Let me start by apologizing for not having posted for over a month. Of course, you might remember that I was involved in a move, and any of you who have moved an entire family home with kids that's you've been in for over 10 years..... well..... you know! A big Thank You goes to everyone from my in-laws, to some of my students and to my friend Daniel who drove up from his home over an hour away! With all that support, we turned a difficult situation into a workable solution. Anyway, we're mostly done now and things are slowly going back to normal. There's no more sure sign of that than the "Skunkworks" getting back into operation.
For the "Stealth", that means a new "engine" along with a few other "bells and whistles". I'm a practical guy, and in light of that, I built the current version of my desktop workstation with pretty much only what was necessary, vs. what I
really wanted. Since that time, the 256Gb SSD that held the OS has been upgraded to 512Gb, and the 1Tb "scratch" drive became 2, 1.5Tb drives. Even the fairly low-powered Radeon HD 7750 graphics card got upgraded to an HD 7870. So, pretty much the only major part from the original build that hadn't been upgraded was the CPU. Although, much of that could be attributed to the efficacy of the Intel Core i5 3450s "Ivy Bridge" chip, it's not as if I didn't dream of having a big-boy i7!
That little fantasy finally came true about a week ago. Let me go off the path a little and talk about how this situation presented itself. Everybody pretty much knows that I'm pretty frugal and will only
splurge if an extraordinary situation presents itself. So; here's what happened...
I bought a Dell! An OptiPlex 7010..... Oh No No!!! I don't mean I bought this vanilla appliance of a computer to use from myself. As soon as it arrived, I promptly removed it's processor (i7 3770), and put it into the "Stealth"! So, here's the
story behind the story. These Optiplexes, the working "drones" of the office world are sold in the untold tens/hundreds of thousands, with the vast majority equipped with i3 or i5 processors. Sometimes though..... you'll find ones which were sold with an i7! .....and those are the diamonds found in the figurative pile of coal. Most surplusers don't bother to look closely at the palleted hundreds or thousands other than to occasionally pull the drives for crushing when required to do so. Generally, they have the hard drives DOD wiped and sell them for what they can get,
quickly so to clear the warehouse and do it all over again. However, you do sometimes find an outfit that will actually pull the entire specification list and post it in their listing. Of course, there are buyer like me out there mining eBay, but not as many as you might think. So, I bought the whole thing for about $300. That's not much more than the typical selling price ($225-275) of the i7 3770 alone and therefore you get the rest of the computer "for free". When you take into account, a fully working machine of this type with a typical (i3 or i5) processor will often sell for around $300, you see where this is going, right? As they say; "the rest is history". I put an i5 back in it and have a client for it at the price of the machine. That's right.... i7 upgrade
for free!
Did the Skunkworks do anything else? Well..... I always wanted more RAM and to try water-cooling..... therefore, I chased down a "customer return" Corsair H110 sealed-loop water cooler on Amazon for $80 shipped ($140 MSRP), and caught a sale for 16Gb (2 x 8Gb) more of the Corsair Vengeance RAM on Newegg for $75 (free shipping). With the much more compact water-cooler in place of the massive Cooler Master Hyper 212Evo, I could now access the RAM socket closest to the CPU, thus allowing the memory upgrade!
I'd say that the current version of the Blackbird is as close to being finished as it's going to get! It should be good for at least another year or two. Right now the specs my workstation are as follows:
- Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H Motherboard
- Intel "Ivy Bridge" i7 3770 CPU
- Corsair DDR3 Vengeance RAM, 32Gb (4 x 8Gb)- Maximum for this chipset
- Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2Gb DDR5 GPU
- Gigabyte Radeon HD 7750 2Gb DDR3 GPU
- Crucial MX-100 512Gb SSD
- Hitachi 1.5Tb/7200rpm HDD (2x)
- Hitachi 1Tb/7200rpm HDD (2x)
- Optiarc DVD+RW Optical drive
- Optiarc Blu-Ray Optical drive
- Seasonic M12 80 Plus Bronze 850w PSU
- Lenovo ThinkVision L220x (1680 x 1200) S-PVA Monitors (2x)
- Lenovo ThinkVision L1940p (1440 x 900) Monitors (2x)
- Cooler Master Cosmos II case
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