build log [Build Log] $120 LAN PC, its finally happening!

[RGProductions]

On 8/15/2016 at 6:42 AM, TheCamba said:

Nice work.  Creativity is the father of necessity.

I think it is "Necessity is the father of creativity" actually

[TheCamba]

13 hours ago, RGProductions said:

I think it is "Necessity is the father of creativity" actually

It becomes a real messed up family.

 

Just looked it up.

necessity is the mother of invention

 

So I screwed it all up.  Regardless, still cool.

[Bananasplit_00]

UPDATE:

ughh.. i almost dont want to make this update but i feel i need to because its pretty relevant tbh, anyway i took the LAN PC to its first LAN party, it was just a small thing with a few friends in a basement but still, those are also pretty fun! anyway so i packed up my stuff in a nice pile:

(thats atleast most of it, forgot to take a better picture)

 

and then headed off to the LAN pary! all was well untill up about the point where i connect to the network with my ethernet cable and it just says unidentified network and i dont get an internet connection... this was one of the first things that happaned at ALL, so i tried different ports on the switch,i tried with my friends, that had internet, cables and nothing worked so i just said screw it and thetherd to the wifi network via USB from my phone, which it wasent too happy about but it worked OK so then i open CS:GO and all my settings are screwed up so i fix most of them and then we start playing some HnS(Hide and Seek) and im playing some music through my monitor and everything was OK, i had shit FPS for some reason but it was working atleast. after just a short while tho the screen glitches out, the music freeks out and the computer just freezes up. so i start it again passing it off as an anomaly and then just a little while into the same thing i crash AGAIN, in the exact same way and at that point i flip the PSU switch and take out a GPU, i remove the EVGA one and place the Gigabyte 660 in the top slot:

it was even bright outside still, this was just after about one or two hours in, and i have already got serius problems...  i also flipped that card saying one GPU/ two GPUs but you cant see that in this picture because the cooler is in the way, anyway this seemed fine, i was getting WAY better FPS at higher settings in CS:GO for some reason and then BAM ethernet starts working when i have 1 GPU installed. What The Fuck... anyway so we keep playing and then it crashes AGAIN in the exact same way and at this point we abandon CS:GO and start playing CIV-V, i end up as Vennice and screw up my city placement so i am basically at the bottom all the time and everything is on fire because there are shit loads of barbarians around me that noone does anything about and it goes like that for about 50 or so turns and then i get ANOTHER crash in the exact same way, and at this point im just pissed and i swap the Gigabyte GPU for the EVGA one, and all whilst this is going on the bot is screwing me over big time in CIV-V, not that i was going to win anyway lol, and then the game runns fine for a while, and then it crashes AGAIN in the exact same way and at this point im just out of ideas and i am compleatly screwed in CIV but i start up the computer and then it crashes again at turn about 120 and im just getting more and more pissed. i try installing whocrashed but that was complaining that some file was missing that i could do nothing about, i restrated and still no such file so i gave up on that and tried the reliability manager and that basically showed me no info further then that it had crashed and "was not turned off properly", which gave me no clues at what was wrong so i uninstalled the GPU drivers, they were whatever the latest NVIDIA drivers were and then i installed what im running on my main PC which is 359.06 which i have never had any problems with and give me good overclocks on my 970 atleast but that didnt help much seeing as it crashed after playing some more CS:GO, and then it crashed whilst i was just faffing about on the desktop and after that there werent too many more crashes, maby one or two but god was i pissed at this freaking computer seeing as i had NEVER had any problems with doing anything on it at home, it just seemed to hate everything when it was moved. right now it is just on my kitchen table where it was built and i dont even want to look at it right now. i feel i will deal with it some time later, posiabbly next weekend seeing as school starts for me on tuesday. anyway thanks for reading this pretty sad LAN PC update

 

TL;DR:

