Building Desktops The Frugal Way: Part 2

Back in the middle of January, early this year, I started talking about how I got to my current situation in building desktops for myself. This started in the relatively ancient time of the 386 and I ended at the original Pentium. 

At this point, I was at a crossroads. I had succumbed to the Best Buy glitz and bought a really nice Toshiba Infinia media desktop computer, then proceeded on to it's contemporary IBM Aptiva "Stealth", after learning that buying "new" from the Best Buys of the world is like getting onto the treadmill of losing propositions.

After a pretty fair amount of contemplation, I arrived at my current philosophy. I call it the "generic box", "do-it-yourselfer" computing stage. 

  

This may not have been the exact model, but it's pretty darned close. I decided to find a relatively attractive, but innocuous case that would become home to multiple motherboards over it's lifespan. It became home to the bang vs. buck king of that era; the AMD processors. First there was a K6-II/400, then I moved on to the "Barton" core'd Athlon XP, which is where I stayed for a very long time.

During this time, I used Abit or Tyan boards which were generally slightly less expensive than Asus, but "feature rich" and offered excellent speed for the dollar. This case spent just about as much time with the cover off than on since I was constantly tinkering with it. At this point, I also learned the joys of picking up "surplus'd" monitors, at one point, patching together my very own "Stan-finity" 3 monitor setup long before AMD made it popular. I used a SGI 1600SW LCD (yes the famous one from their graphic workstations) flanked by a pair of Apple Mac CRT Studio Displays. This was around 2000/1, so I was an oddity of that time. This state of affairs when on happily for some time till we moved across the Northern part of Texas from the Panhandle to the Dallas area. However, before we moved, I learned a few things. For one thing, I certainly didn't need to buy new from a retailer ever again. But secondly, and maybe more importantly, there were trends in the market and if you knew what they were.... money could be made from that knowledge. 

Around 2000/2001, LCDs were HOT!!! And special high-end ones (even ones that had been save from the dumpster), sometimes sold for something like $700. Yup, I sold that 1600SW and turned it into parts which became our huge media center, which still sits in our living room. So for a while, I limped along with my giant 20" CRT Mac Studio Displays and the old "Barton", happily oblivious of the butt-kicking that Intel was unleashing on AMD which is still going on today. You see, we had been sucked in by the cult of the laptop! So, after the move, that computer sat out in the garage for years till I had a student who wanted it. I took it apart, and over the course of the next month or so; I taught him how to build a computer. 

As we move forward (and those who have read this blog from it's beginning will remember this timeframe), I became more and more involved with digital photography. This meant the need for; more storage, more muscle, more devices..... pretty much more everything that normal laptops don't do well. Of course, you can do a "workstation" laptop, but those are big bucks! So, the "need"/desire to build an expandable/rebuildable desktop returned to my life. That year's "generic black box"? The Cooler Master 590. As you can see, it's not something that calls a lot of attention to itself, while at the same time, offered the ability to be almost infinitely configurable. Over the last several years, it has seen 3 motherboards (Gigabyte GA-43, then 45s), 3 processors (Intel E8400, Q6600, and now the Q9550), Several drives ranging from different SSDs to mechanical drives of various size and speed. Anyway, you get the idea. This thing is what every tinker needs. The inconspicuous black box that serves as the computer that does everything and starts every time. 

In fact, I was so pleased with it, that there's an older Centurion 5 sitting right next to it which houses my "XP" system that I use to trouble shoot old client machines. It doesn't have a lot in it; just a GA-41M board with a low-end C2D processor, some left over RAM and hard drive. But it does a job and it basically cost nothing being made up of leftover and obsolete parts. 

But these cases and the concept is kind of like this old DeLorean.... just the shell that houses the guts of future technology. Part 3: Coming to a desk near you.

 

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.