DIDDUMS IS BUILDING A PC OMG OMG OMG

[Diddums 4,346]

I've been using my trusty old 2500k with 8gb of DDR3 and and an R9 290 4gb for years. To put this in to some perspective, the R9 290 was bought a few weeks after our first Eurogamer meet and the 2500k a few years before that. It still works fairly well, runs anything and some games quite well, but there are titles out there which are starting to seriously stress the poor 2500k. I overclocked it to 4.4ghz, it's perfectly stable and has run like this for a few weeks with no problems and never going above 62deg.

 

An upgrade has always been in the back of my mind but I've never thought I game enough on PC to justify spending over a grand on new stuff, despite you guys buying me games to get me back in to PC gaming. Star Citizen really hammered home how old this beast it getting and truth be told it sort of soured the taste a bit because I was gifted this awesome game by awesome people and couldn't even join them on it. 

 

Nevertheless, I spotted some old gaming PCs lying in my boss' storage at work. They looked lost, forlorn and like they hadn't been touched in years, so I asked what he wanted to do with them. I was told "take them, just wipe the drives" (midget porn? idk). Not knowing what I was getting apart from one very obviously being an Alienware Area 51 and the other an Origin PC, I gladly took them off his hands. 

 

Some photos:

 

The Origin PC, cased in a beautiful, if slightly tatty Corsair Obsidian case (this was like a £400 case years ago):

 

 

The Alienware. This case looks pretty but I can't stand it, where the fuck do I put my feet? Side note: This thing is heavy. I don't mean a little porky, I mean heavy. So that was out instantly, impractical, overweight, old, and nothing on top. A bit like me then.

 

 

This is where things start to get interesting. I took this photo and only properly studied it a few days later. The keen eyed amongst you will notice a few things: Blue USB ports, so it's USB 3. It's not that old then. Core i7. I wasn't sure of the exact architecture, but I remember when Sandy Bridge came out, Intel changed their sticker so you knew it was a Sandy Bridge from the outside. I never looked in to this one, but Alienware tends to be high spec stuff. Another little detail which I'm sure you're all screaming about by now (I'm such a little tease aren't I?) is that it has two graphics cards:

 

 

My interest was firmly piqued at this point, and excitement started building a bit. My hopes were for a 2600k, maybe 16gb of DDR3 and a pair of GTX 680s. This however gave me a little taster:

 

 

Well, I can now confirm, having stripped all this stuff down, that the Alienware had two GTX 980s in SLI, 32gb of DDR4 (!), and a Haswell-E i7 5930k sitting handily under a closed loop water cooler which is OEM but a bit of the ol' scratch'n'sniff revealed it to be an Asetek, which is pretty decent, so I'll be keeping it for now. As you can  tell however, this thing is dusty. Like the inside of Susan Boyle's coin purse dusty. This is going to need a load of work.

 

The case is a load of wank so that's going in the bin. The motherboard is also some OEM jobbie but it's made by Foxconn who make tons of good stuff so it can't be that bad. The PSU is a Dell (Dell makes Alienware) 1200w jobbie, but it's amazingly enough 80 Plus gold rated (which apart from Platinum, is the highest quality rating you can get). It's also fully modular and has obviously fed this hungry beast with power for years so it's going to get a clean up and used if it'll fit (it's some weird shape, but looks like it'll work).

 

The Origin contained the i7 2600k I wanted, 16gb of DDR3 and a single GTX 580. The PSU is a Corsair 850w non-modular so this will be plan B. Amazingly, the motherboard in this system is one I lusted after for years: An Asus P8-P67 Pro, which was pretty much the king of the hill when Sandy Bridge (both my i5 2500k and this i7 2600k are Sandy Bridge chips) was launched. 

 

The case however, is beautiful. So, time to tear it all to pieces and get to work. 

 

The motherboard seems to be a standard ATX form factor so fits perfectly in to the Corsair case. Some of the connections are questionable, such as the audio connector which is slap-bang in the middle of the motherboard so will need a bit of creativity to get it to look neat:

 

 

The age difference between the case and the motherboard is fairly significant, so there are connections on both which the other doesn't accommodate. The case has Firewire, which by the time the Alienware was made, was consigned to the history books, and the case doesn't have USB3 connectivity whereas the motherboard has the interface for it, so I may need to get creative on that front too. 

