project was the running back and forwards to my laptop to look up various technical points for the build, and I considered bringing the computer out to the workshop, but I considered there was no safe place to put it. The main bench was crowded and was used for packaging stuff for eBay, so it needed to be organized better.

A small, portable solution for good internet connection, fast web browsing, was researched.

It needed to be "garage worthy" and dependable, with a good battery life and WiFi, good screen, keyboard, trackpad and a big aspect of garageworthiness was that it had to be cheap as chips :

This Acer C720 Chromebook from around 2013 has found it's way onto my bench, and it should be noted that there are millions of these things in the market at the moment, millions...

Intel CPU, Celeron 2955U, Haswell, 4GB fixed ram, 16GB SSD (upgradeable) and a reasonable screen, keyboard and trackpad. In fact this trackpad, for workshop use, is very good as all actions can be achieved with two fingers of the same hand. 

A Chromebook uses ChromeOS and the target audience for these are schools, and as these units are no longer updated by Google, they have been replaced and therefore the C720 has become very cheap. I picked this one up for C$79.50 including taxes and Fedex shipping.

In my testing, browsing the internet is very quick, WiFi is strong, Youtube plays well, streaming is good and on top of that, battery life is around six hours or so. It is a perfect addition to the workshop and I expect it will also become a laptop for our hotel stays in the future.

Build Struggles post mortem

Just a quick update on the previous post, I was correct in assuming most of the struggles were down to that ASRock B450M motherboard, although there was a bad stick, or two, of DDR4 ram. The offending articles have been suitably disposed of, deep-sixed as far away as possible from the work zone, swimming with the fishes, gone walkies to the dark place.

In writing a post mortem, I have to acknowledge what good came out of my experiences with the build, basically lessons learned, there is always something to be gained from work done. 

One thing that has been obvious is that I discovered most of the issues with the motherboard when I had mostly finished the build, and completed the wiring "beautification" and although it all looked lovely, I was not happy with the end result, compromised and waiting to annoy me again at some point in the future.

So, lesson one, test components before assembly.

The second lesson is a bit more of a challenge, I had used the ram on another project and suspected it was questionable, but then assumed it was incompatible with that motherboard. I should have marked it as potentially dodgy going into this build. This lesson is more difficult for my aging brain as there are so many pieces of electronic stuff in the workshop that I find it almost impossible to keep track, so I suppose the lesson is I should make some notes or mark items somehow.

The last comments though are a big positive for me, I took my time, I did not get frustrated and I managed to diagnose the issues, even though the project was a failure, in the words of the great Charlie Sheen, I was definitely in the zone of "winning" during the time spent on the project.

Although granted, they are many hours of my life that I will never get back.

Build Struggles

I was going to progress an AMD Ryzen 3-1200 build into the bargain case, let's just throw a photo onto the blog and discuss everything that went wrong.

Mostly used components, used 8GB DDR4, new M.2 Sata, new M.2 NVME, used Asrock B450M AM4 motherboard, used Ryzen 3-1200, new case and a GPU to be named eventually.

Usually builds go very well, like assembling something in lego, but this build has been an education in nothing working properly, I reckon most of it is because of the Asrock motherboard, but also a little bit of blame can be placed on the Corsair memory.

Long story short, SATA M.2 did not want to work, NVME M.2 did not allow the motherboard to POST, PCIE3 slot has no power, I flashed the BIOS, rolled the BIOS back, discovered the RAM was not compatible. Then when I replaced the RAM I discovered that the SATA M.2 did not allow ANY of the other SATA connectors to work, so I installed a mechanical hard drive.

Let us fast forward to what I believe are happier times :

No M.2 solid state drives installed, PCIE3 still not working, Nvidia GT 1030 installed and although case has a total of 7 fans, it is running quiet. I should take some time and cost this build out and publish that next post, for now here is a photo of the finished article :

However, issues continued with this build and I realised that because of the odd power issues with the PCIe slots. I would not be able to install an internal WiFi card. I could have installed a USB adapter I suppose, but I decided to deconstruct the project and order a new motherboard. I will document progress in a future blog. 