LAN PC didnt fullfill its job as a LAN PC and had shit tones of problems with crashing and shit to the point where i removed a GPU and installed drifferent drivers and eventiually just handled the fact that it crahed a load

[Bananasplit_00]

UPDATE:

ITS ALMOST ALIVE AGAIN ALMOST SOTROF

Ok so after i got pissed off at the LAN PC it was in my clauset for a while basically untill this monday when i decided to place most of it in a case that i didnt think would work but it did and i have gotten about 75% with that but thats not the exiting part here  so i got my hands on an I5 680, 4GB of DDR3 1600Mhz and an MSI H55M-E33 and i got the parts today and building has started and will be finished before i go to bed, and with that i mean, its assembled, has windows 10 on it, has CS:GO and CIV-V on it and everything works. i get decent fps in CS:GO and CIV-V is playable basically. i cant post any pictures right now seeing as im wrighting this from work because it involves waiting quite a lot so i have dead time. but updates will be rolling as i build probably, could probably stream it to Twitch but im pretty sure like one of you might join so i wont bother if not everyone really wants it lol. anyway the reson im going to make sure its done before i go to bed is because there is a LAN party tomorrow after school so it NEEDS to work tomorrow otherwise there would be litteraly no point to this PC tbh. its also going to a pretty big LAN party on haloween with around 200 people, so if anyone hapens to be going to a Haloween LAN in the middle of Sweden tell me and we could have a chat about the LAN PC or something  anyway here is a little run down of what i have done this last week and why almost nothing is done even tho i have worked on since monday(no pics tho):

 

the 3.0 of the LAN PC started when i found a deal for an I5 + "broken" motherboard and some HDDs for $35 tho i ended up paying $40 and got some really shit headphones and a coupple of P4s too, turned out most of the HDDs were useless and it wasent even an I5. The CPU was an I3 530 but i was ok with that because it was better then the Q6600 because i couldent overclock the Q6600 because of the cooler anyway. i took out the CPU and checked the socket and there was one single pin in there that was slightly crooked so i bent it back and put the CPU back on, dug up my old intel stock cooler that was on my 4690K untill last christmas and to my surprise it just clicked right in! not too surprising seeing as its socket 1156 and all 115x coolers have the same mounting holes i realised aftwerwards but it was good that i had something that worked for cooling. i took out a stick of RAM from my main PC and put it in the motherboard and i just got boot loops, i tried a LOT of things but no matter what i would not POST properly and just looped when it started to load the BIOS. anyway turns out i had RAM that was wrong in almost all the possible ways whilst still beeing DDR3, motherboard cant take RAM with more then 4GB per stick and it can be almost any speed EXEPT 1866Mhz and i have 2x8GB of 1866MHz RAM in my main PC lol. looked arond for RAM for a while but didnt really find an apealing deal until i found a guy selling an I5 680 and 2x2GB of 1600MHz CL9 RAM and i instantly put $40+shipping and got it. i did over pay for that deal, should have put  $35+shipping but whatever i really didnt want anyone else getting it before me so i put in a high bid. i just got the parts a few hours ago and started work, tested that it boots into BIOS with both the I3 and I5 and that went fine tho the I3 got unhappy when i used the XMP profile to get the RAM up too 1600Mhz but it worked fine with the I5 as far as i could tell. now came the hard part, mounting the motherboard. i had taken out the old custom server board that was in there which was just about the most dificult thing i have ever done concerning PC parts but i got it done but it litteraly took me 3 days of work to get just the old motherboard out and cleaning up the case a bit... anyway work continued today because the parts arived today so i spent 3h trying to find a way to mount up the mothetboard with more then one screw, something that turns out isnt possible because the custom board really was a custom job and nothing else is even close to using the same moutnign holes  atleast nothing i own. i got it mounted after a few hours but the final mount is really strange and now the motherboard is about 1.5cm lifted from the wall, its mounted with one screw and i screwed in some cardboard to make sure nothing was going to short itself out in the unpainted steel mount. whats remaining is to install the rest of the parts, PSU, HDD and GPU in some cool way or i could do it like a "normal" person and mount it in sensible places designed for the parts BUUUUUUT I COULD ALSO HAVE THE PSU IN THE FRONT OF THE CASEFOR MAXIMUM "WTF WHY???" FACTOR(yes.. its something i could actiually do, there is a huge space in the front where the PSU fits really nicely lol( one funny = one vote for front mount PSU lol)) then i just have to install windows 10 and test that its all fine and then i can get some sleep  hope there is still someone interested in this project still because i sure am enjoying it, thanks for reading this wall of text  