 

The Haswell E CPU is considerably larger than the Sandy Bridge too:

 

 

The 5930k has 50% more cores at 6, and the same for threads at 12, and it will clock fairly high so it'll run circles around this 2600k. 

 

These aren't pretty sticks, but what we're looking at here are 4x 8gb DDR4 2133mhz sticks of RAM:

 

 

 

Aaaand installed:

 

 

The graphics cards were seriously dirty and needed a bit of extra TLC:

 

 

Time for a good stripdown for a clean and rebuild:

 

 

Here's a comparison of before and after:

 

 

Side note: the build quality of these things is amazing. Props to Nvidia.

 

The SLI bridge is such an odd component, these things are literally fancy plugs and cost a fucking fortune:

 

 

 

And installed:

 

 

And that's where I'm at now. Yes the CPU is installed and no there's no cooler on it as I have no thermal paste so will grab some tomorrow. I might also pull the 980s apart and redo the paste on them too. The CPU is just to prevent the pins getting bent. To give you an idea of how neglected and dirty these components were, here are a few photos:

 

 

 

 

 

So that's first on the list for tomorrow, then do the thermal paste, clean and install the power supply, sort out the storage and optical drives, give it a last clean and see what she does. I'll probably benchmark my current system so I have a proper comparison in terms of performance. 

 

This has been a bit of a road of self-discovery again if I'm honest, due to various personal reasons I sort of lost my soul for a few years and had zero inspiration to do anything, so I just sort of drank a lot and played loads of video games. Now in my new job, having weekends off, having less debt and being able to afford things again, I can feel my soul coming back and this little session this afternoon has shown me again how much I love this stuff. Really looking forward to carrying on tomorrow

 

Cheerio!

[phil bottle 9,743]

Awesome write up. Great little project. Keep it up[emoji8][emoji8][emoji846]

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

[Nutcuttlit 359]

Wow, great job didds. I would have stuck my head in the oven by now.

[Diddums 4,346]

I'm genuinely intrigued to see what it'll do when it's complete. Although the tech is getting on a bit it was all seriously high end kit when it was released so should still compete with mid to high end kit nowadays. 2x980 seems to be on par with a 2080ti, but this is obviously very driver dependent. Even Nvidia and AMD have given up on multi-gpu stuff as it's a complete clusterfuck for drivers and generally needs a lot of spoon feeding to keep it running smoothly, rendering it pointless for all but the enthusiasts.

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

Very neat Dave. Excited to play a game with you again in the future. 

[Plumbers Crack 4,059]

Nice start to the project Dave [emoji106]

Via the FG App

[GazzaGarratt 11,037]

Great to hear your desire is back in something like this mate. You've always had the knowledge for this and it's cool seeing the progress in your post.

 

Looking forward to seeing the finished product.

[tronic44 3,642]

Very nice dude, 2x GTX 980? Very nice!

 

Looking forward to seeing this beast up in action and playing some games with you. 

 

If you have any spare parts.....hi 😄

[phil bottle 9,743]

Very nice dude, 2x GTX 980? Very nice!
 
Looking forward to seeing this beast up in action and playing some games with you. 
 
If you have any spare parts.....hi [emoji1]

You can't out it off much longer Mr Tronic, you're next[emoji106][emoji39]

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

[BO7H B4RRELS 2,452]

Wow, dude!!!  That's awesome.   Congrats.  

[Diddums 4,346]

19 hours ago, phil bottle said:

You can't out it off much longer Mr Tronic, you're next

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk
 

 

Indeed.

[crispymorgan 1,054]

Have you got the thermal paste?  Is this finished?  ANSWERS ARE NEEDED!

[Diddums 4,346]

11 minutes ago, crispymorgan said:

Have you got the thermal paste?  Is this finished?  ANSWERS ARE NEEDED!

The thermal paste was picked up yesterday from Currys, yes my soul was on fire, and will be installed tonight if all goes to plan. With abit of luck I'll get the PSU installed too, then it's just drives. I'll keep you updated, I promise

[Diddums 4,346]

Well the Snaggy McSnaggington came to visit, in the form of the Alienware / Dell PSU being Murican. I only found out because every time I undid a screw it tried to build a wall around me and screeched like an eagle, so it's the wrong voltage. Looks like I'm going with the Corsair. It'll probably go pop but we'll see. 

