The Start of a New Project

I've discussed new projects before. I've even talked about the rebuilding of the "Blackbird" (or any number of others) workstation before. But typically, I'm pretty far along in the process before I start writing about it. So this is a little bit different. 

This time, it's more like this,.... in the drawing stages. So far, I've used the network identifier of "Blackbird" on my primary workstation with 2 different chassis. The first, being in a Cooler Master Centurion 590 which held a Core 2 Duo/Quad generation machine, then on to the Cooler Master Cosmos II which holds the current "Ivy Bridge" generation. Some of you might remember that I didn't have any intention of changing cases, until the lack of space behind the motherboard tray shorted out the new board/heatsink combo. This time, I well and truly have zero intention of building in a new case since the Cosmos II is still the "800 pound gorilla" of computer cases and will hold anything up through EATX boards and 13 drives! No, this time, it'll be completely about the guts.

 

In the previous versions, I skipped 3 generations before pulling the trigger. Part of that had to do with me being able to move from a "Wolfdale" Core 2 Duo to a "Yorkfield" Core 2 Quad. In the current board, I've been able to go from the original low powered ("S" Spec) i5 to a regular power i7 of the generation. These LGA1155 processors have been so solid that I was able to go another 3 generations now before I even started my planning this next build. Not that I'm complaining about my current hyper-threaded i7-3770 cpu; I just think that enough of the peripherals have moved on to faster interfaces that it's time to think about it. 

What I've been chewing on is this. A move to the more professional/workstation oriented LGA2011-v3 and X99 chipset. These exist on true workstation boards and not just "enthusiast" ones like the "Z" chipsets. Why? Actually, what I do with my machine is more oriented in that direction vs. overclocking and having lots of PCIe lanes for video associated with gaming. These boards also tend to come with M.2 sockets onboard so I can move on to the new faster NVMe SSDs for primary OS and application storage. They also tend to have 8 RAM sockets vs. 4 so I can start out with lower density memory that's cheaper and allow me to upgrade without pulling modules in the future. Anything I expect to carry over to the new system?

 

I've already said, I'm keeping the Cosmos II, but I'm also going to expect to keep my current data storage drives. They are 2, 1.5Tb, 7200rpm Hitachi Deskstars. Some of the finest and most reliable that they ever made. My plan is to put them in a "mirrored" RAID and use them as protected online data storage. On that front, I'll probably also keep the 2 optical drives (one DVD+RW, one Blu-Ray), but will probably replace the 500Gb Toshiba "scratch drive" with either a bigger one, or an SSD. Of course, the modular 650watt, Seasonic M12II will stay unless something blows up. Changes (apart from the MB/CPU/RAM)?

Yup; this non-gamer bought something from Team-Green..... a GeForce GTX 770 Reference card. Reason? It's a pretty decent upgrade from the Radeon HD 7850 that was my main graphics card, but mostly because I got it for $75..... really. Alert to all you frugal gamers out there who didn't already know this, but the "10 Series" cards from nVidia has had people dropping perfectly adequate "9", "7", and "6" series cards like nothings I've ever seen before. You throw in AMD's RX cards it's looking like Berlin in 1945. There's just a lot of really nice cards floating around out there. I'm also keeping an eye out for a GTX 750 (non-Ti version), to replace the HD 7750 in the computer as well which run my number 3 and 4 monitors. Some of you might have detected that there's something fishy going on here, since 22" monitors (even 4 of them, although 2 aren't that big) don't need this much power to run. You're right. I'm looking seriously at moving to 4K, so I'll need something along the lines of the 770 to run that. I'm not talking 4K gaming mind you, but just 4K, so I think the 770 will be fine for that. Then the 750, which needs no power other than what the bus provides can handle the two 22", 1920 x 1200 which will move to the side. 

So, that's it in a nut-shell. It'll probably take a while before I pull the MB and do the actual up grade, but that's be basics of the plan anyway.
 

New "Propulsion" System for The Stealth

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

Propellerhead Gear: Blackbird Mk II, Part Deux

Yesterday was "Skunkworks" day. If you aren't up on aerospace lore, it's the highly secret Lockheed design and construction facility outside of LA. This place goes back to Howard Hughes and his work for the government during WWII..... and also where the SR71 "Blackbird" was birthed.

