So I thought I would put up a few pictures of some rig I haven’t shown before. They are not the neatest in the world. In particular the miniITX build is a bit of a mess of wires, but there isn’t a lot of space in there, so I think that is probably justified.
The first rig is my old server, which has now been lent to my girlfriend’s brother on a permanent basis so that he can play Skyrim with ease. Until very recently he was gaming with a 9400M GS graphics chip on a laptop so the step up was pretty decent.
The PC is in a Coolermaster Scout case which was bought because it was cheap and slightly nicer than the Xigmatek case that was eventually donated to my mum. The motherboard is a Crosshair IV formula with an X6 1090T CPU. The graphics chip is a 280GTX with a custom cooler because the old one’s fan decided to die.
4GB of Ripjaw RAM and a gelid tranquilo cooler (it was bought for an X3 athlon) round off the build. It was originally running a 320GB laptop drive for a storage drive, but that has been replaced with an F3 1TB drive and the system drive is an old 80GB SATA drive, which does the job. The whole project was done on the cheap, hence the PSU is an OCZ, which hasn’t let me down yet. It is a pretty decent PC for the money and the current user is pretty happy with it. (Dang straight).
AMD machine by DiabloG1, on Flickr
AMD machine 2 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
The second PC was built as a present for my girlfriend’s mum. All of my girlfriend’s family is camera obsessed, and all of them and me use DSLRs, so we have quite a few pictures between us. Originally my girlfriend and her brother bought their mum a digital photo frame, but that was quite poor as it could only take 2GB of photos. We found out that she also wanted something to play music on in the kitchen so that she could listen whilst cooking and avoid any calls from relatives on skype.
Thus we decided to build a small PC for this purpose. The original plan was to use a picoITX PC, but the performance is so poor and the noise is high. Hence an ITX was called for, with an H61 board, an energy efficient Pentium CPU (sandy bridge) handling the graphics and CPU and a 1TB drive for photos and music. The screen is mounted to the wall above the table. She loves the PC, which is great, and it works very well. Testament to Silverstone’s and Asus’ build quality the PC even survived somebody spilling a glass of wine over it. It can decode RAWs and playback music on some pretty decent creative speakers we bought for it.
MiniITX 1 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
MiniITX 3 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
MiniITX 2 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
Finally the latest PC I built is a server. As mentioned above, the family is photo obsessed, and my girlfriend’s dad lives out in Saudi Arabia, so access is needed all around the world. There are something like 1.5TB of photos kicking about already, about 100GB of music and hundreds of gigabytes of other data in the house. Hence centralised storage for backups etc. is needed. They had an NAS with 2TB of space, but that ran out of space and the transfer speed was about 2-3MB/s so backups took forever. Additionally the NAS kept disappearing of the network and was a nightmare to work with.
After wiring the house up completely with Cat 5E cable, my girlfriend’s mum and I decided that a dedicated server was needed. It runs an i3 2100 sandy bridge CPU, on a Z68 board. The higher end board was bought to enable any additional expansion in the future which might be wanted, and because the price difference between a decent, power efficient H61 board and a decent Z68 is pretty small. The system drive is a 320GB HD for the OS and some programs. The case is a Silverstone P06B-W, which I have used in the past and found to be very quiet and easy on the eye. It also has a hot swap port on the front for 3.5” and 2.5” HDs, which is useful for quick backups of entire drives. There is an adaptec 6805 RAID card, with a zero maintenance cache and capacitor powered NAND flash storage. The server grade card enables massive expansion down the line and also is an extremely reliable and quick card. There is a fan on top of the power supply for active cooling of the heatsink. The wiring is unfortunately not as neat as I would like due to the extra cooling that was implemented.
The CPU is cooled by another Gelid tranquilo heatsink, which is all that is needed for a relatively low power CPU. At idle the PC uses about 30-40W. It has 3x3TB disks in RAID 5, with the option to upgrade when space requires it. Write speeds are 240MB/s. The whole house has their own space on the drive, password protected and there is an FTP server, which is pretty neat.
Server 1 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
Server 2 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
The wires are in the process of being tidied, but there is a limit especially as bits occasionally change, for example more disks have been added (only 1TB though) and it has good air flow, so I'm not too worried. It lives below the desk so all in all aesthetics come below function.
