Trying to build a PC myself for the first time - with this ancient case

[Bramimond]

Measurements

The slider where the motherboard gets mounted: L:34cm, H:33cm and the part where stuff gets mounted is 12cm ('til the screw and then an extra 3cm metal. But that's not usable space. It's so you can fix the slider in place with screws from the outside.)

The lower part of the case, where the slider gets moved in (interior):  L:36cm,H:31cm, W:14cm (from slider mount point to wall of case)

 

The entire case (exterior):L:39cm (or 42cm if the plastic cover counts), H:62cm, W:19cm

 

The slider has seven opening slots for cards.

 

Side note: I don't think there's any need for a dedicated graphics card and for the SSD with the operating system anything above 128GB is overkill.

[mxk]

2 hours ago, brob said:

 

No. H370 has a few more resources than B360. Most particularly it supports both SATA and PCIe  RAID while the B360 does not. 

ohh, ok. I thought that h370 was better but I wasn't sure so thats why I asked. Good to know though!

[Bramimond]

I was researching about those SATA ports and stumbled upon the concept of port multipliers. Is this as simple as with USB HUBs? I don't need speedy access, only reliable continuous access. USB HUBs always disconnected my hard drives, is that different with port multipliers?

 

I also found alternate frames for 5,25 that support 4x 2,5 drives, which is awesome. (Initially four drives is all I need, but my space requirements are growing at about 4TB per year and I'm currently at around 14TB.)

 

If this works, I'll only need to figure out the cooling, which will probably be the hardest part,..

[brob]

Consider going with a motherboard like https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming/index.asp#Overview. It has 10 SATA III ports.

 

I'd suggest using high capacity hdd, something over 10TB.

 

[Bramimond]

This looks amazing. Thank you very much.  ...but there doesn't seem to be a way to connect a screen?

 

Also, it says that it supports Ryzen (AMD). Does that mean I have to go with one of those CPUs or are the other parts you suggested earlier still compatible?

 

The trouble I see with 10TB HDDs is that they only come as 3.5, so I can have one of them in the big slots or I can have four 2.5s with 4TB each, coming in at 16TB per slot. Another problem with drives that big is data rescue, when they eventually fail. It just takes forever.

[brob]

The X370 motherboard uses AMD Ryzen cpu.and requires a discrete gpu.

 

2.5" hdd are designed for laptops, not file servers. While it is true that recovering 4TB is faster than recovering 16TB, recovering four 4TB drives will take as long as or longer than one 16TB drive. One way of reducing the impact of drive failures is to use RAID arrays, preferably 1 or 10.

[Bramimond]

Is it compatible with some cheap GPU that will fit in my case? And how do people usually find the compatibility out? Had some bad experience around 2011. I wanted to upgrade from VGA to DVI and I had a DVI card lying around, but just putting it into the motherboard did nothing. Wasn't recognized. Not sure if that was because the card was incompatible or because of Linux shenanigans.

 

About the drives, I'll hope that not all four will fail at the same time. I have four 4TB 2,5 drives lying around already. A 3,5 one I would have to buy first and as far as I can see, it's less expensive to buy 4TB drives that are about $100 per drive, than it is to buy something like 12TB drives, that are about $400 per drive.

 

Also, will fans (for mounting on the case) generally be compatible with motherboards or will I have to decide on the motherboard first and then look for fans?

 

[brob]

Use pcpartpicker.com to assemble a build list. The tool does basic compatibility checking. 

 

Starting on page 8 of https://web.aub.edu.lb/pub/docs/atx_201.pdf is the definition of motherboard mount points. You can verify that the motherboard tray in your case meets the spec.

