Building this for a friend at the moment. He works in a liquor store and like me, enjoys automobiles, but is a little bit more liberal with his money and likes to throw a lot at his MX-5 (Miata for Ameribros). So one day he approached me and asked for me to build him a gaming PC. I said sure why not and immediately started firing off prices in my head for an average Kaby system and hypothesising a Ryzen rig. When i said it would be in the vicinity of like 1500-2000 AUD he kinda shuddered at the idea, so I got a little bit more info off of him as to what he wants to use the PC for to which he responded with "Playing Asseto Corsa". So I went home and meditated on the Idea and realised that I have a spare hardware that by today's standards is pretty ancient but might just do the trick for the application.
Parts
- CPU: Intel i7-920 @2.66GHz
- Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R
- RAM: 6GB OCZ Reaper 1600MHz
- PSU: Antec Quattro 1kw
- Stock Intel Cooler.
The above parts cost me absolutely nothing. Reason was because about 6 years ago now they belonged to a friend of mine who purchased everything new for a gaming PC circa 2009 (I think). They along with two 5870's in crossfire had a pretty easy life of playing mainly Fallout 3 & NV. Until I acquired them because my friend was leaving the country and offloading his stuff. So he gave me the his entire rig and asked nothing in return. One of the Radeons died just out of its warranty and the other was rusted and the fan assembly was non functional but otherwise still works, I however gave it to a friend to use as a placeholder GPU. The Hard drives my friend had used were also given to the same owner of the Radeon. There were two WD 500GBs. Also the case was a antec Dark fleet and it was scrapped because it was a biohazard (regretably the I/O shield was still inside of it when it was trashed). However minus some cosmetic crap the PC was still functional. So i stripped it out and it sat on my office shelf covered in anti static wrap for 6 years. Occasionally only coming out to test PSUs.
The Heatpiped RAM never fails to amuse me.
Dat rusty ass tho.
All of these photos were taken after I mounted all the hardware to a new case. Speaking of which...
Found this on facebook for $70AUD. Which is an absolute steal, it also happened to be in the same area as where I live so I didnt need to get it shipped, just picked it up.
The case is in marvelously good nick (no scratches or dents) and is DEAD silent, the previous owner only used it briefly to house his gaming pc but found it got too hot with his 390X and replaced it with a Corsair. The case has since lived in his garage apparently, and "something" has apparently lived in it. Being in Australia that "something" could literally be anything, however he cleaned up the case before I arrived to buy it. The case still has an "atmosphere" to it. It smells like a mixture of Glen 20 and rodents. I intend to pull it apart and give it a pressure wash at some point as I believe the 800 is fully modular and you can remove pretty much everything down to bare metal. Case also came with an abundance of thumbscrews and all the accessories. considering the case is almost new and new they are 169AUD I can't believe how much I got it for. I'm almost tempted to strip out my now broken FT02 gaming machine and reshell it into this after I get a new mobo for it. Only time will tell however, I find myself loving this BQ case more and more every day.
I tossed in my 1070 the other day and powered her up to see if everything was fine, to my luck everything worked fine and i was able to get into BIOS. About as far as I could go however as I have no spare drives around to install to, so thats currently next on the list of crap to attend to. I went into my old place of work the other day where I used to sell computers and they have a whole stack of 2.5" drives from laptops that they perform SSD upgrades on. I managed to score a 1TB HGST for $20 which is now mounted on one of the rear SSD brackets.
The drive was pulled from a brand new laptop so it has seen almost no use whatsoever. I am not sure if it will be a permanent fixture as it is likely 5400RPM and has no real noise deadening on it. I would prefer to make use of the cases multitude of 3.5" bays if i can find some half decent drives with relative ease, but for now I know I have decent source of 2.5" drives for cheap.
All in all this PC has thus far cost me a grand total of $90. Which is pretty swell. I have a few ideas for what needs to be done to get her up and running;
- Perhaps replacing the i7-920 with a Xeon W3690 for cheap 990X level performance.(Super tempting although highly unnecessary. Just want to do it because I can)
- Source more RAM to make a comfy 12GB (or more), maybe to virtualise windows within Linux.
- Source a GPU: A friend of mine has a GTX 780 which I have expressed interest in. Still waiting to see where that takes us
- Source an SSD for boot
- Maybe beef up the cooling too???
- Make a half decent attempt at cable management to hide the disgusting Antec power lines.
I will update this post in future on a regular basis provided work doesn't get in the way. My friend who will probably end up owning the rig hasn't really got a time frame for when he needs it buy so I'm going to make a project out of it and see how cheaply I can build it for, if he doesn't want it then I'll use it lol.
Anyway, stay tuned.