The first rig is my old server, which has now been lent to my girlfriend’s brother on a permanent basis so that he can play Skyrim with ease. Until very recently he was gaming with a 9400M GS graphics chip on a laptop so the step up was pretty decent.
The PC is in a Coolermaster Scout case which was bought because it was cheap and slightly nicer than the Xigmatek case that was eventually donated to my mum. The motherboard is a Crosshair IV formula with an X6 1090T CPU. The graphics chip is a 280GTX with a custom cooler because the old one’s fan decided to die.
4GB of Ripjaw RAM and a gelid tranquilo cooler (it was bought for an X3 athlon) round off the build. It was originally running a 320GB laptop drive for a storage drive, but that has been replaced with an F3 1TB drive and the system drive is an old 80GB SATA drive, which does the job. The whole project was done on the cheap, hence the PSU is an OCZ, which hasn’t let me down yet. It is a pretty decent PC for the money and the current user is pretty happy with it. (Dang straight).
AMD machine by DiabloG1, on Flickr
AMD machine 2 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
The second PC was built as a present for my girlfriend’s mum. All of my girlfriend’s family is camera obsessed, and all of them and me use DSLRs, so we have quite a few pictures between us. Originally my girlfriend and her brother bought their mum a digital photo frame, but that was quite poor as it could only take 2GB of photos. We found out that she also wanted something to play music on in the kitchen so that she could listen whilst cooking and avoid any calls from relatives on skype.
Thus we decided to build a small PC for this purpose. The original plan was to use a picoITX PC, but the performance is so poor and the noise is high. Hence an ITX was called for, with an H61 board, an energy efficient Pentium CPU (sandy bridge) handling the graphics and CPU and a 1TB drive for photos and music. The screen is mounted to the wall above the table. She loves the PC, which is great, and it works very well. Testament to Silverstone’s and Asus’ build quality the PC even survived somebody spilling a glass of wine over it. It can decode RAWs and playback music on some pretty decent creative speakers we bought for it.
MiniITX 1 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
MiniITX 3 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
MiniITX 2 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
Finally the latest PC I built is a server. As mentioned above, the family is photo obsessed, and my girlfriend’s dad lives out in Saudi Arabia, so access is needed all around the world. There are something like 1.5TB of photos kicking about already, about 100GB of music and hundreds of gigabytes of other data in the house. Hence centralised storage for backups etc. is needed. They had an NAS with 2TB of space, but that ran out of space and the transfer speed was about 2-3MB/s so backups took forever. Additionally the NAS kept disappearing of the network and was a nightmare to work with.
After wiring the house up completely with Cat 5E cable, my girlfriend’s mum and I decided that a dedicated server was needed. It runs an i3 2100 sandy bridge CPU, on a Z68 board. The higher end board was bought to enable any additional expansion in the future which might be wanted, and because the price difference between a decent, power efficient H61 board and a decent Z68 is pretty small. The system drive is a 320GB HD for the OS and some programs. The case is a Silverstone P06B-W, which I have used in the past and found to be very quiet and easy on the eye. It also has a hot swap port on the front for 3.5” and 2.5” HDs, which is useful for quick backups of entire drives. There is an adaptec 6805 RAID card, with a zero maintenance cache and capacitor powered NAND flash storage. The server grade card enables massive expansion down the line and also is an extremely reliable and quick card. There is a fan on top of the power supply for active cooling of the heatsink. The wiring is unfortunately not as neat as I would like due to the extra cooling that was implemented.
The CPU is cooled by another Gelid tranquilo heatsink, which is all that is needed for a relatively low power CPU. At idle the PC uses about 30-40W. It has 3x3TB disks in RAID 5, with the option to upgrade when space requires it. Write speeds are 240MB/s. The whole house has their own space on the drive, password protected and there is an FTP server, which is pretty neat.
Server 1 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
Server 2 by DiabloG1, on Flickr
The wires are in the process of being tidied, but there is a limit especially as bits occasionally change, for example more disks have been added (only 1TB though) and it has good air flow, so I'm not too worried. It lives below the desk so all in all aesthetics come below function.
