Thought id make a thread where we can post pictures and tell story's of our many rigs.
Also thought id let some people know where it all began for me, and what ive been through since
So 2 years ago Christmas. I decided i wanted a gaming pc, for my 14th Christmas i ended up spending my entire budget... £300.
Browsing ebay, i found a xw6400 server board with 2 quad core xeons in it, but the listing was poorly described, hence i didn't know what processors i was getting, But i ended up with 8 cores heat sinks and some free ram. Second hand for £50. i brought the cheapest case on ebay i could find that supported e-atx. being the akasa eclipse a62, on ebay for £5 +p&p, and it was the windowed version. i brought a cheaply 850watt power supply, as it had a 8 pin cpu power cable. Though , this power supply has been loaded since that day between me and my friends where its been relocated, and has shown no weakness ( I Cute FTW! <3 )
Looked pretty nice, also fully modular
But i had no idea what i was doing, soon had the system up and running with a 4650 and only 2 gb ram. But i had ram temp issues (ecc server ddr2 runs burning hot, and so did the chip set on the board)
i had taken hard drives i scrounged from a Dell dimension i got for free with a blown board (iirc i had a 160gb and a 250gb)
But, unfortunately i didnt take any pictures of internals :/
You can tell i wasn't a gamer, i had a xbox (shoots self)
But anyhow, the chip set heating issue was being seen to with some beefy coolers, when i decided to install them i realised id need to take the heat sink of to have enough room, as a result of using to much tim i killed my board, as i took the cpu out to clean the old thermal interface materiel off, a small blob fell of the cpu cage directly into some of the 771 pins on the board, and due to the curing time it sank to the bottom, and i was unable to get it out, and it was akasa ak 455 Thermal paste, witch is electrically conductive, and well in the long run bricked cpu socket 0 and therefore the whole motherboard.
This was very frustrating as it was the only dual socket 771 board i could find with 2 x pic-e slots for running crossfire-sli, except for the intel sklltrail d5400xs, and the asus skultrial version, (model number escapes me)
witch were both very very expensive £400+, and considering i only had a £300 budget and it had already been spent, and the fact i was 14 and not working i had no way to pay for it, hence was forced to sell the cpus and restart my whole build. even now id prefer this build if it was sorted and working (except a change in gpu and psu) over my i5 sandybridge setup i have atm :/
But anyway, my pair of matched xeon quads sold on ebay for £225, so i defo mad a profit on the board even though i broke it
And then i brought myself one of these
2009 amd phenom? what is this wizardry!? Here we have my Favorite and best chip ive ever owned
this is no ordanry phenom, its a 970 quad core, with thuban stepping rather than denab. this chip i was lucky to source, it was canned just after realise and there were few in the world known as Zosma cpu's. unlike the 960t witch came to the shops for a bit about 2 months ago. This 970T was effectively a disabled six core, and was fully stable and then some at 6 cores, was shown in cpu-z as a 1705T lol, but it was the fastest stock clocked 6 core chip possible, but it was coupled with a msi fusion power edition 870 motherboard, witch was very nice
. anyway, on with the rest of the spec
It was all dropped into my akasa (all that i had) coupled with 2x 36gb raptors that cost me £5 +p&p
it was starting to look promising.
Then i got some xms3 4gb ddr3, and a akasa nero s heat sink. and clocked it to 4ghz on stock voltage, installed windows and prime 95 popped it. Of course that being that the msi board supposedly could support the 140w cpu's but the 4+1 power phase wasn't up for it....
Unfortunately not know what had gone wrong and why, i sent the motherboard and cpu back, to be tested replaced or returned. Not knowing that my boards power phases failed and the cpu should be fine (unless you put loads a voltage through it it wouldn't be dead) i sent it back to the seller, who made ebay believe that he had never received it and pulled a fast one with my £140 of golden cpu that could do 4ghz on 6 cores without voltage change. I believe this chip could do 4.2 maybe even more
. but anyway, i stripped my system down once again, and waited for my cpu to be returned. It never was.
yet i ended up with an asus am3 board as a replacement. and no cpu.