Beginning last Thursday (good timing huh?), the last of the stuff for the Blackbird rebuild started coming in; the Intel i5 3450S processor and the Kingwin FPX-004 Front Panel, cardreaderUSB3.0portsfancontrollercasetemperaturereadoutmicheadphone-thing. Oh yeah, the X300 screen, but that's a different story. Confronting me was; Thursday night, one child going to a "real" basketball game with her team, and the other child's Open House/Music Program. Then Friday night in the lovely village of Crandall with Soccer and overlapping Valentines dinner-date with my very patient wife who happens to teach there, which caused me to get home at 10:30, so no build. Saturday, I had kids' basketball, pretty much all day, cleaning the garage, spraying the yard for weeds and pulling the stack of old computer parts I promised to another ThinkPad Forum member....so yeah, wiped out. Then Sunday, of course there was church then grading two stacks of essays from my Advance Placement World History class. However in between the two sets of papers, I took a break by pulling and starting to disassemble Blackbird. Then finish grading the second set of papers. However I got nothing else done since it was now time for my son and I to go see "Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit", which I highly recommend for all you aging Tom Clancy readers out there.

After dinner at Wendy's (son's choice), it was time for........ no, not The Little Mermaid!?! Nope, that's there, because that's where mom and daughter had gone, about the time we got home! Slick planning huh? I took the boy to the late afternoon movie so that when we got home, the mother-daughter event was just starting in downtown Dallas! Two plus hours of solitude, otherwise known as SKUNKWORKS TIME!!!

Now, finally, I got the chance to put the "new" parts back into the old case. I moved all the drives to their new location since I was putting the new "avionics" (Kingwin Superpanel) into the top bay of the case. I had already swapped out the new (Sandisk Extreme) 240Gb SSD in the drive cage, so that went in as well. The Z77 board was bigger than the old one so I installed new stand-offs. Then it was board-time; the CPU got cleaned and went in, then I tackled the big CoolerMaster 212 EVO heatsink/cooler and let me tell ya, it's a huge chunk of copper and alluminum! The Corsair RAM went in next, then the board was installed. It was now time to connect ALL the many cables, followed by the cards. After that, comes the part that I hate. Crawling under the desk to connect all the various peripherals, in positions that make it hard to see and uncomfortable to be in.

I was rewarded by.....this.....a black screen, and the computer going through repeated loops of trying to P.O.S.T. I tried all kinds of stuff. Usually, a "black screen" is a sign of bad or loose memory. Not this time. Then I remembered that this board had a 2 digital diagnostic panel on the MB, which emphatically said "15". The manual said that 15, was Pre-memory Northbridge Startup. WHAT THE!!!! Off to Google, which said all kinds of things that didn't make sense until the end of the 3rd article I looked at which talked about a backside short on the motherboard. A-Ha, I said! I had noticed that it looked like the backplate of the 212 might have been touching the MB tray. One disassembly/couple of layers of electrical tape/reassembly later, the machine booted normally.

 

 And I got to see that wonder of modern computing....the UEFI! From here the load proceeded as normal, except much, much faster. I felt like some sort of Geek-Spy-Superhero who had just saved the world/western civilization by hacking into a secured computer system. OK, that was the Jack Ryan character from the movie, but still......

We are now in "test flight" time. Which basically means loading basic software, updates, and more updates. Then I started getting some errors on a few utilities I use. After more Googling, I learned that if you use a machine with UEFI, and GPT instead of MBR, you'll run into the problem I did (whatever the &^%^$#% all that stuff means). Anyway, the fix, is to repair or reload after having preformatted the drive before the Windows load occurs! Of course that means, 2 hours of work wiped out! In the mean time, the wife and child came home which as good timing since was a little frustrated and needed a break!

 

11 O'Clock, back to work and magically everything loads as it should. A couple of M$ updates rounds later, it's off to bed at 2:55 AM. Yeah, the sides are off. The cables are all over the place. My office looks like craziness happened there and I haven't gotten monitor 2 working right, but hey; that's why we crash-dummies get paid the big bucks, right? If there's a cautionary tale in all this; it's to never so a build without another fully working computer beside you which is hooked up to the Internet! In the end; the cat got to play in the boxes, and that machine? It's seriously faaaaast!

