"Ghetto Fabulous", a sleeper/all bite no bark build

[KeltonDSMer]

Quick history of why I have this case and why I decided to put modern HW in it. My father had a long term project in Sydney when I was in 4th Grade ~1999. The family decided to move there for the better part of that year. A coworker of his stayed at our house while we were away, they gave us this PC as a "thank you" when we got back.

 

I used this slot1 pentium II equipped workhorse throughout middle/high school. I never have had the heart to trash the parts since it was the first computer I got to keep in my room.

 

I honestly didn't know DIY PCs were a thing until 2013, despite having used one for years. It makes me sad, the PC I bought from Dell in '06 for College was such a ripoff...I paid over $1000 for a Pentium D and a base NV GC. I was part of the consumer base that purchased based on MHz numbers and didn't know AMD even existed during their heyday . Had I even been presented with the option for a different CPU architecture, I would have likely learned about the differences and been 10 years ahead of where I am now in my PC DIY experience. I'll always be a bit bitter towards Intel for bribing OEMs and fucking over the whole industry, and screw you Dell for taking the cheap CPUs in trade for not offering AMD chips!

 

Anyway, this build is all about stuffing no thrills, bang for the buck HW into an old shitty tank of a case. I've never been to a LAN event, but my thought was to put something together for a LAN party that would have people thinking "wtf is that?".

 

Parts (all new from MC):

-i3 6100 ->$109

-Asrock Z170m Pro4s ->$45 after MIR/$30 bundle discount at MC

-bx200 240GB  ->$55

-crucial ddr4 c16 2400 2x8GB ->$43 (holy shit that was cheap)

-EVGA B600 -> $37 after MIR (was the cheapest 80+ bronze they had, cheaper than cx450) (I really should have purchased a modular PSU for this, but $$$$$$)

-R9 270 as a placeholder until I can compare AIB rx480s to AIB 1060s

 

There were no surprises putting this together, I just went for it and didn't even test the HW out of the case.

 

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They don't make 'em like they used to....28lbs lol

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The black 5.25" cover is just there temporarily. The 2nd beige CD drive is too long and interferes with the RAM, so I'll find a beige cover to replace the black. I wanted the two drives because that's what you did 10-15 years ago...read from one while writing to the other!

 

I took the time to hook up all the front panel switches and lights, it feels AMAZING pressing that old beast of a switch and seeing all the old school lights start blinking away

 

I'm not about to spend $$$ on a cooler for $100 chip, so I OCed it as far as it would go on the stock cooler at a voltage I tested to be safe temperature-wise. Once the BCLK is adjusted, the temps sensors are disabled. To make sure my temps are safe, I kept increasing voltage at stock clocks until I saw mid-70's running R15. This was at about 1.2V. Since temp scales with voltage much more than clockspeed, I figured this is a pretty safe way of finding the thermal limits without being able to see core temps while overclocked.

 

Oh, and the bios that was shipped with the board did not allow me to OC without it killing the multiplier. I needed to flash a beta bios off of Asrock's site before I could OC.

 

Results are pretty solid in R15, 14% increased performance for a 13% clockspeed increase! I think the CPU has a lame MemController because I had to keep dropping the divider as clocks went up. I know the DIMMS can handle it because I tested up to 2800MHZ @1.25V at stock CPU clocks.

 

176CB single thread, that's about what haswell does at 4.7Ghz! 452 multi thread is not too shabby either.

 

stock

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OC

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Thanks for checking it out! I'll update with a new picture once I find that beige colored 5.25" bay cover and new graphics card.