[Bramimond]

So I've been playing around with pcpartpicker and came up with the following. Not sure if the power supply will support as many hard drives as the motherboard does, though. Or if the NoFan cooling makes sense.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 7 1800X 3.6GHz 8-Core Processor  (€239.80 @ Alza)
CPU Cooler: NoFan - CR-80EH Fanless CPU Cooler  (€59.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Motherboard: ASRock - Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming ATX AM4 Motherboard  (€239.90 @ Caseking)
Memory: G.Skill - Aegis 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  (€126.89 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: ADATA - XPG SX6000 256GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  (€63.13 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Asus - Radeon R5 230 2GB Video Card  (€64.22 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Ultra Titanium 650W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  (€172.84 @ Mindfactory)
Total: €966.68
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-11-04 18:36 CET+0100

[brob]

PSU should be fine.

 

Given that the case is going to be quite warm inside, do you really want a fanless cpu cooler?

[Bramimond]

I'd like a silent PC, but noticed that the fan is only for CPUs up to 65W and the one chosen above has 95W, so something else is needed and I don't really want to mess around with liquid cooling. Maybe https://de.pcpartpicker.com/product/8pgPxr/noctua-cpu-cooler-nhd9l

 

[Bramimond]

Is there a difference between the motherboard here

https://www.caseking.de/asrock-x370-professional-gaming-amd-x370-mainboard-sockel-am4-mbar-232.html

and the motherboard here

https://www.amazon.de/dp/B06X9MP4ML/

 

PCpartpicker doesn't have the amazon one listed, but it's cheaper and looks identical to me.

 

EDIT: I'll just assume it's the same one. Updated list:

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 7 1800X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor  (€253.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
CPU Cooler: Noctua - NH-D9L 46.4 CFM CPU Cooler  (€49.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: G.Skill - Value 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2666 Memory  (€131.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: ADATA - XPG SX6000 256GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  (€63.13 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Asus - Radeon R5 230 2 GB Video Card  (€56.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Ultra Titanium 650 W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  (€175.85 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case Fan: Noctua - NF-R8 redux-1200 21.1 CFM  80mm Fan  (€10.03 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case Fan: Noctua - NF-R8 redux-1200 21.1 CFM  80mm Fan  (€10.03 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Other: ASRock X370 PROFESSIONAL GAMING Socket AM4/AMD ATX Motherboard   (€196.94 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €948.67
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-11-06 21:03 CET+0100

Edited November 6, 2018 by Bramimond

[Bramimond]

...so all the parts are finally here and I build the PC, but when I turn it on, it stays on for a couple of seconds and then turns itself off. Only to immediately turn itself on again, to then repeat this cycle, while the MoBo shows the errors 3F and 4B.

 

Building a PC is harder than I thought it would be,...

[grss1982]

1 hour ago, Bramimond said:

...so all the parts are finally here and I build the PC, but when I turn it on, it stays on for a couple of seconds and then turns itself off. Only to immediately turn itself on again, to then repeat this cycle, while the MoBo shows the errors 3F and 4B.

 

Building a PC is harder than I thought it would be,...

Do you an internal speaker attached?  If so any beeps being heard?

 

If you're building on your own try assemble everything outside of the case.  I mean yank the motherboard from the case and place it on top of motherboard box. Then have just the PSU, motherboard, processor, 1 stick of ram, keyboard, mouse and monitor connected to one another.. Try to boot up with just those components and work your way from there.

 

 

[Bramimond]

I tried attaching the speaker according to the manual, but it doesn't make any beeps, not even when booting without RAM, so maybe the speaker is dead. Mouse and keyboard don't get power (their lights don't turn on). After clearing CMOS I get different codes showing up on the motherboard, though: C8 - 01 - 1F

 

Apparently those mean:

C8: CMOS shutdown

01: NMI disabled; Start CPU flag test

1F: Ready to initialize video system

 

I don't have much else inside the case anyway. Not sure what improvement there is to expect doing it outside the case. Wouldn't it be easier to just remove the SSD? That would leave me with PSU, motherboard, processor (+cooler), 1 stick of RAM, a discrete graphics card (since without one I can't attach a monitor) and mouse+keyboard, but those stay dead.