Propellerhead Gear: Blackbird Mk II

I love my computer, I really do. However, it's time for the old girl to go in for an overhaul. In this case (literally), I'm going to rip the old guts out and start over. Not that the "Yorkfield", Core 2 Quad isn't doing it's job. It's just time. In Frugal Propellerhead-speak, that means that the cost of a significant upgrade has dropped to the point where I can do it inexpensively.

You might remember a few ramblings about gathering parts for this build that began with this; a Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H motherboard that I picked up locally for $60. It got RMA'd back to Gigabyte for a broken PCI-e slot and came back as a replacement. The socket 1155 and Z77 chipset on this board allows me to install i Series, 2nd and 3rd generation CPUs in it, more commonly known as "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge". Being a mid-line board, it gives me lots of nice features that are common at a $200 pricepoint. This 2 generation jump will allow me to go, not only a whole new series of CPUs, but also SATA II to III yielding a doubling of the critical throughput on storage, and the jump from USB 2.0 to 3.0 which is huge as well. Of course, there are other areas of upgrade like the jump to DDR3 and UEFI BIOS. 

One of the first things I had to get sorted out was storage. I had an OEM Samsung 256Gb SSD in Blackbird, and although, the capacity was fine for me, the SATA II interface was not. Which led to a series of machinations that produced this drive...... the Sandisk Extreme, 240Gb SSD that was in my wife's T61. Last month, when I upgraded her to a ThinkPad T500, it started a chain of events that would give me the correct drive without costing anything. First of all, I had bought a Dell E6500 for a client who wanted a 1Tb mechanical drive in it. The Dell, came equipped with a Samsung 128Gb SSD. That drive went into my desktop, which gave me it's 256Gb SSD that went into my wife's "new" T500. The T61 which had the nicer nVidia graphics went to my son replacing his T61 with Intel graphics. His SSD went into mom's old machine. His machine got a 80Gb mechanical drive and sold off. All that work yielded me a free 240Gb, Sandisk Extreme SATA III drive for free! Actually, that's not completely accurate. The sale of that T61 actually made me money on the whole thing, but I'm not going to bother trying to compute what the actual net profit ended up being out of all that; let's just say that it didn't cost anything.

In the last post I talked about mining Craigslist and this was one of the products. A pair of Corsair XMS3 DDR3/1600 RAM for $50, bought from the same guy that I got the motherboard from, so I also have the added benefit that of knowing it'll work on that board. The configuration will fit my philosophy on RAM. Which is: 

•  Adequate (4Gb) is not enough.
• When a major upgrade happens. Keeps the same amount for that OS, but cut the number of modules in half. I have 8Gb in 4 modules, so I need to drop down to 2.
• Leave yourself room to upgrade. The point above gives me 2 empty slots for future upgrades.
• Buy mid-line from a reputable manufacturer. For Corsair right now, that'd be XMS vs. the uber-expensive Vengence line. You still get lifetime warranty but half the cost. 

At this point, my Blackbird upgrade is up to $110. 

Now, I'm in the "home stretch", and just need a processor so I can start building. This turned out to be the most time consuming part of the whole process. Originally, I had thought I'd get my brother's old 2390T that he replaced in one of his computers. Unfortunately, he recently has taken a new position in Taiwan and hasn't been home to sent it to me. On top of that, it's the world's only non-Quad Core i5. I'm not really thinking I want to take a step backwards at this point. However, the concept of using a low-TDP (Termal Design Power) processor was intriguing. My current C2Q 9550 has a TDP of 95 which isn't too bad, and the typical Ivy Bridge chip is around 77 TDP is even better. When you look at Intel's list of 22nm processors (Ivy Bridge), you see lots of "S" spec chips that have a TDP of 65, with the current "T" spec chips down at 45 TDP. I'm all for that! If you've ever been in my south-facing office in the summer, you would be too!

