Had this idea bouncing around for a while, and now i got, well, stumbled upon the resources to make it work.
Currently, the computer i use at work is a Q6600 on a crappy intel 965 desktop board that i overclock with setfsb, 3GB of DDR2 667 RAM, couple random HDDs and a 60GB Kingston V300 SSD that recently found its place in there after our boss gave my coworker a 128GB one. I was too lazy to bother cleaning up Windows and reinstalling it on the SSD, so it currently holds just the pagefile, Mozilla and my VMs. Oh, and the display device is a ghetto modded Geforce 9400, with a laptop blower duct taped to its rear end as the old fan was busted.
The whole thing is sitting into a HP dc7600 tower case and still using the original power supply - and that was again an upgrade of the old system i first found when i got there! Cutting the old I/O shield out, which was integrated with the motherboard tray, was a royal pain btw. I kept the very nice tower style CPU cooler by AVC.
The only nice thing about it is the Dell 2007WFP monitor i found lying around the company a couple years back, with a blown power supply. It only needs one voltage of 24 volts, and that's being supplied by a damaged universal laptop adapter which doesn't want to put out anything other than 27 volts anymore. Yes, i was too lazy to order a $3 controller chip and fix its original PSU. Hey, it works. I am using this on DVI both for the quality and also for keeping the VGA port free for testing other boards.
Yesterday i stumbled upon this: http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/...D=640#overview
It had been around for a while but i never bothered with it for some reason. Anyway, the problem with this was "no video output", and that was true for onboard graphics, but i plugged a GPU in the PCI-E slot and the board came to life! Upon closer investigation the IGP is not receiving power, this seems to be some sort of communication problem as there is nothing wrong electrically and the VRM does not even try to turn on. But either way, i could care less about that, i will be using discrete graphics. So, i have a board!
I have replaced a couple lytics in critical areas with polys just for peace of mind but most of it will be staying like it is.
There is one other thing wrong with this board - it bluescreens when trying to install Win10 with UEFI, and does not post anymore if i set "Launch CSM" to "Never", requiring a clear CMOS. This may have something to do with the fact that i tested with old GPUs which do not have UEFI BIOS... Nonetheless, Windows installed fine in "legacy" mode, i ran a few stability tests and everything's good.
My boss supplied me with 8GB DDR3 1600, one Adata and one Corsair VS. These have also been in my coworker's computer, who asked for different RAM because his board would refuse to POST with both memory sticks installed every time the power went out, requiring him to pull them out, start with only one stick and then power off and put the other back in. The new memory does the same. I updated the BIOS on that board last time while he was away, but we didn't have any power cuts since to see if that did anything.
The CPU i tested this board with was a Pentium G620. Definitely not what i had in mind. I found an i7-3770 (non-K) for a bargain price on local classifieds and that's due to arrive tomorrow. A locked CPU is fine as i don't expect that little toy board to overclock anyway, and as a general idea, that i7 will set me back the same price of an i5-3570k, while coming with 4 extra threads and 2MB more cache. My boss offered to pay for the CPU, which is very nice.
Since i want to get a larger monitor in the near future, i thought keeping the Geforce 9400 would be a bit ridiculous. With no money out of my own pocket so far, i have decided to spend $77 on a R9 270x 2GB that a guy working at the company next to us has for sale. A friend of mine was supposed to buy that card and we tested it, but he decided against it because it made too much noise under load. That noise comes with 45C FurMark temperature tho - so i don't mind that one bit. Also with my usual workloads it is unlikely that i will even get the fan to spin up at all - i'm not mining or gaming. Hmm... mining.
I will be keeping the HP case but replacing the power supply with a FSP 500W 80 Plus Bronze which we pulled from some name-brand computer a while back - only thing wrong with it was a seized fan. The power supply in the HP would still be fine, but there's not enough connectors on it to accomodate two PCI-E 6-pin adapters and still keep all the drives, and this FSP is just lying around anyway. It has two PCI-E 6-pin connectors native.
For OS install, i will be picking up the cheapest 120/128GB SSD that isn't Adata or Kingston. I could use that little V300 but 1) it's too small, 2) it's too crappy, 3) i would like to keep it for testing laptops that come into the shop without drives in them, as installing Windows and benchmarks on crusty laptop spinners is very time-consuming.
A few weeks back i picked up a really nice Samsung 128GB SSD (forgot the model, sorry, it was a Lenovo OEM part) for $38.50, that was for a laptop i sold. I had saved the guy's number and he happens to have another 128GB drive for sale for the same price but forgot what it is, i asked him to message me some specs and we'll see if it's nice enough for me to take that off his hands as well.
The only other thing i need to find is a cooler for socket 1150, currently on it there's that tiny stock cooler Intel bundles with their CPUs, which does fine for the little Pentium but i'm sure will be completely inadequate for the i7. That's still TBD.
