The 2009 AMD Beast

[periodic.insanity]

 Hello nerds! I'm here to show off a build that is mostly complete but will be subject to some upgrades in the near future. I called it the resurrection build(yay cliche) because I am using a bunch of parts that I had lying around, some for 4-5 years, and rebuilding them into The 2009 AMD Beast.
 Our story starts with me lying in bed, for some reason thinking of computer parts(essentially porn for me) and I thought, "Well I have that motherboard. I have that 965be, ddr2 memory(which turned out to be dead), and that computer he has is just sitting there doing nothing." So the next day I asked my dad if I could pull out that pentium 4 and give him something that won't flip out on windows 7 simply browsing the web. Of course he said yes, and so I took a look inside to see what I had to work with. Picture form:

 

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-The case is probably an early 2000 model, my dad said he got it from where he used to work. Remember when they used to make everything inside sharp as F#$%? No rubberised coating here! These are after I cleaned it. I really wish I had photos from before, you can see some of that in the videos below but a before and after is always awesome to see. Imagine years of cigarette smoke, dust, hair from cats, etc. because those poor filters were brown. Live and learn I guess.

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-It was a pleasant surprise to see a recent Corsair GS600, apparently my dad had gone through some bad power supplies and bought a nice one finally.

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-There was a sound card in there because the on-board audio was "F@%$ing garbage" not very good.

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-This is an old AGP Ati Radeon 4650 1gb DDR3 video card that I originally got with the computer I bought from Ibuypower many many years ago. Won't ever buy a pre-built again although the NZXT Tempest case is still in use

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-Here is this old Motherboard and processor, didn't bother to separate them.
-Oh yeah and a crappy old HDD and dvd drive that I'm reusing 

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Those 4 pin molex connectors were like fused into the devices, I forgot how hard it is to not pull out your damn graphics card while trying to unwedge those things. Anyways, I took it all out, cleaned it with alcohol while drinking other alcohol, washed the filters and let it all dry overnight.

Here is everything I'm putting in as one pic and list:
Motherboard: Asus m3a78-cm
Processor: AMD Phenom II 965BE
Memory: 8gb Hynix DDR2 800mhz
Power Supply: REUSING Corsair GS600
Storage Drives: REUSING 250gb WD and DVD Drive
Sound Card: Onboard Motherboard
Video Card: AMD/ATI XFX 4870 512mb GDDR5 PCI-E
Misc: REUSING 2 Fans back in.

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And after several hours that included: fighting with that garbage AMD stock cooler, cutting myself on the case, trying to find a way to not have a mess of cables with a non-modular PSU, remembering the io shield at the last second, and having to look up the manual for ASUS weird placement of front hookups...

its still a damn mess, but its way better than it was before! And I installed that back fan wrong, but its crap anyways and barely spins.

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First power on resulted in going WTF to discover the RAM was bad, the ram spots on this mobo are picky as hell, its all around weird because it supports ECC, so anyways, got 2 more sticks to fill it to it's max of 8gb. Got through the bios and windows 7 64 bit installed, ran what benchmarks I could (this is like DX10.1 ish hardware so no DX11)! Crazy seeing it produce near playable framerates in Tomb Raider 2013(1920*1080 high, no vsync/AA, 25.6MIN,31.2AVG,35.8MAX) Dirt 3 was a breeze never dipping below 50 on high, CS:GO was around 80-120 average at med-high settings but I didn't play any huge servers. There are some problems however:

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These two damn things sound like vacuum cleaners when the going gets rough, and here in 2016 it gets rough real quick. Plus that damn 4870 maxes out at 87 degrees C which I know is fine for the card but near 90 has always made me uncomfortable. Soooo I took that heatsink off and replaced the thermal paste with MX-4 and it dropped down to 83-84 C max, although to be clear when I say max tamp I haven't run any full torture tests on the hardware because I don't want to blow it up (today at least). The cpu cooler kept it a cool 59 C max(enough that I don't think this cpu is fully powered on this mobo however with one cpu power connector?!) in a quick cinebench, with score 338 which seems maybe a little low but it works. Again, still sounds like a vacuum cleaner.

 

On to future plans for this build. I want to get a motherboard on the cheap that has some USB3.0 ports and doesn't worry me with just the 1 4-pinned cpu power connector, so probably a cheap 990fx. I need to put a different cpu cooler in there, its seriously unbearable, worse than the graphics card blower fan for sure, very whiney. Looking at a cheap one there to, not trying to spend a bunch on this but I do want it to STFU sometimes. Finally some new fans would help the air flow in this case a ton, and make me worry a lot less about the long term future of this build. He could probably use a cheap 1tb hard drive or small ssd boot drive to replace the cackling joker thats in there now. My dad mainly plays Rome:Total War (actually he founded the mod Roma Surrectum 1 and 2 and is working on "3" or whatever they call it) so the hardware is easily powerful enough to run that, I just want this build to last a decent amount of time. Will update next week because I will probably order those fans and cpu cooler soon, and if i see a cheap 990 board well... which of us can resist taking it all apart just to put it back together again

 

Let me know what you guys think, how is the post formatting, is the content interesting, etc.

 

For those who TL:DR there are 3 videos (which will take you longer to watch than read lol), my awkward first filming and editing experience. They actually get better from one to the other I think!

 

 

[PCgamer324]

Holy Shit how has no-one seen this!  Phenom? and a 4870? Glorious!

[periodic.insanity]

Thanks man! I know, I was gaming CS:GO on this wondering why I ever upgraded. Price/Performance was AMD all the way. Hell that 965 still beats modern i3 procs.