[crispymorgan 1,054]

Pretty sure most PSUs have a voltage switch on them

[Diddums 4,346]

11 minutes ago, crispymorgan said:

Pretty sure most PSUs have a voltage switch on them

This is an Alienware tho. It’s made by dem gosh darned aliens.

[crispymorgan 1,054]

That's a C19 connector.  I can post you one?  It must be a fucking powerful supply because they are rated way high. 

[crispymorgan 1,054]

In fact, looking at your original picture you had one?

[Diddums 4,346]

10 minutes ago, crispymorgan said:

In fact, looking at your original picture you had one?

 

Gosh darnit Cripspeeeee! You're right! You dun shown me a ting! I didn't bring any leads home with me but I'll pick it up tomoz and connect this bad boy.

 

Here's where we're at:

 

The AIO (that's All In One for the @Plumbers Crack's amongst us) after a good clean:

 

 

 

This is the fan. I've named him Fanny:

 

 

 

For the record, the Alienware for some reason was sucking air in to the case rather than blowing it out, so I've swapped from a pull configuration to a push configuration which should gain me a degree or two.

 

Copper block. GO FORTH AND COOL ALL THE THINGS:

 

 

Of course in able to do this you need some thermal paste, I went to C*rrys and they had no clue what the fuck I was on about (omg currys seriously #incompetent) but at the right time a knight in silver armour and many braces came along and saved the day. I paid 40% over the odds for this:

 

 

(in this case 40% extra means £7 instead of £5 but the percentage makes Currys look worse and I fully support this notion). Here it is unwrapped. This is more asspensiff than crack:

 

 

I never took any photos of the application because I didn't want to fuck it up, but here's the whole shenanigan installed:

 

 

Quite why the PSU is the last component (other than drives, but they're easier to work with than Paris Hilton's coin purse) I'm installing is beyond me, but at least some progress was made. I'll now be removing the Corsair PSU and installing the Dell jobbie. I'd be a lot more motivated to do this if I had a bloody lead but I'm aiming towards plug & play on the last lead tomorrow, so let's see how it goes. 

 

 

 

 

[Diddums 4,346]

Quick update, up at 4 tomoz. It's alive. Barely, but it's alive. I got it all together but the PSU cables are too short so it is seriously ghetto at the moment with shit and bits hanging everywhere. I hope these are standard cables as a new PSU is north of 200 bones.

 

I think the motherboard's fucked. It didn't output any picture so it got stripped down to barebones. One GPU? Nothing. Fuck. Remove all RAMS, install one, she boots. Error messages all over the shop but she booted. Insert second RAMS, nothing. Then I started shuffling and fucking around a lot more and it looks like ram slot 2 is borked. With a stick in 1 & 3 she fires right up but as soon as I put one in slot 2 she fails. 

 

So atm I've got more tests to run for diagnostics, she's on 16gb at the mo which will be plenty until I can afford a new X99 motherboard. It whinges like a little bitch though, because the motherboard was transplanted from the Alienware case it's lost a shitload of limbs and fans and likes to let me know every boot. 

 

Tomorrow I'll pop the second 980 in and see if I can maintain POST. I think it'll be fine but we'll see.

 

Then I have a todo list as long as my arm to get it exactly where I want it but that's all part of the hobby I guess.

 

I said no pics but fuck it, here's a sneaky little preview of what's going on:

 

 

[phil bottle 9,743]

Another awesome write up. You have patience I can only dream of[emoji39]

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

[Greboth 2,721]

Is the AOI rad thin or is that a 38mm fan on it? as it looks thicker than a standard 25mm fan.

 

Shame one of the RAM slots is borked but nice work getting up and running at all.  Should be a good gaming rig if you can get it working properly.

[cyberninja2601 1,106]

 

 

All I could think of reading this is that I am getting soft in my old age and "pointy hair boss". 

 

First thing that came to my mind  is the that I would ask one of the "kids" on the team to go and do that for me

 

Patrick