This led to LOTS of contemplation and sleepless nights. Power vs. Efficiency? I knew I could get a really nice processor that would do everything that I wanted between $150 and $175. I had just done a machine with an i5 2500K, "Sandy Bridge" chip and it was flat-out, FAST. In the end, I knew that I didn't need, "nose-bleed" speeds; I just don't do that much "high-end" stuff. So I focused on "S" spec, Ivy Bridge chips. I started out looking at the commonly seen 3330S, then realized that the faster, yet just as cool models costs about the same. I even looked at the 3450P with the disabled GPU and all the way up to the current 3570S which sells for around $160. After reading reviews and benchmarks till my eyes crossed, I decided that the few percentage points between the chips weren't worth the $25-35 to me. Maybe it'd be different if I was a gamer, or did a lot of video editing, but then, I'd be looking at i7s, right? The other thing that I found out was that the "S" spec chips are generally sold to big OEMs....the Dells and HPs of the world. They use them in the "small form-factor" desktops that are sold by the thousands to corporations. When they are replaced, these machines are almost never sold off as whole computers, but are commonly "parted-out"/recycled. This means that there are lots of these chips appearing on the "secondary" markets (read eBay) as the first of these machines are being pulled at the 2 and 3 year mark. All that means: just be patient and wait for the right deal to drop in your lap. On Sunday, I caught a 3450S that sold to me at $133 with Free Shipping. That puts me at $243 and I'm starting to make plans to build.

One more thing. I'll have to admit, it's a bit of an extravagance. Although, it's just a $40 extravagance. This is a Kingwin FPX-004. I always wanted one of these, since the first time I saw one a number of years ago. A full (5.25") bay multi-function panel. This one has a card reader (one less thing on my desk), 2 fan controller with temp/rpm readout, eSATA, mic/headphone jacks, AND most importantly, USB 3.0 ports. That was my rationale. The new MB has a USB 3.0 head, so I really would like to be able to connect those devices without crawling under my desk. The final total? $283 for a total upgrade to Ivy Bridge. 

So, a week from now, the old Cooler Master Centurion 590 case will be completely new machine inside. Do I loose anything? The new board doesn't have an IDE header, so the Fujitsu 640Mb, Magneto Optical drive will probably bow out. But this thing is going to be one FAST AND COOL CAT. 

 
 


 

Building Desktops The Frugal Way: Part 3

If you didn't already know, the "Blackbird" is in the planning stages of a rebuild. This will the 4th motherboard, and 3rd processor, although the CPUs and MBs didn't come and go together. All the board have been Gigabyte. The first was the GA-EP43 since I could only afford either the board I wanted, or the CPU I wanted, so I went with the Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale processor. Eventually, I came into a GA-EP45 that I really wanted originally, so in it went and the E8400 got moved over. The following year, I was able to get the higher end, dual Ethernet version of the EP45, so another switch. This was followed by the Q6600 last year, which lasted less than 6 months, until I got a great deal on the "Yorkfield" Q9550. 

Then this happened! I've previously talked about this Gigabyte GA-Z77X board so I won't rehash it other than to say that I've received notification from Gigabyte's RMA facility in LA that the replacement is on the way back. 

That's kind of convenient since I just sent the HD 7750 that I bought back to them on another RMA yesterday. For those of you keeping score at home, I'm up to $110 now, $65 for the motherboard and $45 for the video card. I'm going to bet that my brother will send me his old i5 so, there'll probably be nothing spent there. So, what does that leave to be done for the new guts?

Well; there'll be the RAM of course since the move will necessitate a change to DDR3 memory of which, I don't any laying around. My philosophy on this is going to be that I'll start where I leave off on my current system, but leave room for growth. I'll start with the same amount (8Gb) of RAM, but in less memory modules (2 instead of 4), that way, I'll be able to upgrade to 16Gb at some point down the road. That's exactly what I did on my current system, starting at 4Gb in 2 modules, then adding two more when I upgraded to 8Gb. That's pretty much the poor-man's way to do it. You can spend a ridiculous amount of money on RAM by going with all the cool looking-high-spec'd-"gaming" stuff. I tend to buy "mid-line" which typically has a nice long warranty period and enough headroom to be good for later updates. I've usually regretted it the times that I've bought "value" RAM, so I just don't do that any more.I expect to spend somewhere in the $65-80 range for this. 

Then there's the issue of storage. You might think that with a Samsung 256Gb SSD in my current system, I'd just reload and call it good. But, noooooo.....my drive is the OEM version of the 470 Series. Yup.....SATA-II....... OK, on a day-to-day basis, I'd bet that I really wouldn't notice. But here's the deal. If I'm going to make a major change, why wouldn't I take advantage of every possible technological improvement. And we're not talking an incremental change here, we're talking doubling the throughput! 