Any comments appreciated.
Currently, the computer i use at work is a Q6600 on a crappy intel 965 desktop board that i overclock with setfsb, 3GB of DDR2 667 RAM, couple random HDDs and a 60GB Kingston V300 SSD that recently found its place in there after our boss gave my coworker a 128GB one. I was too lazy to bother cleaning up Windows and reinstalling it on the SSD, so it currently holds just the pagefile, Mozilla and my VMs. Oh, and the display device is a ghetto modded Geforce 9400, with a laptop blower duct taped to its rear end as the old fan was busted.
The whole thing is sitting into a HP dc7600 tower case and still using the original power supply - and that was again an upgrade of the old system i first found when i got there! Cutting the old I/O shield out, which was integrated with the motherboard tray, was a royal pain btw. I kept the very nice tower style CPU cooler by AVC.
The only nice thing about it is the Dell 2007WFP monitor i found lying around the company a couple years back, with a blown power supply. It only needs one voltage of 24 volts, and that's being supplied by a damaged universal laptop adapter which doesn't want to put out anything other than 27 volts anymore. Yes, i was too lazy to order a $3 controller chip and fix its original PSU. Hey, it works. I am using this on DVI both for the quality and also for keeping the VGA port free for testing other boards.
Yesterday i stumbled upon this: http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/...D=640#overview
It had been around for a while but i never bothered with it for some reason. Anyway, the problem with this was "no video output", and that was true for onboard graphics, but i plugged a GPU in the PCI-E slot and the board came to life! Upon closer investigation the IGP is not receiving power, this seems to be some sort of communication problem as there is nothing wrong electrically and the VRM does not even try to turn on. But either way, i could care less about that, i will be using discrete graphics. So, i have a board!
I have replaced a couple lytics in critical areas with polys just for peace of mind but most of it will be staying like it is.
There is one other thing wrong with this board - it bluescreens when trying to install Win10 with UEFI, and does not post anymore if i set "Launch CSM" to "Never", requiring a clear CMOS. This may have something to do with the fact that i tested with old GPUs which do not have UEFI BIOS... Nonetheless, Windows installed fine in "legacy" mode, i ran a few stability tests and everything's good.
My boss supplied me with 8GB DDR3 1600, one Adata and one Corsair VS. These have also been in my coworker's computer, who asked for different RAM because his board would refuse to POST with both memory sticks installed every time the power went out, requiring him to pull them out, start with only one stick and then power off and put the other back in. The new memory does the same. I updated the BIOS on that board last time while he was away, but we didn't have any power cuts since to see if that did anything.
The CPU i tested this board with was a Pentium G620. Definitely not what i had in mind. I found an i7-3770 (non-K) for a bargain price on local classifieds and that's due to arrive tomorrow. A locked CPU is fine as i don't expect that little toy board to overclock anyway, and as a general idea, that i7 will set me back the same price of an i5-3570k, while coming with 4 extra threads and 2MB more cache. My boss offered to pay for the CPU, which is very nice.
Since i want to get a larger monitor in the near future, i thought keeping the Geforce 9400 would be a bit ridiculous. With no money out of my own pocket so far, i have decided to spend $77 on a R9 270x 2GB that a guy working at the company next to us has for sale. A friend of mine was supposed to buy that card and we tested it, but he decided against it because it made too much noise under load. That noise comes with 45C FurMark temperature tho - so i don't mind that one bit. Also with my usual workloads it is unlikely that i will even get the fan to spin up at all - i'm not mining or gaming. Hmm... mining.
I will be keeping the HP case but replacing the power supply with a FSP 500W 80 Plus Bronze which we pulled from some name-brand computer a while back - only thing wrong with it was a seized fan. The power supply in the HP would still be fine, but there's not enough connectors on it to accomodate two PCI-E 6-pin adapters and still keep all the drives, and this FSP is just lying around anyway. It has two PCI-E 6-pin connectors native.
For OS install, i will be picking up the cheapest 120/128GB SSD that isn't Adata or Kingston. I could use that little V300 but 1) it's too small, 2) it's too crappy, 3) i would like to keep it for testing laptops that come into the shop without drives in them, as installing Windows and benchmarks on crusty laptop spinners is very time-consuming.
A few weeks back i picked up a really nice Samsung 128GB SSD (forgot the model, sorry, it was a Lenovo OEM part) for $38.50, that was for a laptop i sold. I had saved the guy's number and he happens to have another 128GB drive for sale for the same price but forgot what it is, i asked him to message me some specs and we'll see if it's nice enough for me to take that off his hands as well.
The only other thing i need to find is a cooler for socket 1150, currently on it there's that tiny stock cooler Intel bundles with their CPUs, which does fine for the little Pentium but i'm sure will be completely inadequate for the i7. That's still TBD.
Any comments appreciated.
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