Ratdude's Main rig V2

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

Cooler issues (if there are any) aside, Here's part 3!

First, the mainboard installed w/o any cables plugged in:



Since I had all the cables out and I already swapped my IDE cable for a black ASUS cable, I figured I might was well use the super-long black floppy cable that came with it. Both cables are NOS; they were probably bundled with a mobo and they since ended up in a freebie box I was given years ago.

Besides matching my PSU cables and looking awesome, this cable was long enough to do a little cable management trick I thought of:



It makes more sense once a HDD is installed:



No more in-the-@#$%ing-way floppy cable!

All I did was route the cable under the floppy drive, in front of the HDD bays, and back under the front panel cabling.

The old cable, while the right length for a straight shot, was always getting in the way when I needed to do anything in the area and was always getting crossed up with the SATA cable to the HDD. Now it is 100% out of the way.

And FYI, the front of the HDD bays provide almost zero ventilation anyway, so the cable doesn't cause airflow issues there. The bottom vents I added are near the bottom run of the cable, but I intentionally ran it somewhat loose down there to minimize obstructions (there's plenty of vent down there, so it's not a huge deal anyway).

Since I had to pull the HDD to run the new floppy cable, I shot a pic of the label (w/specs)



I still haven't figured out what to do about the HDD situation. I'd like to get two more 320gb drives... but looking at current used drive prices, It's not in the cards to do that and also get a hdd for my other rig. My other alternative is to get a pair (or better yet, trio) of matched smaller drives and move over the 320gb to the other rig. Until then, I'm stuck with running a solo drive on a 3ware card, totally lame.


All the cables buttoned up and ready to fire:



Any comments, suggestions, or complaints?

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

The card reader came in today:



It's hard to see and shoot a picture of, but they were considerate enough to actually add a metal door to the inside of the CF slot to protect the pins. Never seen that before. I wish more devices had that feature (bent pins suck)...

The weird thing about it is that it uses external type USB jacks:



It was designed to be used as either an external or internal reader. which means it uses special USB cables:



Installed:





(5 points to whoever can find my mistake in that picture- I fixed it after I shot the pic)

It reads SDHC just fine despite it's age and lack of SDHC labeling. Here's a RW benchmark of it and a 8gb "30mb/s" San Disk card:



30mb/s my ass... Another reader gave similar readings on that card. Either there's a USB bottleneck or Sh!t D!ck is slapping numbers...


Not bad for a $5 card reader?

---

All it needs now is some HDDs... I may raid 5 a trio of 40gb drives... I currently have only 19.x gb used on my main partition (with 2.5gb in the swap and boot partitions). I know, for sata 40gb is peanuts but given current HDD prices, for a trio its the best I can afford.

[Phaihn]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

one of the screws for the motherboard was missing?

[kc8adu]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

no power to the floppy.
4 pin +12 vrm power missing

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

My only suggestion would be to move the optical drives lower and fold the ide cable so that it won't cover the board

  -
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  -
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\_/

alternatively, get a longer cable or a rounded one.

2$ but who knows how much for the shipping, it's amazon marketplace:

http://www.amazon.com/Mad-Dog-Multim...de+cable+round


as for what's wrong in the picture... what's that power cable doing going from the video card to somewhere under the cpu...

Also, do you need an additional 4pin power for the 2nd cpu or is that for additional power for agp/pci 64bit?


I'd bet more on the poor usb drivers or the crap card reader controller, the sd card is probably 30 mb/s capable. and something else that's wrong, i've wasted 1 minute of my life trying to understand what's with the fluorescent pink/mauve wires, and then i realized it's a wallpaper. ffs alt+print screen captures and dumps the active window in the clipboard.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

one of the screws for the motherboard was missing?

It uses a single screw and a bunch of metal clips to hold in the mobo. One location is indeed missing; the case didn't have a slot for a clip there. That's not it.

no power to the floppy.
4 pin +12 vrm power missing

Right on the first one. OOPS!

on the second one. This one actually uses an 8 pin 12V+ at the top of the mobo, by the 24 pin ATX connector.. That 4 pin is actually some sort of AGP pro boost connector... there was a special adpter IIRC that tuned molex into that connector to boost the AGP rails. Not needed since my card is regular agp with it's own molex connector.

My only suggestion would be to move the optical drives lower and fold the ide cable so that it won't cover the board

  -
  |
  -
  |
| |
\_/

alternatively, get a longer cable or a rounded one.

2$ but who knows how much for the shipping, it's amazon marketplace:

http://www.amazon.com/Mad-Dog-Multim...de+cable+round

Look at the front of my case... the lower slots don't have drive doors and would look UGLY if populated. It's also close quarters down there due to the RAM.

No need to re-route or Twist the IDE. The air intake is actually under the HDD bays; I added them there because that was where I had air exposure w/o it being visible. The cable also has a gradual twist in it to allow air to flow past at the lower end by the intake.

See this for my next point:



Also, the only things covered by the cable are the light/switch headers and what appears to be the southbridge chip, w/o heatsink. The only things heatsinks are the VRM silicon, northbridge, and PCI-X controller (if thats what you want to call it). All of which are not covered by anything.

as for what's wrong in the picture... what's that power cable doing going from the video card to somewhere under the cpu...

Close, but no cigar (right string of connectors). See kc8adu's post for the solution.

Also, do you need an additional 4pin power for the 2nd cpu or is that for additional power for agp/pci 64bit?

Also see above, that connector is indeed a AGP boost, but a proprietary one at that. Not needed for reasons listed above.

I'd bet more on the poor usb drivers or the crap card reader controller, the sd card is probably 30 mb/s capable. and something else that's wrong, i've wasted 1 minute of my life trying to understand what's with the fluorescent pink/mauve wires, and then i realized it's a wallpaper. ffs alt+print screen captures and dumps the active window in the clipboard.