Mashed Potato

A post mortem of the latest build, and a modification. I took the Nvidia GTX 750 TI 2GB card out and replaced with a $20 AMD Radeon HD 5770 1GB, all in the name of investigation and science, and to bring the total cost of the "mashed" potato down to about C$100 even.

The criteria being a "quiet" machine that will run my favourite game, ESO, at an acceptable framerate, mainly as I wish to purchase a laptop soon with similar specifications, to be able to run the game remotely if I choose. I also added a 1X PCIe WiFi card adapter with a laptop card, all included in that price.

The HD 5770 is an older card, does not support DirectX 12 at all, but will support the level needed for ESO. I am testing it out right now and yes, I see a difference from my higher priced card on the "other potato" but it is acceptable for a mobile solution.

It has 800 shaders, 1GB GDDR5 and is really not too shabby for a 108 Watt card (that will run comfortably with the Earthwatts power supply) plus the $5 adapter card with a wireless N laptop card is working perfectly.

Ok, enough talk, time to test. 

Hot Air

The build continued today, I installed a 120mm rear fan and an 80mm front fan. The fan at the front pulls air into the case and the rear moves it out. The Antec case has a side panel attachment that matches the CPU fan position and provides an external vent, I've not checked yet, but I'm assuming it will correspond to the position and height of the updated processor cooler.

The GPU that you see is for test purposes, I intend to install the GTX 750 TI from the $85 purchase which will enable this to be quite a capable potato. I quoted the case and power supply, dvd and hard drive at a conservative $25 in the previous calculation, so being conservative again, the GPU at $60 is used. If I sell the motherboard, ram and cpu from the purchase, I can offset the price, but it looks like the final build cost after I install the GPU will be around $160

The Antec case is very well made, but an older design, so cable management is not really high on the priorities, however, I have made the front panel attachments as tidy as I can, it matters not as once the side panels are installed, it is all secreted away. The front fan clipped nicely into that plastic shroud at the bottom right of the photo and the fan made use of the second 3 pin system fan header on the motherboard.

I can control the fan speeds, and the noise somewhat, from the BIOS settings.

The next step is the GPU installation and then I will install an operating system and a game or two and see how it performs, both from a game focus and a temperature management point of view. It is almost at that end point, a sort of time of sadness regarding the build, but I am learning to take my time, understand what I'm doing and not just throw these things together and move on.

It will be nice if I have a WiFi card somewhere to install in that PCI slot.

Happy Times.

The month of June ended with a treasure trove of computer parts from a chap called Joseph, who advertised on the local marketplace, buy and sell, he was moving to Ottawa and I bought a large amount of stuff from him. In addition, I bought a small lot of parts from a chap in Langford, part of which included a Dell Studio XPS motherboard.

The motherboard tested very dead, but the CPU, an Intel i7-860 was alive and kicking, so I transferred it and it's cooler to another motherboard, an MSI H55M-E33. This time, tracking the price of the build may be a little more difficult, but I'll give it a go.

CPU and Cooler came from a $50 lot of parts and I will very conservatively estimate them as 40% of that cost, so $20. The MSI motherboard was from an eBay seller, but it included an i3-530 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 and a cooler/fan combo. It was $60 so if I play with the numbers, subtract the CPU and cooler, and add another 4 GB of DDR3, call it $55 so I'm into the heart of this new machine for $75

On Friday we travelled to "Gordon Head" and picked up a PC, it had a GPU worth $85 and the whole deal cost, yes you guessed it, the same. It was an Antec case with an Earthwatts 380W PS, and for the sake of the project, let us call the case, PSU and SATA drives a bargain at $25. I would not be surprised if I sell the old Motherboard, Ram and CPU for $60 so the price is a bit wishy washy, but let's call it a donkey, or whatever the kids call a pony nowadays. 