However, I think I've found a loophole for myself that'll be a bit of a money-saver. The main place where you really feel the difference in speed is loading the OS on a super fast drive, and maybe some key applications like the browsers and a few others. So, if I don't replace the SATA-II, 256Gb Samsung with another drive of the same size, but I use a smaller one, I could put the OS on the smaller....say, Intel 330 180Gb or maybe Crucial M4, then reuse the Samsung as a secondary application drive, the 1Tb Hitachi could then continue on as a storage and "scratch" drive. I would be a 3 tier situation with storage being allocated to different storage solutions based on their size and need for speed. What the deciding factor will be based of course, will be $$$. I say somewhere about $120-130. 

So, when it's all said-and-done, I should be "all-in" at right around $300. That's a 2nd generation i5, with close to 1.5Tb of storage. I'm going to say that, I'll be happy with that.


 

Beep Beep!!!

Let me just start by saying, that I'm not easily impressed....especially where computers are concerned. I'm just a believer in that not only do people not NEED the technology on offer in the current generation, but it's just a flat-out waste of money! 

If you've been following along recently, you know that I've been helping a co-worker's son gather parts to build a "modest" gaming computer. I used quotes for modest because, with the judicious use of his $600 and some luck, I was able to score some pretty recent pieces....most notably an Asus P8Z77 motherboard, a Core i5-2500K cpu, and 8Gb of Corsair Vengence RAM. Well; Sunday was build-day. So we put this thing together, and go it to boot. Last night, I put the basic load of Window 7 OS on along with it's drivers. In the process, I loaded and reloaded a number of things. 

Holy Crap! This thing is fast! I thought my computer was fast, but this thing is in another league. Everything is instantaneous. Computer loads are routinely a poke-in-the-eye. Mostly that's due to the repeated reboots. The norm is where you click on "restart", then go on to do something else for a few minutes while the machine does it's thing. There's just none of that, nada, zero. You hit restart, look away, and when you look back, it's already back up. Yeah, I know, when I get more stuff on it and it's anti-virus loaded, then it'll be slower, but still.... I probably load OS on the average of about 1 computer per week. That's roughly 50 machines in a year. Everything from XP to WHS, to Vista and Windows 7. I've just never seen anything resembling this kind of speed. 

You can imagine that I'm now a little wired waiting for my RMA'd Z77 motherboard to come back from Gigabyte. The rebuild of Blackbird V is about to kick into high gear!
 

Buy Broken Stuff....Really!!!

If you don't already do this, your missing something. What am I talking about on this gorgeous Saturday morning (the first cool one this "fall")? It's no secret that I flip computers, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I often leverage the "scratch and dent" bin of eBay and Craigslist for items that I can pick up cheaper than "normal". There are several dynamics to this particular strategy, so lets look at them.

At it's most basic is the "bread and butter" of my little business; the refurbished Corporate laptop. I don't need to get into the benefits of them today, but here's how to squeeze a little more out of them than is already there. If I go out on eBay and just buy a ready to go E6400, I should be able to pick it up for somewhere between $175 and $200, then if I sell it for the typical $225-235, I will have cleared my standard of about $50 (give or take). However, many of these things are sold "part or repair". That means they are missing something. That could be everything "something", but most likely is that they are missing a hard drive, or maybe the A/C adapter too. Sometimes, there's as much as a $100 difference between a "ready to go" machine and one like that. Another factor is this: if I have an appropriate hard drive, in this case a 2.5" SATA HDD of between 80-160Gb/5400rpm, then I'm already ahead of the game. I emphasizes "have" because, if I have to go buy one, it ends up costing around $40 after shipping and it's just not worth it. So where do these drives come from? When I work on a computer and it's trashed, or the client needs/wants an upgrade, then I save the drive. If they want, I'll destroy it, but that's rarely the case. Also, when I get a computer for my family, I always pull the mechanical hard drive and replace it with an SSD. So, over time, I accumulate a number of good condition drives up here in my cabinet just waiting for a job. You might wonder if this is safe and/or ethical. Here's the deal; if after I've DBAN'd it, and "clean-loaded" an OS on one of these guys, the probability that someone is going to try and extract old data off of it is pretty darned slim! So, if I'm careful in buying the "new" machine and pick one of those "Parts or Repair" jobbies that still have the caddy and cover, then I'm golden! For Pete sakes though, don't buy one without the caddy/cover, or you'll end up spending upwards of $25 just ordering that little piece of metal and plastic! 

