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.

The Race to Zero

 I had read  several reviews about the "new" HP-35s, it was introduced as a successor to the HP-33s to commemorate the 35th Anniversary of the original HP-35 from Hewlett Packard. I decided to buy one when the price was right on eBay.

I will tell you what I think of it.

I titled this blog entry because I really don't know where this planet is going with technology, it seems at every stage of progress, we go backwards. If I harken back to my family tree roots, around the turn of the 20th Century, several of my family worked at the Lancashire Watch Company in Prescot, they were involved in making timepieces of excellence, clockwork pocket watches that kept good time and some that only needed winding every eight days. Here we are a hundred and thirty years later, and people with so called "smart" watches need to recharge them every third day and if there is no power, then the watch will die.

It seems that the planet is going backwards, not forwards and the HP-35s is a good example of consumer products that on first look, appear to be robust, but in reality are not meant to last. 

This is a rant, and I am sure many find the calculator a little powerhouse, but I will be quite surprised if calculators such as this have the lifespan of the original Hewlett Packards, these new calculators are branded HP, but are basically Chinese crap.

The case is bonded leather that deteriorates as soon as you open the package, for those that do not know, bonded leather is not leather, and it does not wear well. It will protect the device, but in a matter of weeks, will look like the dog's breakfast.

The calculator itself feels nice, and a lot of the enthusiasts are all happy about it having the big "enter" key and the ability to use RPN as the input method, but that is where the similarity to the classic calculators ends, in my humble opinion, this is an absolute train wreck. I am sure many will disagree, the calculator is very powerful, it has classic looks, keys that almost feel like the original keys, but not quite, because someone in production along the way decided they could save a few cents per key, and then the next generation decided to do the same.

The race to zero.

Decades

Back in September I bought an HP-11C Owner's Handbook and Problem Solving Guide and a week or so ago the actual calculator arrived, it had slowly winged it's way through the Global Shipping Program from a seller in the USA.

In 1985 when I was working at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, California, I had "leaned into" buying one of these at the local speciality camera shop near the facility. Instead, a month or so later, back in the UK, I bought a Texas Instruments TI-66 programmable calculator. 

It is a bit of a none story really, in 1985 I didn't do something, let us not start a list of things I did not do in this life....

The TI-66 provided a lot more programming steps than the HP-11C, and also offered labels within programs. At the time of course I considered it was a better choice and was the right decision. I have recently thought about obtaining another one, so that may pop up on the blog at some point. 

This particular HP-11C is in good condition, a few signs of use but quite acceptable for the collection, I will report back about my opinions at some point.

The Throwaround HP-12C

This is the reveal of the improvements to the sad HP-12C - I am quite pleased with how it turned out, I still need a battery door, but I have used some black insulation tape for now, which is fine.

There was some sanding done on the bezel to remove the gold finish and most of the scratches, I used automotive polish on the screen (very gently as it is a liquid crystal display) and some cleaning of the case of course and a little paint touch up and cleaning on the keyboard area. It was about an hour or so work to bring a little life back into the calculator.