Here is the exciting bit, motherboard, cpu, ram, case and power supply for a hundred bucks. All quality parts as well. The i7-860 was an impressive CPU at the time (although some do not like it) and it does not have inbuilt graphics, so we will have to add that GPU or something else. That is something for me to ponder in the next day or so, and as usual, I am taking my time, after all, I am building another potato.

They are happy times, I am spending more time on my feet, in the garage, at the bench, not sitting on my fat arse playing video games. I joked in the last blog entry that I had a lot of hard drives, and perhaps an issue, but the reality is, I feel as though I have quite a few projects to keep me busy for the rest of the year. 

Ok, next blog to be the conclusion of this build.

You know you have an issue when....

 ....you have at least this many hard drives..

Dell Alienware Nvidia GTX 660 OEM

 Another cleaning and repasting of an older, yet still very useful, graphics card.

It was a quick job, simple copper based heatsink, a bit of compressed air to blow it out. The old thermal paste was dry and flaky, so a little rubbing alcohol to remove. The only variant for this was that between the fins of the heatsink and the plastic cover there were some foam strips, so I replaced them with similar sized strips of double sided foam tape.

Interesting that 3 of the 4 screws securing the heatsink came out no bother and left the standoffs attached to the mainboard and one stayed in the aluminum block, no big deal really, but sometimes a worry that maybe a thread becomes stripped, and then attaching the heatsink back will be uneven. A none story really, little to worry about, nothing to see here, move on....

Performance was pretty good, temperature hovered around 70 degrees Centigrade under load and the fan was quiet, running at around 1500 rpm or 40%. Yes, Centigrade, if you pushed your face on the graphics card at the peak, or anything else for that matter, it would indeed leave a mark.

In a world gone mad with new components being scarce and in demand from gamers, scalpers and crypto miners, these used graphics cards, usually around C$75, are a great deal. 

Potato

The "keeping myself busy" build is almost done and connecting a couple of the ancilliary cables and a boot drive is all that really needs to be done to complete the potato.

I attempted to tidy up the front panel wiring by putting some shrink fit tubing over them, however, I am not too happy with the result, so I may try to clean that up somewhat. I've added an Nvidia Quadro 2000 graphics card which should give this computer a reasonable capability for gaming.

The term "potato" is used by gamers to describe older hardware that isn't quite up to the task of running the modern games at reasonable frames per second or resolution. The term has broadened so much that it is a general insult to tag all hardware as inferior, and I'm witnessing a trend in upgrade madness, driven by the industry no doubt to encourage all users to discard "potato" hardware in favour of the next new thing.

This potato however is extremely useful, both with the integrated GPU or the Quadro 2000 and the difference between the two can be expressed as two numbers, the AMD A8-5600K integrated Radeon 7560D graphics have an average G3D benchmark of 475 and the upgrade to the Quadro 2000 almost doubles that to 944. I would expect this PC to play games from 2014 or so very well.

As an "office box" or a PC destined to run Excel, Word, Internet and eMail, this machine would be far more that adequate with the four core A8-5600K processor and DDR3 memory and I consider it unfortunate that a lot of this level hardware is being sent for disposal or recycling on our potato mindset planet.

I encourage anyone with the old hardware to tinker with it, take it apart, put it back together again, learn to upgrade it yourself and give the old stuff a new lease of life in someone else's home. I have realised after the completion of this build that I have a better motherboard to install in this case, however, I will need a better power supply....

...and so it goes.

ASUS A55M-E Lazy build

The online game I am playing is down for maintenance, so I decided that I would not start my Ryzen project today, so took the small case off the shelf and installed an ASUS A55M-E motherboard in there. 

The motherboard has 24 pin power and 4 pin CPU power, so the power supply should be fine, the one thing it lacks is a 6 pin plug for the graphics card, so a lower wattage card will be considered, we will see.

First photos, you may recognize the Rosewill case from the T1700 project here on the blog from back in 2019. I transplanted all the innards from it into a solid Antec case that has become my primary test PC, so the little Rosewill was looking all lonely and dejected on the shelf, I felt it was time to give it a heartbeat once again. 