anyway, i ended up spending time and money on sorting small things out before deciding to fix it completly
Saphire extreme 5830 (5870 with a butchered gpu), That in its later days hit the 1ghz mark stable just about , could have done more with a voltage tweak but that would have involved the penile mod, and im lazy. Any way, being a noob with poor taste id always like the look of the CM stacker, especially the nvidia one, so i wasted money on it. and it was awful. but i dont want to get side tracked and ramble.
on, so ill leave it at that
So i dropped some hardware into it and started saving the pennies till i could get a cpu again
It wasn't long before an offer on a amd phenom x3 720 Be came on, and i though hmm, that's meant to be the sweet spot and i need a good pc, and brought it. Soon my pc was bad and running!
and then i ruined it with my old cathodes from the akasa
And at this time i was selling pc's, here was my sale table (alienware bare bones was old and only bare bones, but it also only cost me £10)
And then, yet again i broked it!
That being a bit of a lie, the asus board was broken since i got it, would struggle to first time boot at 1600 ram settings, and would fail my first time boot anyway with 1333mhz ram. First i thought it was the ram, but also was suspecting of the board could be at fault as with memtest i got no errors, so i cracked them both under the heat gun.
and this is what ended up of my system, as remember, im the master of all red neck pc's.
This happened due to not taking of the cpu mounting bracket, and the only way around that is a heat sink resting on the cpu, but there was not enough pressure on it, so the power supply became the heat sink bracket
until i changed my hard drive and got a new retention bracket, as it melting and snapping when i tried reforming it to a usable shape. surprisingly as long as i was careful not to knock my desk the system was booting first time and stable.
as a side income i scoured 2 builds worth of hardware for £60 witch ended up being built and earning me about £280-£320
first system (amd athlon am2 with 3gb ram and a gtx 7800)
More coming. feel free to comment or post your own build story's and pictures
second system (amd athlon 64 x2 4400+ witch was a 2001 dated dual core) ended up with 3gb ddr1 and being housed in a horrible thermal take kandalf with the second 7800gtx, and seemed speedy for a 2001 system
anyway, i ended up with enough money to upgrade my system, i wanted to go intel sandbridge i5 and new someone that was selling cheap, but after stripping down my system, setting a date to buy, i had transport issues and ended up being beaten to the deal. so it had to wait, and i really couldn't be bothered to rebuild my system with by now had been getting boot issues again and took about 5-6 attempts to get to windows, but was fine afterwards
hmm what's this, after stripping down and not bothering to rebuild it into a case i left it for a bit. And changed the power supply finally to an eneramx galaxy 850watt, witch is actually rated between the rails for 1250watt if you do the maths a bit better than eneramx lol, anyway the story between that is i brought it faulty on ebay hoping for a few bad capacitors,a and it worked fine (though is aging so bad, and is now 6 years old lol), perfect timing considering my friend blew his £2 carboot sale 600watt psu with a gtx 280, so the icute was then given to him, along with my akasa.
And then it arrived :0
followed by....
Finally Intel, and the motherboard being brand new i was hoping for less problems
so i built it up
And somewhere along the line it ended up upsidown
And this is how it stayed for a while
was a i5 2310 as it was 80 quid on the bay one lucky night.
After a while of scrambling suposedly faulty parts on ebay, i had an i7 system on a x58 platform for £85 of stuff. But the buyer requested Dx11 so my 5830 left my main rig and was replaced with a 4850
And then somehow this happened to my rig. Yeah, the raw power of the Gtx 295 is incredible for its age, yet its outdated by v ram and still has driver issues, it also was mistreated, and broke on me 3 days after buying it, hence i got a refund. The akasa was donated by Setter from ocuk forums, (im nots rue weather he was a member heer as well), and the side panels stolen from my old akasa my mate was using. undfotunatley the internals of this one were silver!
and then for three weeks my system was riduculas looking with a gts 240 being my only spare graphics card. It just looked all wrong with that card in it
So it was soon corrected by this
.
Asus 7950 dcII, was purchased as a vtx one on ebay as fault after speaking to vtx and getting a rma accepted. The company sent me the wrong package, on a wii acsesorie, so i never got the vtx card, as the buyer of the wii acsesories refused to give it back. so the company set three people filtering there stock for a graphics card id want, and wernt communicating, so i managed to blag myself a 7770
direct cu and a 7950 dcII, both fully working for £150 xD
And after 2 years of throwing money at a brick wall ive fianly managed to get a stable build on intel with a decent card and that looks good-ish
here it is as it stands.