The same thing goes for the T61, T400/500 machines from Lenovo ThinkPad. These are corporate machines and when they come "off lease" or are surplus'd due to replacement, many entities require the company handling the old machines to physically destroy the drives. Anybody like banks, insurance companies and hospitals which require client record confidentiality will then put thousands of these computers into the secondary market w/o a drive! The better surplusers, will save the caddy/HDD cover, but the sloppy ones will just destroy the whole thing. This whole process will allow you to either make more money or if you are buying for yourself, save more money. I've often upgraded our own computers using this technique and end up making it a zero-sum operation.

Here's the next Frugal Propellerhead trick: buy outright broken stuff.... really! Understand before we proceed that there are risks with this. It's simply not 100% and sometimes you lose. However, knowing this, if the price is such that you are OK with the cost/benefit ratio of the equation, then there are great gains to be had. I'll start with my latest conquest. The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H bought off of Craigslist for $65. I understood that it had a broken PCI-e (x8) slot, and was pretty OK with the knowledge that it was usable even without that slot. At worse I could use it in my HTPC which would never need a second graphics card. Besides, this was an ATX board with a third full-length slot (albeit a x4). However, the upside was that this is a board which is at worse, a year old, and at best 6-months or less since the Z77 platform was current right up until the release of the Z87 "Haswell" chipset. And as you guys know from an earlier post, I did a RMA (which was approved) on this guy and it's on it's way to Gigabyte. So in a week or so, I'll have a replacement in hand. 

That little episode was so successful, I've decided to do it again. This time, with a Gigabyte GV-R7750OC graphic card. I've been wanting to upgrade my vid-card for some time, not because I need more power (I don't), but because, my HD 6700, on a fairly regular basis, will behave strangely. It will give me artifacts around my mouse cursor, and if I don't reboot quickly, it'll go "black screen" and lock up the box. This is not acceptable on my main workstation on which depend pretty heavily. So, why don't I just pick up one of the many really cheap, 5000 or even 4000 series cards and replace it then? Well, for one thing; I'm kind of a stubborn cus' and don't like using "bottom-feeder" gear on my primary machine. And secondly, I will on occasion, convert a video or two, but most importantly do photo-editing on rather large DSLR generated image files. There's that, plus I want a cool running card as well. Those specialty passively cooled "mid-line" cards are really kind of hard to find and they tend to be a little pricey (at least to me) when you do find one. What to do? While researching cards for my client's gaming computer, I had zero'd in on AMD's 7xxx mid-line otherwise know as the "Southern Islands" series. In there is a low-powered model designated as the 7750. So low-powered that it doesn't need external power. Now; that's for me! However, I didn't want to pay the $90-100 for a new one. Yeah, that's right......I want nice higher end products, but don't want to pay the price. Did I say that I'm a stubborn 'cus.....hence Frugal Propellerhead? Not surprised that I bought a "parts or repair", "untested" (meaning, "we know it doesn't work, but you can hope") one off of eBay for $45, are ya? Would you be surprised to learn that Gigabyte also warranty's these guys for 3 Years like their motherboards? And that, I've got run it through their RMA process and currently waiting for approval to send it back?

One more example. In case you forgot: a little more than a year ago, I bought an "as is" ThinkPad Tablet (original Android version) for a very good price. The same day that I received it, I shipped it to Lenovo as a warranty repair since (of course) it was still within a year of purchase. They didn't have the parts to fix it within the specified time-frame for a "corporate" item, so it was arranged that they would drop-ship a NEW one directly to my house. Yup, that's how it's done! 

Any failures? Yup; I bought a couple of refurbished Dell Stream 7 tablets from Newegg. Unfortunately, the power connector broke on my son's pretty quickly and within what Newegg had assured me to be Dell's warranty period. That turned out not to be the case and after several unproductive discussions with their consumer support facility in India, it went nowhere. Newegg however, was gratious enough to do a partial refund and we moved on from that episode. What's the lesson? I could very well turn the name of this whole blog into: DON'T BUY CONSUMER!!!