Chieftec Dragon LGA1366 Build

[dmill89]

I recently got ahold of a bright green Chieftec/Chenming "Dragon" case (I've always liked these cases, especially in "oddball" colors) and decoded to throw together a period correct-ish build.





Components:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R:
CPU: Intel Xeon W3680
RAM: 24GB DDR3-1333



GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX1060 (I know a GTX1060 is a bit too new, I was going to use a GTX780, but it was too long to fit with the lower HDD cage installed, and the GTX1060 provides similar performance)


SSD/HDD: 250GB Samsung 970 Evo SATA SSD (OS Drive), 1TB Western Digital Gold 7200 RPM HDD


Optical Drives: LG GGW-H20L Blu-Ray-RW/ HDDVD-ROM combo drive, LG GH24NSC0 DVD-RW


Power Supply: Seasonic M12II Bronze 520W


CPU cooler: Zalman CNPS9900


OS: Windows 7 Pro



Completed System:

[Topcat]

Very nice! Where did you find that case in that condition!?? Very rare! Most the ones I find are completely ragged out.

[dmill89]

Very rare! Most the ones I find are completely ragged out.

Ebay, I got lucky as it had a dead (bad motherboard/PSU) system in it (P4 socket 478) and was listed as a broken desktop PC so it went fairly cheap ($50, and the parts I salvaged out of it were easily worth that, it had an AGP GeForce 6200 512mb, 2 working IDE HDDs, and a good IDE DVD-RW drive), where the cases themselves often go for a few hundred.

It was owned by a smoker though, so it took a good cleaning to get it to that state, but at least the plastics were intact, and it wasn't too banged up (just a few scratches)


Now if I can only get as lucky on a pre-Dell Alienware "predator" case, it and the Cheiftec Dragon were always two of my favorites (but not so much that I'm willing to pay the several hundred dollars they often sell for). I wish I'd bought both 10-15 years ago, back when they were plentiful as E-waste and went for next to nothing.

[Dan81]

I have a Chieftec case as well though this one uses a different faceplate. Still not sure what model it is though it uses the same sidepanel as yours. Currently empty as I don't yet have anything really worthy of it.



The black one above is the dual Pentium 3 build I've mentioned in the "best cheap/free scores" thread, and its GPS-450 PSU came from this very case (I have a spare and quite reliable Andyson-built Raidmax RX-700AC for this one. Wanted to use a 350W Chieftec but that one is as dead as a brick unfortunately )

[sam_sam_sam]

Ebay, I got lucky as it had a dead (bad motherboard/PSU) system in it (P4 socket 478) and was listed as a broken desktop PC so it went fairly cheap ($50, and the parts I salvaged out of it were easily worth that, it had an AGP GeForce 6200 512mb, 2 working IDE HDDs, and a good IDE DVD-RW drive), where the cases themselves often go for a few hundred.

It was owned by a smoker though, so it took a good cleaning to get it to that state, but at least the plastics were intact, and it wasn't too banged up (just a few scratches)


Now if I can only get as lucky on a pre-Dell Alienware "predator" case, it and the Cheiftec Dragon were always two of my favorites (but not so much that I'm willing to pay the several hundred dollars they often sell for). I wish I'd bought both 10-15 years ago, back when they were plentiful as E-waste and went for next to nothing.

Where did you find a floppy disk drive that works
Where did you find a USB front multi port like the one you have in this computer

Very nice work on restoring this computer

I have restored several HP Elite 8200 and the 8300 with the original factory restore disc to bring it back to the original factory settings when it was originally released
I have bought several on EBay for under 50.00 sometimes with CPUs and memory and sometimes with a 500 gig bite hard drive the computer cases in excellent condition most of the time I get the drive hardware still there only a couple of times did I somewhat get burned that the motherboard had issues but the motherboard are still available for a reasonable price

I can put one together for under $100.00 and have a good working computer for that price

The place that I used to work they use this brand and series computers and I saw how reliable they are and they are fairly old and now fairly inexpensive to buy bare bones version


I would like to build a computer with a motherboard that I could find the drive disk but this type of thing is in the past now you have to go on line and sometimes you do not get the right driver that is the reason I have not built any other type of computer machine if I can not find the original factory restore disk I personally do not have time to hunt down the right drivers for the chipset drivers software and everything else that is needed to make the computer stable to use

[dmill89]

Where did you find a floppy disk drive that works

I had one on hand from many years ago, I don't have a specific source for floppy drives, you can try your luck on eBay and the like though there is a good chance you'll have to open it up to clean the heads and re-lube the worm gear (most of the 3.5" drives (including this one) are ALPS branded and I've had pretty good luck with them working).

Where did you find a USB front multi port like the one you have in this computer

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GAKX34E...roduct_details
*note: these have a really annoying bright-blue power-on LED (the bottom LED, the top one is for access), I always open them up and desolder/remove that (only takes a couple minutes).

I would like to build a computer with a motherboard that I could find the drive disk but this type of thing is in the past now you have to go on line and sometimes you do not get the right driver that is the reason I have not built any other type of computer machine if I can not find the original factory restore disk I personally do not have time to hunt down the right drivers for the chipset drivers software and everything else that is needed to make the computer stable to use

for this one luckily Gigabyte still has the drivers on their website, so it wasn't an issue, the only other driver I needed was the GPU and of course Nvidia's website had that.

