The-G

There's quite a few old laptops on eBay for around that price (http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_mPrRngCbx=1&_udlo=&_udhi=20&_nkw=laptop&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1) I've gotten lots of old laptops for free from my Dad's work, so if you know someone in a business-y type place you could ask them to look around for something. Most businesses just dump their old computers in a cupboard somewhere.

Yeah I'll give that a go in a bit. I remember the cable was at a bit of an odd angle so maybe that was it. Thanks for the help

I think it's still in warranty, although I'll have to check. I'm not sure if it is the fan as it's brand new (Came with the case), and it was working fine until I unplugged it and plugged it back in, although I will try and refrain from using that fan header. EDIT: Out of curiosity I tried the fan on another header and it worked fine. I then tried using a different fan on the original header and it ran at a higher RPM that the others. I think what happened is that when plugging in the 3-pin connector I put it in the wrong way (Maybe connecting some pins that shouldn't be connected), and that fried the MOSFET which controls the voltage for that fan.

I wouldn't say it was dirty, although I've never cleaned it. Do you think it's safe to continue using that fan header (The fan plugged into it seems to spin at a faster RPM than the others), or the computer as a whole for that matter?

Maybe, although all I did was plug in a 4 pin fan header. It might have already looked like that, but I certainly never noticed it if it did. I'm not exactly sure what was burning, but that chip was near the fan header and looks burnt so I made an assumption that it was the culprit.

Yeah that would make sense. I just looked at the fan that's connected to it and it's spinning faster than all the others, so maybe it is fried? I don't know. I'm more concerned about if I've broken anything else.

So I recently re-built my PC in my new case, and earlier today I noticed that one of the fan cables went over the 24 pin motherboard connector. I looked at this and thought "That would look much better if I made it go underneath, as that way you can't see it so well". So I unplugged the connector, routed it under the cable, and then went to plug it back in. The computer was still on BTW. When I plugged it in I thought I saw smoke so I pulled it out, but there was so little of it that I assumed it was nothing and plugged it in again. This time I could see it clearly, so I pulled it out and switched off the power supply. Oddly enough the computer was running fine through all of this. After looking around the fan header to see where the smoke had come from I noticed a chip that looked burnt: After doing some research (And finding nothing relevant to my problem), I fired up the computer again, and it's working fine. I played some games to put it under load, and there hasn't been any problems. While I still don't know exactly what happened, my best guess is that I unplugged the fan header before the chip got fried (The fan header does still work BTW), and that I should have shut down the PC before plugging in the fan. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts though, as I couldn't find anyone with a similar problem. My motherboard is the MSI Z97 Gaming 5, if that helps.

Yeah prices suck over here

Cool, I'll have to see if I can find a thrift shop with some old PCs. If not then eBay usually has some old/scrap computers for sale. Thanks

I'll have to keep an eye out for them. Currently the cheapest p5k-premium motherboard I can see on eBay is £55 ($68). There's also a P5K-VM, is that the same as the p5k-v? It's a better price at £35($43).

Yeah true, that's why this mod is so cool. I should overclock mine a bit, although I doubt my motherboard will get me very far. I think I'll upgrade it to a better one at some point.

Yeah these old Xeons seem to be really good. There was an LTT video a while ago that looked at running duel Xeons in a server board as the platform for a gaming rig, and it was really good for the price.

That looks pretty good. I might try buying an old PC case (I don't have any lying around unfortunately) that I can salvage the back plate/motherboard tray from - In fact I think you can buy them separately, although I'm not sure how much they'd cost.

Wow that CPU is pretty impressive, and yeah I've heard of Tech City, that's where I saw the video on the 771 to 775 mod, although I haven't seen the one you mentioned, I'll have to take a look.

A couple of months ago I put together a test bench that I could use for testing old hardware from my eBay business. It consisted of a Pentium 4@2.66Ghz, 2GB of DDR RAM and an Nvida FX 5200 graphics card. It was pretty crap, but all the parts came in a joblot so I just had to slot everything in and I was good to go. Here's a picture of it if you're interested (WinXP ftw): However last month I decided to give it an upgrade, so I bought a cheap 775 motherboard off eBay that came with a dual core CPU (It was nothing special, just a cheap foxconn board and a pentium dual core). When I bought that motherboard I remembered watching a video about a 771 to 775 mod that allowed you to use some of the older Xeon CPUs in consumer 775 motherboards, and I had the intention of replacing the pentium with a quad core Xeon later down the line. In the end though I ended up buying the Xeon (an X5450) and the converter sticker on the same day. When all the parts arrived it didn't take long to put it all together. The most nerve-racking part was cutting the tabs on the CPU socket so that the Xeon would fit. It took me a couple of tries but eventually I cut enough off (A quick tip if you plan on doing this mod is to buy a cheap 775 CPU (I just used the pentium dual core) to use as a guide, so if you do screw up all you risk losing it a cheap CPU). After putting the converter sticker on the CPU (The mod requires a sticker to short some pins on the CPU for it to work), I slotted it in the motherboard, put on the cooler and... it didn't boot. I proceeded to waste several hours wondering why (I even brought in a projector from the other room and had that set up as it was the only other portable display I had that had VGA), but eventually I found out that it was my own stupidity. I had put the sticker on upside down - *facepalm*. So after putting on a new sticker the right way round (Thank god I bought two), the system booted up! (Yay). Currently It's still just sitting on a motherboard box, but I plan to get/make a test-bench case at some point in the future. Here's the full spec list if you're interested: CPU: Intel Xeon X5450 GPU: Whatever's lying around, currently an Nvidia 6200LE RAM: 1.5GB of DDR2 (I desperately need to buy more RAM) Motherboard: Foxconn G31MXP 775 Motherboard PSU: Generic Dell 250W Power Supply HDD: 80GB IDE Maxtor Hard drive (I'm gonna get an SSD at some point, this was just the only drive I had at the time) OS: Windows 7 Other: There's a sound blaster card in there at the moment, but I was just testing that out. And here's some pictures: So yeah, that's my testbench. It's pretty bad, and the cabling is a mess (Not much I can really do about that atm, and the PSU has really short cables so it's hard to manage them at all), but it does what I need it to do. The main things I want to do to it next are: Buy an SSD Get more RAM Change the GPU Buy a new power supply Change the motherboard Anyway, if you read this far, then thanks for taking a look! I'd love hear your feedback and also to see your test-benches (I'm sure they're better than mine)