[grss1982]

9 minutes ago, Bramimond said:

I tried attaching the speaker according to the manual, but it doesn't make any beeps, not even when booting without RAM, so maybe the speaker is dead. Mouse and keyboard don't get power (their lights don't turn on). After clearing CMOS I get different codes showing up on the motherboard, though: C8 - 01 - 1F

 

I don't have much else inside the case anyway. Not sure what improvement there is to expect doing it outside the case. Wouldn't it be easier to just remove the SSD? That would leave me with PSU, motherboard, processor (+cooler), 1 stick of RAM, a discrete graphics card (since without one I can't attach a monitor) and mouse+keyboard, but those stay dead.

It's to eliminate the possibility of a short.

 

If not even beeping with no RAM attached could mean a dead mobo.

 

Try reseating the processor.

[Bramimond]

Short shouldn't be possible, since the motherboard is attached to a slider, that can slide outside the case and on that slider is seated exactly where it should be. Since the case is ancient, I'd rather bet on a dead speaker than on a dead mobo. Or maybe I connected the speaker thing wrong.

 

I already worked through this, fyi: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/261145-31-perform-steps-posting-post-boot-video-problems

[Bramimond]

Yeah, the speaker was dead. I connected one of those removable speakers from another old PC and now I get beeps. Three short ones. Error code is now C8 - 01 and then it restarts and repeats.

Another thing I changed was moving the graphics card a slot up, so it is now closeer to the CPU.

 

EDIT: SOLVED

 

Nevermind and thanks for keeping a conversation up with me, which helped me trouble shoot even more. Moving the graphics card up a slot and than changing RAM seating did the trick. Having a speaker that does the beeping really helped, too. Apparently three short beeps mean RAM issues.

 

Really glad I didn't have to play the parts replacement game to see which part was bad. I also documented the process with a couple of pictures which I will post probably tomorrow (it's evening around here).

 

And thanks again for helping me with all this, otherwise I wouldn't have build my very first own PC.

[grss1982]

6 hours ago, Bramimond said:

Yeah, the speaker was dead. I connected one of those removable speakers from another old PC and now I get beeps. Three short ones. Error code is now C8 - 01 and then it restarts and repeats.

Another thing I changed was moving the graphics card a slot up, so it is now closeer to the CPU.

 

EDIT: SOLVED

 

Nevermind and thanks for keeping a conversation up with me, which helped me trouble shoot even more. Moving the graphics card up a slot and than changing RAM seating did the trick. Having a speaker that does the beeping really helped, too. Apparently three short beeps mean RAM issues.

 

Really glad I didn't have to play the parts replacement game to see which part was bad. I also documented the process with a couple of pictures which I will post probably tomorrow (it's evening around here).

 

And thanks again for helping me with all this, otherwise I wouldn't have build my very first own PC.

AWESOME!

 

Glad you got this settled, man.

 

It's a pain to do but troubleshooting via beep codes is the way to go in this situation. Makes you wonder why motherboard manufacturers don't have the speaker integrated still.  Cut down on costs I guess?  But the weird thing is entry level motherboard in the past have the speaker integrated.  Thus I'd expect mid or high end stuff should have it by default. 

 

EDIT: Was working when making my comments above. So forgive me if I did not keep up. hehehehe

[Bramimond]

If the speaker is integrated, replacing a defect one may prove difficult. But they could have one of those replaceable ones inside the box... if I hadn't had another old PC around to test the speaker...

 

 

Anyway, it's a bit late, but here are some pictures:

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

As it turned out, that was the wrong slot for the graphics card and that speaker there on the case is broken. 

 

Spoiler

Cab

 

 

 

 

Cable management,... my first try. Didn't like it, though, and changed things up. Routed a cable around the backside of the case. Still looks messy.

 

 

 

[grss1982]

On 12/9/2018 at 7:42 PM, Bramimond said:

If the speaker is integrated, replacing a defect one may prove difficult. But they could have one of those replaceable ones inside the box... if I hadn't had another old PC around to test the speaker...

 

 

Anyway, it's a bit late, but here are some pictures:

  Hide contents

 

  Hide contents

 

 

Looking good! Too bad no matching color for the optical drives.  It would have complimented it's sleeper build look.