server gaming pc [BUILD]Old server as a gaming PC...didn't turn out well.

imranisak · September 24, 2016

I did something similar Linus did.I took an old server, threw in a 570 Gainward GS and made a decent gaming PC...well, I thought it was decent. Here's what happened.

Some local shop was selling old server parts, and dad and I decided it's time to upgrade our now vintage c2d rig. At first, we got an MSI 9661 with two 6-core Opterons clocked at 2GHz (I don't remember the exact model). In Cinabench, it scored 600 points, not bad.

But things quickly went out of hand. The heatsinks were crap and the CPUs easily reached 105C before shutting down. And, no matter what I did...used different fans, dug in the BIOS, used loads of different software etc. I couldn't get the fans to speed up. AND I noticed that my USB devices were failing. Turns out it fired all, yes ALL of my USB devices. It even damaged my phone so I can't copy any files via USB now. I sent the MB back, and got the same MSI 9661 MB, this time with two quad-core Opterons at 2.1 GHz. Things were going well...I still wasn't able to make the fans spin up, but we've put some bad-ass heatsinks which kept the CPUs under 60-65C even when maxed out for 60 minutes. Rest of the components were 32 GB of DDR2 ECC ram (66? MHz) and a GTX 570 Gainward GS, 512 GB WDB HDD. Things were going well for 2 months. Since it was winter, that thing put out so much heat into my room I didn't need heating. Really!

But...

Things went bad soon. The PC would just freeze up and hang, forcing me to reset it by holding the power button. Long story short, the MOBO was making a contact with the case, making a short, and freezing the system.
Anyways
I took the MOBO out, and put it on my table. I took all the bits I need from the case, like front audio and USB (THIS MOBO HAD NO AUDIO JACK AT THE BACK!) Even theh, when I turn on the PC, when it was counting the RAM, it would just freeze. I had to restart it 2-5 times till I got it running.
Solution?
I never turned it off. Really! I turned it off every 10ish days, just to give it a brake. After that, it became more and more unstable. It would also just randomly slow down, despite the temps being well withing reason. It would also freeze when I plug in a USB device. Then it would..."unfreeze" when I unplug it. Sometimes, it didn't do that...with the same USB device and port.
So i just got pissed and sent the whole thing back.

Cable managment was also a bit of a pain, since the connectors were in awkward places.

Performance?

It performed well...mostly.

It literary slowed down with time. It was especially noticeable in Sony Vegas. I reinstalled Windows a few times. No viruses.

But it did game well, tho. In Crysis 3, Full HD on low settings, I got 55-65 FPS and 45 on medium...

And I did reorient the fans from that picture and video.

I even made a video about it.
(Sorry for the rough cut, I have no idea what happened with Vegas that day.)

►►►https://youtu.be/WT6TfkzMURQ