Bet

y11971alex · March 11, 2015

Firstly, a brief introduction about myself. I'm a full-time university student living in Toronto, mostly by myself, though my parents sometimes come to visit me with extended stays. My family has moved through 5 PCs in the past 2 years, all name-brand products, and all 5 have failed some of our most basic requirements -- system stability, multitasking, and overall ease of maintenance. This January, we were fed up with a HP all-in-one with the somewhat senseless configuration of a dual core, 1.8 gHz processor coupled with 8 gB of main memory. The computer would not run smoothly no matter what measures we took to that end; we suffered daily crashes in lieu memory stop errors, virus infections, and general irresponsiveness of the computer itself. I am not a heavy computer user by any standard of the word -- a spot of Photoshop and Fireworks is the heaviest load that I put on that all-in-one at any given time, and on occasion MapleStory, but it simply wasn't up to this task. I could recall that my PC in 2006 ran MapleStory with admirable fluidity.

I told my family that the components used to build the computer was mostly to blame for the computer. The discussion devolved from a polite one into a highly confrontational debate, ending in a bet between my father and myself, about the quality of components. I argued that components of good quality will always come out to be a good computer, while poor ones would result in a build of poor quality. My father argued that new components were more important than good components. I therefore laid down a bet that for $1000 I could fashion out a computer of better quality than the 2014 HP that sat silly in the study, with main logic and memory dating from 2006 or before, with storage components being unlimited in era.

For the rest of January I worked on getting a feasible design, revisiting specification sheets that I would have drooled over in 2006. My father told me that I could access his old computer components, which he salvaged from a legal firm liquidating computers. I pulled together the design in late January and ordered the parts that I could not find on eBay. Specifications --

Processor: (2) Xeon X5355 @ 2.67 gHz w/ 8 mB L2 cache

Processor Fan: Intel's OEM fan (bought)

Motherboard: Intel S5000XVNSATA (bought)

Main Memory: 16 gB Samsung FB-DIMM ECC DDR2 @ 667 mHz

Graphics: Quadro NVS 300 by PNY w/ 512 mB GRAM DDR2 (this might be early 2007, but who knows)

Boot Drive: Hitachi 10,000 RPM 160 gB (bought)

Data Drive: WD 7200 RPM 500 gB

Power: EVGA 650W G (bought)

Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro Black (bought)

Total $ spent: $600 or so.

I ran into significant problems dealing with the slightly dated components. Few local stores sold parts for Socket J (LGA771), so I had to improvise when the screws on the heatsinks wouldn't bite snuggly into the backplates on the motherboard. A few parts from eBay didn't work when they turned up, so I had to get them replaced. My original Thermaltake power supply didn't have enough 12V plugs for the motherboard, which I suppose is my fault for not reading the board's literature carefully, which stated that it needed both an independent CPU power supply (8-pin) and an additional 4-pin 12V power. The whole build took me about 5 weeks to complete.

The finished product (pictures addenda) was powered on about a week ago. I was amazed by its performance¹ in the Adobe suite, though ostensibly I had no particularly heavy workload for it to carry out. I had opened multiple browsers, videos playing, Photoshop and Fireworks, MapleStory, and MS Word, and it still ran smooth as a nut, with CPU power consumption below 25%.

I'll conclude by shouting out to all the kind people on this site that have helped me win my bet on this thread http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/321621-half-completed-pc-w-parts-missing/#entry4371699. I thank you for your good analysis of the situation, which admittedly is out of the ordinary and perhaps slightly idiosyncratic to a history major student.

Well, what can I say? It's a rewarding experiment that yielded me an unexpected treasure. I think I'll make this machine my PC for the time being. Comments welcome!