[Bananasplit_00]

UPDATE:

GPU is in and it took me over an hour to figure out the super stupid HDD mounting system lol, here are some pictures(sorry for the light ):

 

and yes, if i want to plug stuff into the motherboard i have to go through the old IO plate or PCI slots because i dont have time to dremmel them off if my dremel will even cut steel  anyway just booted into BIOS and checked and everything seems to be working fine and everything is detected like it should  im now a little closer to beeing done! 

[Bananasplit_00]

UPDATE:

here we go again... just as everything is going fine i start having boot problems... i just get one long continous beep right now and thats it, before i had a play with the memory config i didnt even get the BIOS to start loading and it just power cycled. well time to do shitloads of debugging and googling and asking the forum basically i guess  

[Bananasplit_00]

UPDATE:

 

ITS SOMEHOW BACK FROM THE GRAVE

 

so friend came over and i tried it again and after fiddleing around for a bit it works now  but it only shows one stick of RAM so i just have 2GB of RAM and im not really sure how thats going to turn out... im bringing 3 computers to the LAN, the "2.0" LAN PC but this time in a case and with only one GTX 660, the LAN PC 3.0 and my laptop if all else goes to shit or something... anyway it is currently installing CS:GO and seems fine in windows 10 right now but as i said, only 2GB of RAM seems to be working, might be something i can change in the BIOS and i will check that later. i will also try to get some overclocking on the LAN PC 3.0 with the switches on the motherboard and XMP for the RAM if that has reverted back from 1600MHz. i dont have any new pictures for you seeing as it looks basically identical now, it just works instead of not lol. 

[Bananasplit_00]

UPDATE:

well... the LAN PC 3.0 died at the LAN party, this thread is kind of dead and im probably just going to make a new one where i put all of my computer adventures and stuff. im going to try to source a new motherboard but not before testing this one a bit more, might have been shorting out becaue i didnt put enough electriacl tape on the metal in the case or something but it had pretty bad problems with BSODs and crashes right after loading windows and it only found 1.9GB of RAM too which is only one stick(tho it said it was running dual chanel somehow...) anyway its dead for now, il post a link to a new thread here if anyone ever looks here again lol

[Alec M]

At first I was like: Hoooly $H!T that doesn't have good specs, come on - a 8800gt in 2016?,  and by the end it was actually decent!

Great work, hope to see more!

 

My original build (Yeah, it's worse than your original, and I was using it last year before I built RedPower ) Core2 Duo E6550, Sapphire Radeon HD 3650, 250W PSU, and a horrible lenovo motherboard.

 

Happy building!

[Bananasplit_00]

17 hours ago, Alec M said:

At first I was like: Hoooly $H!T that doesn't have good specs, come on - a 8800gt in 2016?,  and by the end it was actually decent!

Great work, hope to see more!

 

My original build (Yeah, it's worse than your original, and I was using it last year before I built RedPower ) Core2 Duo E6550, Sapphire Radeon HD 3650, 250W PSU, and a horrible lenovo motherboard.