You may notice that one of the stand offs does not have a screw in it, top left in the above photo. This became a very annoying five minutes as one screw ended up cross threaded and it would not go in, and more annoyingly, would not come out again. Typically it was the sixth stand off, not the first, so I ended up brute force cross threading it even more and then managed to extract it. I will leave it vacant to remind me that the brass post needs throwing away.

It is an older motherboard, socket FM2 with an AMD A8-5600K processor. I will see how noisy that short little CPU fan is and see if I can add a quieter solution. I'm not quite sure what the "FAN Xpert" banner means as I could only find one 4 pin fan header on the board and that is for the CPU cooler and one 3 pin chassis fan header. That really is it for fan options and looking online it appears that the only fan that is covered by the "Xpert" feature is the 4 pin, so it is just a PWM fan ahead of it's time I suppose and the 3 pin is standard.

There are a lot of these catchy banners peppered about on the motherboard, I've often wondered why they do that, perhaps just to encourage the initial sale of the item, odd though, it's akin to them having cars with banners like "handy steering wheel"  or "floor for resting feet on" to encourage sales.

I am a little cranky today, hopefully maintenance on my silly game will be finished soon. 

Grubby Graphics

A little job to keep my hands and mind busy, it is a cleaning job on an ATI HD 5770 Radeon Graphics card that is bunged up with dust, I bought it on eBay and knew it was dirty from the single, blurred, photo that the seller had included in the listing. It was funny, in the description he had put "seller refurbished" but when it arrived it was obvious it had never been cleaned, perhaps in it's lifetime.

A graphics card processor unit (GPU) is similar in some ways to a CPU and is cooled by a heat sink and a fan, the heatsink has thermal compound applied to take up the air gaps between GPU and the heat pipes. The first order of business was to use the compressor to blow out as much dust as possible, but then it was down to disassembly, paint brush and elbow grease. 

The dry old thermal paste and enough DNA to create a new species had to be removed.

Close up of the cleaned GPU.

The cleaned copper block and heat pipes and heatsink, reattached to the plastic cowl. Then fresh thermal paste is applied to the GPU and everything is clamped back together. This is quite a fiddly job for my fat fingers, some tiny screws that can not be lost, which is why I use the bar mat on my bench.

Everything assembled and into the bench PC for testing.

A satisfying job, bringing a grubby graphics card back to almost new condition. This card will be used as a backup, a "known good" card for testing motherboards and perhaps at some point it will be let go and released back into the wilds, back to eBay with an honest seller refurbished description and some decent photos.

If you have a PC that has been running for a few years, it would be wise to unplug it, remove the side cover and use compressed air to blow out all your skin cells. The PC has an intake fan or two that will pull in quite an amazing amount of dust, and over time the cooling fins of heatsinks, and the general surface mounted electronics and power supply, will become gummed up, just like the item above. When that happens the PC will run hotter, less efficiently, and is more prone to fail, so a little bit of cleaning will lengthen the life of the PC.

Ok, what is next I ask myself, what is next... 

It's Alive!

 Well, nothing (so far) has gone terribly wrong with the new build.

I suppose I should crack on and install the SSD and the operating system, which is perhaps one of the saddest moments of building a PC, as I am already planning the next one and this will be relegated to it's home under the bench, along with the other lonely and unused computers. 

I know, it makes no sense, building stuff that will not be used, but for my brain, the joy is definitely in the journey, not the destination. I learn something new in every one of these endeavours, I find joy in the assembling of unwanted parts to be (theoretically) useful once again and it matters not that I initially have no use for the end product, however, that can change in the blink of an eye with electronics.

As a final note, I see that the BIOS version is F10c and I checked on the Gigabyte support website and that appears to be the latest, which makes me happy as it removes a task that I have never found comfortable, the dreaded BIOS flash. 

ASUS R9-370 2GB Graphics Card

The current build makes progress, and I continue to take my time and reflect on life, the universe and everything as I assemble the computer. I moved the wiring somewhat for the space where the graphics card will sit, that being PCI Express slot one, the 16x slot on the Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 motherboard.

