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.


 

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.

 

A Sandy Bridge Silent Assassin

A funny thing happened on the way to building a gaming system for somebody else..... pa-dum. Well, actually; here's what happened. Once I had identified that the Z77 platform had some potential to become a fertile area of growth for my in client (Librarian's son), I started turning over rocks to see where I could find some good boards on which to build. Of course, there was the every-present online retailers such as Newegg and Amazon. Shoot, I even went over to Fry's brick and mortar store and touch physical product! But in the end, I ended up at the tried and true eBay and of course, it's poor cousin, Craigslist. In the last post, I detailed the nice package that I was able to land from eBay which resolved several problems at once at a good price. 

However, it wasn't that Craigslist didn't bear fruit; it was that CL didn't bear the fruit that was really useable for a client. In fact, there was a listing that fairly jumped out at me! An ad for a Gigabyte (although the ad didn't say that), GA-Z77X-UD4H motherboard for a $75 asking price. You might ask, what was wrong with that price for a budget build!?! One hitch. The second PCI Express (x8) was broken clean off the board! Now, I don't expect that this kid is ever going to go triple SLI on the machine, but when dealing with a "client" (even one that I'm not planing on making money from), I don't take chances and don't like to deliver anything where something isn't right. And, as it was, I had found that pretty killer deal on the Asus P8Z77X-V Pro board anyway, so I passed.

But the several days, this $75 board is working on my consciousness, nibbling away. If you've read many of my posts, you are probably aware that I have a pretty decent history with Gigabyte product, currently running 3 of their motherboards in my 5 desktop machines. Finally, I gave in, contacted the guy to see if he still had it (he still did) and offered him $65 for it (which he took).

 

The fact is that it's a risk. Although, anyone can accidentally break things, but you find that if somethings broken on a rather sophisticated device like a computer motherboard, there's every possibility that other stuff is broken on it as well. I'm not being a cynic; that's just the way things like that usually go. But I figured, "what the heck", $65 is a risk worth taking, weighed against landing a very nice mid-line board. In the motherboard world, $100 is the low end, $300 is the high end, and $200 is "mid-line". If you've been around computer building for a while, you know that mid-line leans more toward the top than the bottom. And this board cost every bit of $200 less than 6 months ago! Besides.... I had an Ace up my sleeve. Less than an hour after I got home, I was on the Gigabyte website submitting an RMA (return merchandise authorization) asking that this board be repaired or replaced under their 3-Year warranty. I also know that these sorts of connectors are put on by robotics, so if they OK it, I'll get another board. 

Yup, I came home today to find an email, authorizing the RMA with an attached label and questionaire sheet to be returned with the board! That's so cool, I had to include a picture of the motherboard's onboard on/off switch! I really love this feature which most nicer current MBs include. 

Which brings us to the dinosaur.... Although, my old workstation which finally got a quad-core processor earlier this year runs very well, it's really pretty darned old, in that the socket 775 came out in July of 2006 as the successor to the 478! It even originally ran P4s in it! The Q9550 "Yorkfield" CPU that I run in it is literally the last series made for this line. In it's day, they were the coolest (temperature) running high-powered quad cores having been manufactured on the 45nm process. The total TDP of 95w was ridiculously low for a 4 core high-end chip. These January 2009 processors were literally the last of their breed, newer even than the XE (Extreme) processors or the Q9650. 

So, let's just say that in the 4 years since, some progress has been made by Intel (even AMD for that matter). First there was the Gen 1 Sandy Bridge i3/i5/i7-xxx, followed by the Gen 2 Sandy Bridge i3/i5/i5-2xxx, then the Ivy Bridge Series i3/i5/i7-3xxx. Now, on the eve of the "Haswell" invasion, I might have found the reason to put the old dino out to pasture. When that GA-Z77X-UD4H board comes back "strong, faster......", it can be home to any number of Intel's legion of 2nd or 3rd generation "Core" processors. I'd love to jump on that $180 priced i5-3330S processor that I saw last night, but....

In all probability the dragon slayer will be my brother's old i5-2390t which he just replace. Go ahead, click on that chart and see what it says. That's right, I'll probably replace my 4 Core rig with the world's only 2 Core i5! Thought all i5s were quad-core didn't ya? What that.....? Did you see the TDP of 35w? Yes, that's 35w, essentially about a 3rd of my Q9550. Yup, my computing world is about to go silent.....