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. 

 
 


 

Evolution of the "Blackbird"

Yes, that's right....my desktop computer is named for the famed SR-71 "Blackbird" of Lockheed's "Skunkworks" fame. Actually, all my computers have network names from military aircraft, mostly because they are the coolest things ever and the people who fly/flew them are America's unknown superheros! 

There was in fact a commercial pc version by that name when in late '07, early '08, HP brought out their super gaming computer. It was equipped with the then new, Intel QX6800 "Extreme" version of the Core 2 Duo Quad processor. It sold for between $6500 and $7000. I couldn't afford one.....actually, I couldn't even afford to buy the processor by itself.

So this is what I did. A little over 2 years ago, I started to build a desktop that would function as my photo-editing, music ripping, video transcoding, all-singing/all-dancing computer. So I started by finding a case that would last through several generations of rebuilds and still not look old. That means unobtrusive, big enough to handle anything that I wanted to put in it and rugged. I used the Cooler Master Centurion 5, which essentially has an all mesh front. The first thing I did was to get rid of the drive blank-bay cover with the logo. It needed to look stealth!

Lets just say that I spent lots of time reading every site and magazine under the sun to find a motherboard and processor to suit my needs. This led me to a package deal on eBay for an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 mounted on a Gigabyte EP43 board. The processor was basically what I wanted (within reason) since it was considered to be one of the finest affordable processors at the time, but the board wasn't exactly what I was after. I really wanted the EP45, which was then pretty new and just too expensive. So I settled for the little brother. I then grit my teeth and bought Mushkin RAM, and a 1Tb Seagate drive. I'm not terribly fond of Seagate, but it was on sale, so in it went. The other stuff isn't terribly relevant or interesting so I'll skip it, other than my one weird-o legacy thing, which is my Fujitsu Magneto-Optical drive that lives in it to this day.

 

So, things went along fine for awhile; that is until I came across my friend Pat's old "MythTV"/HTPC build that had been abandoned. One trade later (through a third party), it was mine and inside the case, that computer contained the coveted Gigabyte EP45 board! So a board switch later, "Blackbird" had the MB that had always been planned for it AND I had a home theater PC to boot (albeit with the lesser EP43 MB)! I also bought more Mushkin RAM (Blackline this time) and now I was up to 4Gb in the workstation.

Around this time, I was able to buy a Mushkin Callista 60Gb SSD and "Blackbird" received it's first reload, and let me tell ya....it was fast! A few months down the road, I came across a ATI Radeon 6700 on Craig's List that was selling for $50 so I upgraded from the HIS Radeon 4850 that had been in there.

In the meantime, I also went through a series of upgrades involving the monitors. I had started with my old Acer 20" LCD that was clone of their Acer/Ferrari F20 panel, but I wanted better performance and higher resolution. As luck would have it, I came across a local Craig's List ad for an IBM ThinkVision 17" LCD monitor at $23. Thinking that it would make a good "side/secondary" monitor, I had a friend on that side of the Metroplex pick it up for me. I figured; how bad of a deal can it be for $23! Let's just say that I was a little stunned when he brought it over and the ad turned out to be wrong.....very wrong.....but in a good way! It was a 20" L200p high-res (1600 x 1200) LCD that was top of the line in it's day....wow! Some months later, after being spoiled by the L200p, I started looking for a replacement for the Acer. I'm a little weird with regard to monitors, in the I'll take higher resolution over more size any day, AND I'd really much rather have a better IPS or S-PVA panel to the typical TN as well. After weeks of looking, I found a Lenovo ThinkVision L220x for about $85 shipped. This is where research shows it's importance in frugality. During those weeks of looking, I learned that there weren't a lot of "good" panels out there. Each manufacturer had just a few (sometimes 1 or 2) in their line. The L220x was not only a S-PVA (far superior to TN) panel, but an unusually high resolution for the size (1920 x 1200 in 22"). In general, you have to go to a 24" monitor to get that much real estate. For me, this was perfect since I share office space with my wife and don't have the liberty to go to a really big screen. On top of that bonus, I was able to sell my old Acer for $50 afterward, so the upgrade only cost me about $35 total.I can't emphasize how important it is to upgrade the things that you touch and look at on a computer! 

This state of affairs went along happily for about a year, then this spring I got the itch again when I noticed that the market for SSDs had taken another dip and I could get into one twice the "size" of what I had for the same money. Around the same time, I was able to pick up a Quad core Q6600 as part of package of parts I needed for another build. So reload 2012 occurred with an upgrade in CPU, SSD and more RAM (up to 8Gb). 

This summer the last of the upgrades occurred when my distrust of Seagate drives came to fruition in the form of the 1Tb "scratch-drive" starting to "click" and have write issues. One RMA later, it came back as a new drive, but it went into another (non-frontline) machine. Around that time, Micro Center was having a sale on Hitachi Deskstar 1Tb/7200rpm drives for $79, so I bought one to take the place of the demoted Seagate. Then the Coup 'd Grace arrived in the form of an Intel Core 2 Duo, Q9550 quad core CPU, also bought in a bundle of other parts for a different build. For those who aren't familiar with the entire Core Duo/Core 2 Duo line, the last of the quads known as "Yorkfield" are generally considered special. They much like the C2D, "Wolfdale" E8xxx line, run fast, run cool, are VERY over-clock friendly, plus have very large cache(s) onboard. The "Yorkfield" quad are essentially 2 "Wolfdale" cores on the same die! My "Windows Experience Index" went from 4.6 to 7.2 (out of a possible 7.9) with just that one change in to the system! These chips routinely benchmark within shouting distance of the first generation i5/i7 processors without even overclocking them!

So, essentially, I'm finished. There's really no more progression to upgrade to for Socket 775 motherboards and this machine will be expected to last until some point in the future when I make the jump to the "Ivy-bridge generation". I guess, at that point, the "Blackbird" will fly into the sunset like it's namesake.