There is only one PCIEX16 slot on the motherboard, even if the other looks the same, that one, in the lower part of the photo, is a PCIEX4 slot. The graphics card "of choice" is the ASUS R9-370 Radeon, with 2GB GDDR5 memory. I say that as the current retail environment for new and used graphics cards in general is horrific, world shortage of supply, scalpers and of course, crypto currency mining has driven up prices to ridiculous levels. I was fortunate to buy this card for about 50% of the going rate.

The card takes one six pin power plug, which augments the 75 watts of the PCI Express slot. At peak power the card can draw 150 watts and of course produce a lot of heat. I run an R9-270 on my gaming machine, which allows me to play my games at 1080P with good frame rate, and the average G3D mark is 4260 with the Curacao (Volcanic Islands) Processor, 1280 cores and 256 bit bus width. It isn't the fastest graphics card around by a large margin, but it gets the job done.

This R9-370 is surprisingly similar, but has a Trinidad (Pirate Islands) Processor, same cores, same memory, same bus width and what appears to be a slight tweak to the base clock (925 MHz versus 900 MHz) and boost clock (975 MHz versus 925 MHz) resulting in a marginal increase in performance and heat generation. It is eight year old technology that was re-released six years ago with a bigger model number, a common and sinister habit of the graphics card industry. 

The gaming community affectionately calls this type of hardware a potato.

The next step in the potato build process is to add a boot drive, which will be a solid state drive, or SSD, but before that, I should see if the machine will start up to the BIOS screen and all the fans are running, so that will be the subject of the next blog post.
                                             

Thermal Paste, filling in the gaps

Thermal paste is nothing new, and really, nothing special. It is just a bit of specialized goop that is used to fill in the tiny air gap between a processor and a heat sink so that heat is transmitted efficiently.

A typical CPU or GPU has a processor mounted on a circuit board and a "lid" of metal bonded to the circuit board in a thermally efficient way. However, if power is applied to a CPU without an additional heatsink the temperature will typically rise to boiling point in a few seconds. The processor will shut down to protect itself.

Thermal paste to the rescue!

Well, thermal paste and a honking great heatsink and usually a high powered, temperature controlled fan. The paste is applied to the processor lid, just a small pea of it, and then as the heatsink and fan assembly is clamped down, the paste spreads into a thin laminar to take up manufacturing tolerances and provide efficient heat transfer.

Unfortunately, the trend for home computers is for temperatures to continue to rise as transistors increase due to higher density, operating frequencies increase to make the machines faster and hotter. This means that solutions to cool our gaming computers are becoming more complex, more fans more noise, even water cooling is not passive, it requires air extraction. Thermal paste is part of the solution in the near term, but I hope that in the future the industry will continue down the road of power efficiency, reduce operating temperatures and the need for fan noise while we are playing our silly games.

Rosewill TYRFING Tower Case layout

The project is moving along and I'm already assembling items for the next one, well, during these pandemic times we have to do something to keep our minds, and hands, busy. 

A few more photos of the current project, the first showing the Rosewill case, which is a bit of a monster.

A good example of waiting for the right moment, I bought this on the black Friday weekend, it was half price if I recall, thirty-five bucks and it was bought "because it was so cheap" for some future project, and here, six months or so later, it is the current project.

Amazingly at the price, it came with two 120mm pre-installed fans, front and rear, although the downside to those fans is that they are three pin connectors. The three pin fans are voltage variable speed and the preferred four pin allow for greater fan speed control and can be quieter at idle, how they do that exactly is lost on me, so four legs good, three legs bad (Animal Farm reference there).

The case is big enough for the Gigabyte ATX (30.5cm x 19.0cm) motherboard and has probably too many expansion options. As with most modern cases nowadays, it has power supply mounting at the bottom and both side panels are removable for access and cable management. I've already noticed a flaw in my cable management from the above photo as I have tied the front USB 3.0 cable to the front panel cables right where the graphics card will be, ah well, an easy fix and another cable tie bites the dust.

