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This is my favorite time of year..... when the days get cooler, shorter and the nights get chilly and longer. I can run the systems in my office as much as I want and it only serves to warm up the house! It's that time of year when we spend more time inside and hang around our electronic hearths. There's more time to plan/build systems and 'cus there's less time expended on the yard!
We also start thinking about what we can ask for, for Christmas as well. My Computer Club students are thinking about parts that they can ask for to upgrade their systems or actually build a system. The frantic aspect of the Fall such as the beginning of school and football season is over. Everyone is in a bit of a routine now and know when they can carve out time to work on their hobbies.
For me, it means that there'll be days during Thanksgiving week and Christmas break where I can work on and in my workshop. I have a list of things that need to get built. The unspoken thing down here in Texas is that there is a limited times that these things can happen. Other than time commitments, the main limitation is the extreme heat! If you think that we could get up early or stay up late to avoid that, you've evidently never spent time here in the eastern half of our lovely state where the "H" word have nothing to do with the devil. It's all about the humidity! We actually look forward to the heat of the day to get rid of the oppressive humidity (and I don't even live in Houston)!
On the other hand, our houses don't look like this from December to March either. So, that's when we can do what we want out in the garages. If you've never done it, you should come down to Texas between November and January. The weather is absolutely spectacular, with temps ranging from mid-50s to mid-70s! Plus it tends to be dry, so virtually no snow or ice. If you've never taken your family to NASA in Houston; that would be the time. Want to go to Six Flags Over Texas, River Walk in San Antonio, Big Bend..... come on down!
So, let's take a look at some of things on my docket. One of my Computer Club students wants to do a build on the Mini-ITX form-factor. While all that is pretty straight-forward these days, we still have to deal with costs. I've helped out a number of students in the past by donating various of my old parts to their efforts and this will be no exception. While looking at Mini-ITX cases during a planning session, she decided that she like the Cooler Master Elite 120 in white. I do happen to have the black version which sits in "the closet of doom", so we'll make that into a 2-in-1 project, where we'll paint out the case as well. Some of you might remember a previous student build from a couple of years ago where we transformed an older Alienware case by doing a faux carbon fiber look on it. While that one was just huge, this one will be the opposite!
Another project in progress is the conversion of a Dell PowerEdge SC440 from an old "enterprise" box to a home machine. I have another student who is in that process which will be an excellent "case study" for Linux, FreeNAS use.
Along those same line, we'll also be doing "case studies" on the stack of about 25 ThinkPad R60s that we have down in the "Batcave". These were some of our school district's old teacher computers that we were given. They're of course quite long in the tooth these days, but are also from the Core/Core2 Duo generation so can run relatively modern OS's. These should be fun machines for the kids to take home and play with! I'm certain that, like the others, this will turn into a post of it's own. Are all my projects having to do with the students?
Here's my project! It's kind of a big one. I need to clean out, streamline, update, organize; whatever you want to call it. This is the winter that I need to get myself ready to move forward. Before, I can do that, I have to "un-hook the trailer" from a psychological sense. There'll MUCH more to come on this topic as it progresses.
No, I'm not planning another build. It's just that it's an often asked question during our "Computer Club" meetings with the students. Each new group goes through this, so I figured it's a good time to get it down somewhere instead of reinventing the wheel each time!
These are high school students, so 99% of the time, they want to build a gaming PC. So, the first and most important question is typically answered..... "what do you want to do with it". In todays suburbia, the vast majority of them already have a computer, although, it's almost always a laptop. AND.....it's typically some low end machine purchased from Wal-mart or Best Buy and plays games badly! Which is what leads them to join Computer Club to start with! It being 2016, they've all watch a bunch of videos on YouTube of guys building machines and are now well and truly confused, although they can say a few words in tech; like SSD, 4K, water-cooling and nVidia Titan.
Since we know that this will be a gaming build, then the actual graphics card will go last. Bear with me on this....
I usually start here. Let me explain my rationale:
- Most people know where this computer is going to live, both now and in the next few years.
- The location of the machine often dictates the physical size limitations (such as a dorm-room). They're not going to be in high school forever! Plus "computer club" type kids are typically college-bound.
- In today's world, you can build a decent gaming (or any) PC in any form-factor you want.
- If you're looking to buy a gaming laptop, you have too much money to be reading my blog!
- The price and performance of cases rarely if ever change, although the models often do, so if you see something you like, you might want to grab it now before they stop making it!
Increasingly, I find people looking to do something in the Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX size. Guys like me who want or need to install 3, 4, 5 or more drives, plus optical drives are dinosaurs! So, it becomes a matter of size and budget, balancing asthetics. I'm going to focus on Mini-ITX here since Micro-ATX is mostly just smaller ATX cases.
Some of you might remember my son's gaming machine build in an Azza case. I'll call this type the "console replacement". They are slender, about as tall as they are deep, and can be oriented in both vertical and horizontal direction for placement. They're typically a quadrant inside with sections for, PSU, motherboard, drives, and GPU. They range from the rather garish look of this Azza CSAZ-103 that my teenager son loves, to very subtle Silverstones and Fractals.
The other team is populated by the "box" style such as this Cooler Master Elite 110. They range from "bread-box" to "cube". These usually can house standard component (ATX PSU for instance), and typical have more drive placement options. The Fractal Node is well-know for it's ability to hold several drives and is a good candidate for a mini-server build.
While on that topic, there are a number of specialty cases designed specifically for "other" uses, such as this Silverstone DS380 for server and the above Corsair 380t which is obviously created for portability. Can you say "Lan Party"!?! So, figure out what you want, how you want it to look, and lets get started!
Next post; it'll be motherboard time.