If it is drivers, then it must be linux wide. Both tests were done under debian. One was using a cheapish SD reader stick (which died a few weeks later) under Debian x64 on My dell Latitude D630. The other was using this reader under Debian i386. It could also be that both readers just are old slow designs. That's my only 30mb/s card I have (it was on super sale and It was required for a class) so I'm not too worried.

As for the wallpaper, sorry for not trimming that off... I had a beat up macbook to fix for a family friend that came in the door when I was preparing the post.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

Look what I found:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/8GB-4x-2GB-S...item51a5e99d0c

Even the 2gb in it was starting to run short when I was being too productive... Yeah, I may have been able to get away with 4gb, but for that price, I'll max the Mofo.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

My Xeon Badges came in today:



Note that I said Badges:



If apple can put "G5" on their Powermac coolers, I can put "Xeon" on my coolers (it is a mac clone case after all).

I also added some thin strips of foil tape to seal up the gap on the top of the cooler. there also are smaller gaps on the sides but I didn't feel like pulling the coolers today (and the gaps are indeed pretty small).

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

Some more parts are coming soon:

-original I/O shield, manual, and mobo box (Topcat found it in his attic). Not a huge deal, but it's good to have.
-HDDs! I negotiated a deal for a set of 4 74gb WD Raptors. Note that the case only holds 3 drives; I'll (probably) put the 4th drive in my HP D530 or keep the drive as a spare. Since a Prominent BCN member was involved, I'm not going to talk prices.

All it needs ordered is some short SATA cables and all will be good.

Edit: for the cables, I ordered 3 of these:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

Some more parts are coming soon:

-original I/O shield, manual, and mobo box (Topcat found it in his attic). Not a huge deal, but it's good to have.
-HDDs! I negotiated a deal for a set of 4 74gb WD Raptors. Note that the case only holds 3 drives; I'll (probably) put the 4th drive in my HP D530 or keep the drive as a spare. Since a Prominent BCN member was involved, I'm not going to talk prices.

All it needs ordered is some short SATA cables and all will be good.

Edit: for the cables, I ordered 3 of these:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

You know what would have been funny? put G5 stickers on the CPU heatsinks.
We'll ship the drives and laptop ASAP, hopefully your rig will then be fully functional just the way you want it.
And I'm not sure if you've tried it but Linux Mint w/Cinnamon is very nice

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

You know what would have been funny? put G5 stickers on the CPU heatsinks.
We'll ship the drives and laptop ASAP, hopefully your rig will then be fully functional just the way you want it.
And I'm not sure if you've tried it but Linux Mint w/Cinnamon is very nice

And the seller of the drives reveals himself!

PS- I've heard of it, haven't tried it. I like gnome 3 pretty well (my main rig and D630 use it) but I may try it live just to see what the minties are up to lately.

[KeriJane]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

Advice from your local Mac Enthusiast:

Why settle for a Power Mac clone?
The real ones go for a song.

Either on eBay, Craigslist or your local pawn shop or flea market... these former workhorses of the graphics industry are sitting unused and unloved by the thousands. Ever since the Intel macs came out nobody wants the PPC macs.

See if you can't acquire one. I'll bet you can and on the cheap too!
Take it apart and look at the quality construction. All good caps and plenty of them, adequate cooling*, a solid case and buckets of Style!
And... they go "Booong!" when you turn them on! How cool is that?

You too can get to know and love OS's with names like Panther, Tiger and Leopard! Not an x86 in sight!


And if all you can find is a dead liquid-cooled PowerMac, the case can live on as a Hackintosh.






* well, OK, the liquid-cooled PMs didn't age too well, but really! who does?

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

IIRC he has a G4 already, and he can't get much use out of it because it's unsupported by most anything nowadays.

I have an iBook G4 myself and can confirm that, there's not much you can do with it. I want to set it up for DJ'ing because Traktor DJ Studio 3 runs great on it, but other than that and Warcraft III, it really isn't much use.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

IIRC he has a G4 already, and he can't get much use out of it because it's unsupported by most anything nowadays.

I have an iBook G4 myself and can confirm that, there's not much you can do with it. I want to set it up for DJ'ing because Traktor DJ Studio 3 runs great on it, but other than that and Warcraft III, it really isn't much use.

I HAD a G4 Sawtooth until I traded it for a 700MHZ eMac (which needed new drives).

I also have a Polymodded iMac G5, the 17" 1G one he gave me to beta test/keep.

PPC has little support anymore. However, i686 has tons of support, hence why I use xeons and not G5's.

[momaka]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

Ratdude: that rig of yours is legit! Looks really nice .

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

Ratdude: that rig of yours is legit! Looks really nice .

And you've seen nothing... once the final pieces come, it will be set to rock and roll.

(Although I was given a private suggestion to start building a V3 rig... )

[Pentium4]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

That is a nice rig. And I'm the same way as in I have to have the proper CPU badge on the front of the case or it drives me nuts

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

That is a nice rig. And I'm the same way as in I have to have the proper CPU badge on the front of the case or it drives me nuts

If the badge stays adhered, that is.

I learned the hard way not to try to re-position those... it's not sticking. I also, like a clumsy idiot, scratched the crap out of it trying to get it to re-stick better.

Maybe when I feel like smoking another $2.75 I'll order a fresh one.

[everell]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

I think that rig looks really great. Clean, laid out well, and no cable clutter. Really great job.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V2

I think that rig looks really great. Clean, laid out well, and no cable clutter. Really great job.

Thank you sir.

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I was hoping the RAM would come today, but no dice. Maybe tomorrow.