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.