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..