But anyway, sorry about the crazy long story, any opinions are welcome and feel free to post your own story's and pictures
in this thread, personally wondering weather this thread will catch on :L
Also thought id let some people know where it all began for me, and what ive been through since
So 2 years ago Christmas. I decided i wanted a gaming pc, for my 14th Christmas i ended up spending my entire budget... £300.
Browsing ebay, i found a xw6400 server board with 2 quad core xeons in it, but the listing was poorly described, hence i didn't know what processors i was getting, But i ended up with 8 cores heat sinks and some free ram. Second hand for £50. i brought the cheapest case on ebay i could find that supported e-atx. being the akasa eclipse a62, on ebay for £5 +p&p, and it was the windowed version. i brought a cheaply 850watt power supply, as it had a 8 pin cpu power cable. Though , this power supply has been loaded since that day between me and my friends where its been relocated, and has shown no weakness ( I Cute FTW! <3 )
Looked pretty nice, also fully modular
But i had no idea what i was doing, soon had the system up and running with a 4650 and only 2 gb ram. But i had ram temp issues (ecc server ddr2 runs burning hot, and so did the chip set on the board)
i had taken hard drives i scrounged from a Dell dimension i got for free with a blown board (iirc i had a 160gb and a 250gb)
But, unfortunately i didnt take any pictures of internals :/
You can tell i wasn't a gamer, i had a xbox (shoots self)
But anyhow, the chip set heating issue was being seen to with some beefy coolers, when i decided to install them i realised id need to take the heat sink of to have enough room, as a result of using to much tim i killed my board, as i took the cpu out to clean the old thermal interface materiel off, a small blob fell of the cpu cage directly into some of the 771 pins on the board, and due to the curing time it sank to the bottom, and i was unable to get it out, and it was akasa ak 455 Thermal paste, witch is electrically conductive, and well in the long run bricked cpu socket 0 and therefore the whole motherboard.
This was very frustrating as it was the only dual socket 771 board i could find with 2 x pic-e slots for running crossfire-sli, except for the intel sklltrail d5400xs, and the asus skultrial version, (model number escapes me)
witch were both very very expensive £400+, and considering i only had a £300 budget and it had already been spent, and the fact i was 14 and not working i had no way to pay for it, hence was forced to sell the cpus and restart my whole build. even now id prefer this build if it was sorted and working (except a change in gpu and psu) over my i5 sandybridge setup i have atm :/
But anyway, my pair of matched xeon quads sold on ebay for £225, so i defo mad a profit on the board even though i broke it
And then i brought myself one of these
2009 amd phenom? what is this wizardry!? Here we have my Favorite and best chip ive ever owned
this is no ordanry phenom, its a 970 quad core, with thuban stepping rather than denab. this chip i was lucky to source, it was canned just after realise and there were few in the world known as Zosma cpu's. unlike the 960t witch came to the shops for a bit about 2 months ago. This 970T was effectively a disabled six core, and was fully stable and then some at 6 cores, was shown in cpu-z as a 1705T lol, but it was the fastest stock clocked 6 core chip possible, but it was coupled with a msi fusion power edition 870 motherboard, witch was very nice
It was all dropped into my akasa (all that i had) coupled with 2x 36gb raptors that cost me £5 +p&p
it was starting to look promising.
Then i got some xms3 4gb ddr3, and a akasa nero s heat sink. and clocked it to 4ghz on stock voltage, installed windows and prime 95 popped it. Of course that being that the msi board supposedly could support the 140w cpu's but the 4+1 power phase wasn't up for it....
Unfortunately not know what had gone wrong and why, i sent the motherboard and cpu back, to be tested replaced or returned. Not knowing that my boards power phases failed and the cpu should be fine (unless you put loads a voltage through it it wouldn't be dead) i sent it back to the seller, who made ebay believe that he had never received it and pulled a fast one with my £140 of golden cpu that could do 4ghz on 6 cores without voltage change. I believe this chip could do 4.2 maybe even more
yet i ended up with an asus am3 board as a replacement. and no cpu.