I suspect the large case format is going the way of the dodo, hence the low price, as more and more computers are being built with mini-ATX and micro-ATX motherboards, M.2 SATA and NVME drives and in reality, the only thing keeping computers physically large are the monstrous graphics cards.

The need for those six hard drive and DVD bays at the front is going away, but as can be seen from the above photo, the gap in the middle is required for the long graphics cards, and apparently, this case can handle a 400mm long card.

You will notice that the side panel has a window into the workings of the PC, and this is for the ridiculous trend of turning computers into little disco boxes via RGB lighting. That's my old man's opinion though, being an old tech geezer I can be grumpy about sparkling things that the young ones love. 

The next blog entry will see the graphics card and SSD installation, and that, as they say, will be that.

  

Another Build project : LGA 1150 Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3

Sometime during the odd year that was 2020 I purchased a modern, new Rosewill "TYRFING" tower case ($35) and it has been under the stairs for some time, nice case, great price, two fans. No purpose.

So, several of the eBay acquisitions needed a home : a Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 motherboard ($80) that I populated with an Intel LGA-1150 i5-4570 ($60) and a cooler ($10) dropped in a new Corsair CX450M power supply ($60) 8GB of DDR3 12800U ram ($30) and I will be installing an ASUS Radeon R9-370 Graphics card ($85)

That is $360 so far, and a Samsung EVO 850 250 GB SSD ($35) is on the way from Ontario for a grand total of $395 - all of which is recycled eBay money from this ongoing hobby. 

This is the first photo, just to show some of the wiring routing, I will take some more project photos when the SSD arrives. 

I may have mentioned it before, but these computer builds are a form of therapy, almost a meditation for me during these odd COVID times and I am pleased that I am learning not to rush things like I did when younger. This particular build has no real purpose besides the satisfaction of completing something, making things fit, almost like LEGO for geeks. It is of course "older" technology but still very much capable for gaming and general computing and will quietly sit under my bench in case it is needed, along with several other silent soldiers. 

Heart Transplant, and then back again

This is quite a funny story really, I changed the CPU in one of my Thinkstation S30 machines, and then changed it back. So I thought I'd take some pictures along the way.  The original CPU was a XEON E5-1620 and on eBay I "scored" a really good deal on a couple of E5-2640 processors. The E5-1620 being a quad core, and the E5-2640 a hexa core, or six cores. I made the assumption that the latter was faster, and swapped the CPU.

More about that after the pictures to swap it back.

A lesson learned, well, two lessons learned regarding Intel processors. Six core, twelve thread processors are not necessarily faster than four core, eight thread, especially when the base clock speed is taken into account. It is also worthy of note to check the "single thread" performance of the new CPU.

The pictures show original heatsink, then removed with E5-2640 with (quite new) thermal compound on, then the two levers unlocked to release the CPU cage and the E5-1620 re-installed, with new thermal compound. The heat sink and fan re-installed and then a check with CPU-Z to see if all is well.

A quick note, changing these processors is not for the faint of heart, or those with shaking hands and bad eyesight...

If you compare the two CPU versions, the overall performance of the E5-2640 may, on first review, seem better than the E5-1620, however, on closer inspection, the latter is the better CPU.

State of the Nation

 Happy New Year!

Year two of the oddness, welcome to it all, it will be, what it will be.

The obsession with Hewlett Packard calculators has not run it's course, but I am now in a selective process of selling some of them back into the eBay multiverse.

I was thinking today, which I still do, and I expect that a lot of the recently purchased older calculators will be be "set free" and have their dollar goodness released back into my paypal coffers to recycle and purchase new things, new things to keep me happy and engaged. Yet, I will be keeping some of the amazing vintage machines I have bought, for nostalgia, and education purposes. 

I think the ongoing education, or refreshing of old knowledge, is essential for my brain going forward, in some ways, programming calculators for me is a bit like riding a bike, so there is nothing wrong in getting back in the saddle every now and again.

It's a new year, it's a new adventure for the old tech geezer.