The mysterious and complicated tale about building a computer 🖥 from used parts - PART DEUX

As promised here is part two of The mysterious and complicated tale about building a computer 🖥 from used parts

https://peakd.com/technology/@c0ff33a/the-mysterious-and-complicated-tale-about-building-a-computer-from-used-parts

This is all about those parts are reused our purchased used to end up building an office capable pc for £128.21 - fully Windows 11 Licensed and with some reasonable specs, 8gb Ram, 250gb SSD boot drive with additional hard drives for storage and back ups, Intel Xeon X5675 3.06GHz SLBYL 6-Hex Core 12 Thread LGA1366 CPU Processor and PNY Geforce GTX560 Ti 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-e 2.0 Graphics Card Enthusiast Edition

Now this is no gaming pc build, but the specs are more than capable of providing a smooth user experience in Windows 11 running three separate browsers with multiple tabs open, accounts software, word and excel.

Starting off we have the actual case, now this is from 2017 and used to be the case for my boys gaming pc original build documented on the Blockchain back in 2017 - see

https://peakd.com/gaming/@c0ff33a/building-a-gaming-pc-part-1-i-love-it-when-a-plan-comes-together
and continued here
https://peakd.com/gaming/@c0ff33a/building-a-gaming-pc-part-2-the-components-for-the-pc
and also here
https://peakd.com/gaming/@c0ff33a/building-a-gaming-pc-part-3-putting-the-components-together
and here
https://peakd.com/gaming/@c0ff33a/building-a-gaming-pc-part-4-bench-testing-the-build
and even here
https://peakd.com/gaming/@c0ff33a/building-a-gaming-pc-part-4-boot-time-and-game-play

After replacing that with a new build in 2021 see

https://peakd.com/hive-140217/@c0ff33a/building-a-gaming-pc-late-2021-edition

I had then planned on stripping and selling on the parts of his old pc. As it turned out before I managed to do that Guardians of the Galaxy game came out and it out specced my extremely under powered game cube I had for gaming - so I ended up picking up a reasonable case with some funky RGB fans and mounting the old rig in that - leaving the old case to gather dust in my pc parts and systems graveyard room at work.

So when I had the idea to build this office pc, having a spare case to put it into already saved a chunk of cost. Add I already had power supplies for pc’s hanging around (a throw back from very old bitcoin mining days) and suddenly there really was a good opportunity to build something on the very cheap.

Now the case is by no means your average “office” design, and it’s definitely showing its age compared to modern cases. But it’s free, has really good airflow and loads of spare storage for adding in backup 3.5” drives - taking them out of external usb enclosures where they currently are usb plugged in external to existing office pc’s

Taking a peak inside we can see the components in place, the case has two front fans built in which after 15 months of inactivity were not keen on spinning again - however dubious amounts of WD40 (lubricant and degreaser - ideal for everything from squeaky doors to removing the residue from stickers and polishing steel) and running them using a spare power supply ground jumpered so it runs without a pc motherboard connected they came back to life.

To complete air flow I recycled two old 120mm fans for the back and top of the case - giving a two pulling fresh air in at the front and one pulling hot air out at the back, and one pushing cool air in from the top. Probably overkill for the build but nobody likes thermal throttling on their system.

The CPU heat sink might look a bit janky - but it fits and works really well. Given the heat sink I selected was designed for the cpu socket on the motherboard - I was surprised when it shipped with a 3 pin fan header, the motherboard uses a 4 pin header for the system fan would constantly nag if nothing was attached to it. By good fortune I had an old CPU fan with a 4 pin header - and despite coming off a round heat sink press fitted to the new square heat sink no problem. I still felt that making use of the fan supplied with the heat sink was worth it - so that got hooked to a 3 pin system fan header and both fans work together - pulling fresh air into the radiator using the cpu fan, and the 3 pin system fan is pulling the hot air out. Idling the system rarely goes over 30 degrees on the cpu - and maxes out under load at just under 60 degrees - which is super chill.

Cable management is ok but not ideal, the CPU power cable has no way to fit through the top of the case - as it pre-dates that concept. So it has to run down the motherboard front and through on one of the bottom openings. But this is by no means my worst effort, and looks quite slick through the clear plastic side panel of the case if you look very quickly - and squint.

(excuse the poor cropping, I failed to remove the stacks of paperwork either side and never got around to doing a fresh clean desk shot - so just try to ignore the white blocks.

To complete the look I replaced the display which was fully functional with an Asus 21.5” - I had replaced that at home with a bigger model so it wasn’t adding cost and just made everything look better. And a monster mouse mat because one of the previous issues was random mouse tracking and replacing the mouse did not help so I put it down to the old square mat being used - a full desk mat holds better as the keyboard is on it and gives more range of movement - it also resolved those issues. The old display moved into the warehouse dispatch and their display got mothballed for redundancy. Like any business we need everything running all the time, so you don’t want something like a display deciding to die on you (it’s happened before) so you suddenly have to find a replacement.

Of course it is all worth nothing without reliability, and so far some six weeks in of running 24/7 the build has 100% uptime. I know being a blockchain based site there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about using old parts - It’s no good for reliability, the whole thing could be running on borrowed time and who needs a random shutdown in the middle of the day because one of the used parts expired.

The answer to that is this replaced a running system that was just a bit slow, it has been shelved headless as a server for the accounts software but is still ready to be used for everything needed - and the swap over takes minutes. So worst case we swap out this new build for the old one while I work out what died and replaced. And to be honest if all the hardware is running fine - motherboard, cpu, graphics card - the most likely fail points are PSU or System Drive SSD. The PSU has been used previously but not enough for it degrade that much, and the SSD is brand new - so I’m confident this build will give many years solid use. I had two computers at work that did over 15 years of reliable use before finally giving up the ghost - and that was mainly because they were too underpowered to run modern OS.

When it all comes down to it, obviously buying an off the shelf ready to run solution is going to be the most convenient time saver. But for me this project was never about time or convenience, it was about making something out of parts that would possibly end up in land fill. The satisfaction of creating something out of nothing, and testing my own ability to find parts that would work together and make something that works perfectly and performs well. I enjoy as a hobby messing with computers, whether building them, setting them up and optimising them - or in the case of my Hive Witness servers and Api Node, Hive Engine Witness servers the technical challenge of installing and running the software - on Ubuntu Server which is entirely command line based, it’s a challenge and often frustratingly hard but once you get there and understand how it all works, how the packages need to work together and what you need to do to make it run perfectly - that makes the hard work worthwhile. And I learn things all the time through it.

And out of this project another was born, while researching on eBay refurbished systems to compare pricing I somehow happened on a old Apple Power Mac G5 (Mac Pro Cheesegrater) being sold spares or repairs as non functional. I have always loved the monster aluminium case on these, and it was one of the few bits of Apple hardware I don’t have. At 18 years old even getting the old hardware working would not be very functional except for nostalgia - but build a modern gaming pc into that case…….now that’s a project!

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