 

Happy building!

glad you enjoyed, right now im trying to see if a GTX 680 is working but im getting no display out so im actiually thinkin the MSI H55-E33 motherboard is dead and gone now  will test more but its not looking bright for the motherboard

[Alec M]

3 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

glad you enjoyed, right now im trying to see if a GTX 680 is working but im getting no display out so im actiually thinkin the MSI H55-E33 motherboard is dead and gone now  will test more but its not looking bright for the motherboard

You can  get lga 755 motherboards on ebay for about $20, if you're willing to bid, or a similar price if you look hard.

[Bananasplit_00]

24 minutes ago, Alec M said:

You can  get lga 755 motherboards on ebay for about $20, if you're willing to bid, or a similar price if you look hard.

LGA 775 boards are cheap but the I5 680 that i had in the 3.0 is LGA 1156 but those are pretty cheap too, and i prefer to get from within Sweden seeing as my paypal is on MEGA lockdown after sevral attacks and shipping would be more expensive then the product itself, i think i bring this up in the original post but whatever thats like 400 words or something lol

[JEMGarber]

On 10/06/2016 at 1:15 PM, Bananasplit_00 said:

UPDATE:

More stuff has happened:

i strapped a 140mm fan to the 8800GT and spliced it into a 12V molex cable and now the card runs nice and cool and there is no thermal throttling  it still seems to crash though so i need to look more into that. might have been just because i was playing at 1280x720 with black-bars instead of 1280x1024 but im not sure. more investigation is needed, anyway here is some more "eye candy"(not really though, looks pretty crap tbh  )

 

 

This GPU cooler mod is Linus ghetto style. Nicely done

[Bananasplit_00]

17 hours ago, JEMGarber said:

This GPU cooler mod is Linus ghetto style. Nicely done

that GPU is still in my clauset  i dont even know what to do with it now, the Q6600+motherboard and RAM dont have a case and i have a spare GTX 660 thats going in that if i ever get a case for it so im left with one modded GPU that can barely play games at 1080p  il probably sell it off to someone

[TheCamba]

Very well done.  LGA 755 boards aren't too bad.  They can still handle their own.  Maybe not BF1, but still fun to play around with.  

[Bananasplit_00]

1 minute ago, TheCamba said:

Very well done.  LGA 755 boards aren't too bad.  They can still handle their own.  Maybe not BF1, but still fun to play around with.  

bit late to the party as i just put basically the LAN PC 1.0 into a case to be put up for sale lol, its evolved quite a bit from even the last part of this thread, i decided i didnt want to wright an A4 worth of text every time i spend 10h on it so if you want ocational updates just follow me here on the forum and you will get notifications about my status updates that sometimes have something with the LAN PC to do  

[TheCamba]

1 minute ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

bit late to the party as i just put basically the LAN PC 1.0 into a case to be put up for sale lol, its evolved quite a bit from even the last part of this thread, i decided i didnt want to wright an A4 worth of text every time i spend 10h on it so if you want ocational updates just follow me here on the forum and you will get notifications about my status updates that sometimes have something with the LAN PC to do  

 

Will do!

[Bananasplit_00]

For my 10, 000th post i decided to necro this thread with an update. 

 

The LAN PC is getting picked apart and sold in pieces. Cooler went to a friend for $20 already and Il put up the other stuff for sale once I get home in another week or so. Except the HDD, that thing I'm keeping lol. This entire project has fueled my dislike for Asus with both the original Asus P5 NE-SLI not working with SLI and the Asus Sabertooth p67 having a broken 16x slot and various other problems. The person who helped me most with what to do was some guy on the Linux Mint reddit, honestly more helpful than Asus support lol. Still have the original RAM used in 1.0 and I will try to sell it but if I can't then I'll take the heatsinks for Northern Bee if I can Anyway that's about it for this necro, most updates are in my status updates if you care. 

 

Specs :

CPU: I7 2600 

GPU: GTX 660

Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth p67

RAM: HyperX Genesis 2x2GB

PSU: 500W generic fire hazard

HDD: WD RaptorX 10000rpm 150GB SATA