[sam_sam_sam]

I had one on hand from many years ago, I don't have a specific source for floppy drives, you can try your luck on eBay and the like though there is a good chance you'll have to open it up to clean the heads and re-lube the worm gear (most of the 3.5" drives (including this one) are ALPS branded and I've had pretty good luck with them working).


Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GAKX34E...roduct_details
*note: these have a really annoying bright-blue power-on LED (the bottom LED, the top one is for access), I always open them up and desolder/remove that (only takes a couple minutes).




for this one luckily Gigabyte still has the drivers on their website, so it wasn't an issue, the only other driver I needed was the GPU and of course Nvidia's website had that.

Thanks for this information

How ever I was referring to what is marked in red is your picture that you posted
Thanks for posting the link for that device

[Topcat]

My only light hint would be SLI era-specific cards, looks like the board supports it. I was never a huge fan of it, but it's become a thing of the past....and like SLI voodoo cards, in another decade or so the gear will be hard to come by and rare...right now it's plentiful & cheap. A pair of 580's would be fabulous in that!

[dmill89]

Thanks for this information

How ever I was referring to what is marked in red is your picture that you posted
Thanks for posting the link for that device

Also Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NVP3BQ5...roduct_details

It is basically just an internal USB 2.0 hub (SATA powered), I mainly got it just to fill the spot (though front USB ports do tend to come in handy, especially since the ones built into the case are recessed and many devices won't fit in them properly) since only one drive blank was a perfect match, the others were close, but a slightly different shade of green (obviously not original to this case), and I figured 3 optical drives was a bit excessive.

If you search "5.25 usb panel" there are a bunch of different variants of similar panels (including ones with USB 3.0, USB-C, etc. if you have a newer board that supports those): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=5.25+usb+...e0kBHH8cw4oYR0

[Topcat]

Also Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NVP3BQ5...roduct_details

It is basically just an internal USB 2.0 hub (SATA powered), I mainly got it just to fill the spot (though front USB ports do tend to come in handy, especially since the ones built into the case are recessed and many devices won't fit in them properly) since only one drive blank was a perfect match, the others were close, but a slightly different shade of green (obviously not original to this case), and I figured 3 optical drives was a bit excessive.

If you search "5.25 usb panel" there are a bunch of different variants of similar panels (including ones with USB 3.0, USB-C, etc. if you have a newer board that supports those): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=5.25+usb+...e0kBHH8cw4oYR0

Again, nice work! I have the black iron version of this case...one of these days I'll make something with it.

[Dan81]

Gonna yank out the case from post #4 here tomorrow and I might just go ahead and finally put the EX58-UD5 I have to some use.
Mine runs a standard i7 920 unfortunately, not a Xeon. It did perform pretty good with a XFX 7970 and around 12 GB of RAM though, and I have a spare WD Black doing nothing anyways. (WD1001FALS, Apple pull).

This way I'll likely find out what kind of Chieftec case it is... pretty sure mine isn't a Dragon but I've yet to find any search results that look like mine.

[dmill89]

This way I'll likely find out what kind of Chieftec case it is... pretty sure mine isn't a Dragon but I've yet to find any search results that look like mine.

It looks like it might be an LBX-03B-B-SL or similar: https://mobilespecs.net/cases/Chieft...B-SL_400W.html

[Topcat]

Here's a 'Systemax' branded Chieftec

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175492093873

[Dan81]

Yeah, dmill89 nailed it. It appears to be a LBX-03B-B-SL, except with clear sidepanel similar to his Dragon, and a 450W PSU (Delta GPS-450AA-101A) instead of 400W.

[Dan81]

Well, mine is now done too.



Specs:

PSU: recapped Raidmax RX-700AC, Andyson OEM
MB - Gigabyte P55A-UD3
RAM - 12GB DDR3
CPU - i7 860
GPU - XFX HD7970 2GB GDDR5 w/ VTX3D HSF
ODD - Samsung SH-216 DVDRW
HDD - Samsung HD321KJ
Misc: LSI MegaRAID SAS controller + Pixelview CX23881 TV tuner PCI
OS - Windows 10 Enterprise IoT for now, will also add RHEL once I get some SAS action going on it

[dmill89]

Well, mine is now done too.



Specs:

PSU: recapped Raidmax RX-700AC, Andyson OEM
MB - Gigabyte P55A-UD3
RAM - 12GB DDR3
CPU - i7 860
GPU - XFX HD7970 2GB GDDR5 w/ VTX3D HSF
ODD - Samsung SH-216 DVDRW
HDD - Samsung HD321KJ
Misc: LSI MegaRAID SAS controller + Pixelview CX23881 TV tuner PCI
OS - Windows 10 Enterprise IoT for now, will also add RHEL once I get some SAS action going on it

Nice, I imagine getting that GPU in there was "fun" looks like a tight squeeze.

[Dan81]

A little bit of "elbow grease" was required. There's still about a 4-5mm gap between the HDD cage and the GPU shroud.

I can only imagine what fun it'll be once I get some SAS drives and a SFF8087 to standard SAS adapter.

[Dan81]

Since I can't edit my previous post, found an 8087-to-SAS adapter over Aliexpress. Good god that's gonna be copious amounts of fun to cram in.

Still thinking on what drives to use... I'm thinking of a mix of 2x SAS HGSTs and 2x Seagate ST1000DM010- the latter were literally $21 both, they just had stiction somehow. A quick palm whack on top fixed them, and they run well ever since. Made rather recently (2020 date on both) so I'm pretty surprised as to how did they manage to get head stiction despite not being dented.