anyway, i ended up spending time and money on sorting small things out before deciding to fix it completly
Saphire extreme 5830 (5870 with a butchered gpu), That in its later days hit the 1ghz mark stable just about , could have done more with a voltage tweak but that would have involved the penile mod, and im lazy. Any way, being a noob with poor taste id always like the look of the CM stacker, especially the nvidia one, so i wasted money on it. and it was awful. but i dont want to get side tracked and ramble.
on, so ill leave it at that
So i dropped some hardware into it and started saving the pennies till i could get a cpu again
It wasn't long before an offer on a amd phenom x3 720 Be came on, and i though hmm, that's meant to be the sweet spot and i need a good pc, and brought it. Soon my pc was bad and running!
and then i ruined it with my old cathodes from the akasa
And at this time i was selling pc's, here was my sale table (alienware bare bones was old and only bare bones, but it also only cost me £10)
And then, yet again i broked it!
That being a bit of a lie, the asus board was broken since i got it, would struggle to first time boot at 1600 ram settings, and would fail my first time boot anyway with 1333mhz ram. First i thought it was the ram, but also was suspecting of the board could be at fault as with memtest i got no errors, so i cracked them both under the heat gun.
and this is what ended up of my system, as remember, im the master of all red neck pc's.
This happened due to not taking of the cpu mounting bracket, and the only way around that is a heat sink resting on the cpu, but there was not enough pressure on it, so the power supply became the heat sink bracket
as a side income i scoured 2 builds worth of hardware for £60 witch ended up being built and earning me about £280-£320
first system (amd athlon am2 with 3gb ram and a gtx 7800)
More coming. feel free to comment or post your own build story's and pictures
second system (amd athlon 64 x2 4400+ witch was a 2001 dated dual core) ended up with 3gb ddr1 and being housed in a horrible thermal take kandalf with the second 7800gtx, and seemed speedy for a 2001 system
anyway, i ended up with enough money to upgrade my system, i wanted to go intel sandbridge i5 and new someone that was selling cheap, but after stripping down my system, setting a date to buy, i had transport issues and ended up being beaten to the deal. so it had to wait, and i really couldn't be bothered to rebuild my system with by now had been getting boot issues again and took about 5-6 attempts to get to windows, but was fine afterwards
hmm what's this, after stripping down and not bothering to rebuild it into a case i left it for a bit. And changed the power supply finally to an eneramx galaxy 850watt, witch is actually rated between the rails for 1250watt if you do the maths a bit better than eneramx lol, anyway the story between that is i brought it faulty on ebay hoping for a few bad capacitors,a and it worked fine (though is aging so bad, and is now 6 years old lol), perfect timing considering my friend blew his £2 carboot sale 600watt psu with a gtx 280, so the icute was then given to him, along with my akasa.
And then it arrived :0
followed by....
Finally Intel, and the motherboard being brand new i was hoping for less problems
so i built it up
And somewhere along the line it ended up upsidown
And this is how it stayed for a while
was a i5 2310 as it was 80 quid on the bay one lucky night.
After a while of scrambling suposedly faulty parts on ebay, i had an i7 system on a x58 platform for £85 of stuff. But the buyer requested Dx11 so my 5830 left my main rig and was replaced with a 4850
And then somehow this happened to my rig. Yeah, the raw power of the Gtx 295 is incredible for its age, yet its outdated by v ram and still has driver issues, it also was mistreated, and broke on me 3 days after buying it, hence i got a refund. The akasa was donated by Setter from ocuk forums, (im nots rue weather he was a member heer as well), and the side panels stolen from my old akasa my mate was using. undfotunatley the internals of this one were silver!
and then for three weeks my system was riduculas looking with a gts 240 being my only spare graphics card. It just looked all wrong with that card in it
So it was soon corrected by this
.
Asus 7950 dcII, was purchased as a vtx one on ebay as fault after speaking to vtx and getting a rma accepted. The company sent me the wrong package, on a wii acsesorie, so i never got the vtx card, as the buyer of the wii acsesories refused to give it back. so the company set three people filtering there stock for a graphics card id want, and wernt communicating, so i managed to blag myself a 7770
direct cu and a 7950 dcII, both fully working for £150 xD
And after 2 years of throwing money at a brick wall ive fianly managed to get a stable build on intel with a decent card and that looks good-ish
here it is as it stands.
But anyway, sorry about the crazy long story, any opinions are welcome and feel free to post your own story's and pictures
