Scrap Yard Wars for a Friend in Need

[thebootknifer]

Hello Linus Media Group and fans,

 

My name is Brendin and I'm here to present a scrap yard type build I am about to send off to a friend.

 

First I would like to preface this build with a story about my friends. 

Nearly two years ago my best friend Zach introduced me to a guy named Steve that he had met through a game of League of Legends.

Since that time Steve has been the most friendly person I've ever met; the three of us chat/play games 4-5 times a week, we aren't afraid to share any personal problems or achievements between each other. Think of it as an online support group for one another.

Zach and I live in Edmonton, and Steve lives in the States. We always ask him to come visit us because we feel there would be a lot for him to see and do when all the festivals that run during the summer time, and even if you hate shopping you still need to check out West Edmonton Mall! Although we were sorta kinda joking about him flying up here just to see us, he really thought about it and he decided he was going to save up his money, build a new computer and possibly make a trip to Edmonton to hang out with us, cool right!? 

 

Well, all of those plans are now on hold, for a couple of days he mysteriously vanished off the face of the earth. Zach and Steve normally stay in contact through snap-chat because we had a ranked team in League of Legends, so that was the easiest way to get a hold of him when we didn't see him online. When he finally replied, he returns with the crappiest news of all time, he was in the hospital because he was diagnosed with leukemia.

 

Thankfully he has health insurance, but the entirety of his wages goes towards living expenses and the medication for treating leukemia. He caught the leukemia in time, it seems with the medication it will stay in remission and not effect his life expectancy (a silver lining i suppose).

 

Now Steve cannot make a trip to Canada, or at the very least build a new pc. His current rig is an old dual core athlon, with a cheap 512mb graphics card from early 2007/09 doesn't seem to run anything other than moba's. The HDD is old and the pc sometimes hates it when he tries to run a game and discord at the same time. It's slow, frustrating and sounds like the pc is on its last leg with the problems it's been giving him.

With Christmas coming around the corner, and myself having consistent 30-40hr work weeks, I finally have some disposable income after being in school for the last 5 years. Zach and I decided to put together a "scrap yard wars" type build with a budget of $300 split between us to surprise Steve with a brand spankin' old but new PC! The build is complete now, and I hope to ship it to him tomorrow, he has no idea what is coming. All he knows is that we are sending him a gift in the mail. I'm very excited for his reaction.

For the last two weeks I kept a close eye on Kijiji for any deals on used pc parts. Here is what I found.

I decided to search for the cpu/mobo first, as I feels that would be the hardest part, you rarely find compatible cpu/mobo's on the Edmonton Kijij being sold at the same time, Unless its an entire prebuilt PC.

Oh boy I think I struck gold on day one.

Someone was selling the Linus Tech Tips Scrap Yard Wars cliche build!! I found a listing for a Q6600 CPU with a motherboard and 6gb of ram for $80!
It had 2x (2GB) of Patriot Ram and 2x (1GB) of crucial DDR2 ram for a total of 6gb, perfect! More than 4gb thankfully, but not quite 8. Oh well! He threw in a 500gb HDD and DVD drive for $25, so I took that just in case I needed it.
The motherboard is an EVGA nForce 780i! This thing was high quality back in the day! If I remember reading the manual correctly, it has (3) 16x PCI-E slots, that's crazy! Anyone reading this should check out this board online, It had to have been a beast back in its day.

 

Now it was time for a video card, I found an HD 6850 for $40, I thought it would be able to handle Overwatch on Med/low settings. I was wrong, oh so very wrong. I didn't think the 6850 would be so pathetic. It's back on Kijiji and my search began for another video card. People kept flaking out, no one wanted to meet up, or they made no effort to schedule a time. I found a 690 for $100! But it sold pretty quickly after the ad was posted, sad life.

I found some over priced used cards all over the place, then I found 3 750ti's for $70-$100/ea. One guy was selling two, he said he would sell me one, but he stopped contacting me after a while, then I found another guy selling some weird off brand 750ti from a new dell desktop he bought. The card was hardly used, if at all. I managed to get this from him for $80.

 

I forgot I had my brother's old Corsair HX650 PSU in my closet, he needed a new one because he upgraded his PC to be VR ready, and he threw out the extra modular power cables when he build his pc a couple of years ago. So this cost me 0$.

 

There are literally zero cases for an ATX build on Kijiji for the Edmonton area! I didn't want to spend $70 at the local Memory Express. Thankfully Zach remembered he had his old torn apart PC in his mothers basement from 2009. That's just one more item we don't have to purchase!

The first iteration of this build was right after I picked up that 6850. I installed windows on that old 500gb HDD, nope, not good.
The drive is slow, clunky and was pinned to 100% usage just by loading up a program. I needed to figure something else out.

There was a 120gb SSD in my PC that I had for a W7 partition to run Rocksmith 2014, for some reason the guitar cable only works on windows 7. But I had not played in a while, so I decided to pull it out of my system and use it for this build. I decided I'll replace that later at my own cost. I found a brand new on on kijiji for $45, so we'll factor that price into this build.

That's better. An SSD in a budget build. So fast, so snappy, and overall a joy to worth with. I kept the 500gb drive in there for storage and general program/older game installations.
(I needed 2 SATA cables for $5 each, I seemed to have given all my extra ones away over the years).

 

I forgot old cases had no cable management holes, were sharp everywhere and poorly layed out. Don't judge my cables, I gave up. I'm tired and I work tomorrow morning haha. I want this shipped ASAP so he can enjoy it before Christmas.

You may notice the picture above has a different set of ram in it, It turns out the case Zach brought over had the motherboard ram and cpu in it, so I stole the 4gb of ram from Zach's system and swapped out the 2x (1GB) sticks we had. Now we have a total of 8GB!. Again, no additional cost.

 

Now that the PC is built, we have to overclock it right!?

Well, I'm not the greatest or most patient for overclocking, so I went for a small overclock.
I unlinked the FSB frequency in the BIOS so I didn't have to mess around with the RAM. I managed to boost the Q6600 from 2.4ghz up to 3.26 by turning up the frequency and setting the voltage to auto. It seems to give it enough voltage on its own. Prime 95 ran for a few hours with no problems (sorry I didn't do the PC master race 24-48 hr test). At 3.3ghz or higher prime 95 runs into problems after a couple of minutes. I decided to stop at 3.26.
It was loud and hot with the stock cooler, so I picked up a CoolerMaster Hyper T2 for $23.

 

The 750ti works pretty well, if you look in the above photo's it has some pitiful cooler on it, but it doesn't go over 71C when bench-marking it on Heaven Benchmark. I got about 225 extra on the Core clock, good enough I suppose. It gave me a few extra frames in Overwatch and Guild Wars 2. Both run at playable frame rates on high/med settings at 1080p. I wanted to go into a more in-depth overclocking adventure with base results and end results with more games, but I don't have the time right now. Sorry for the lack of content with regards to overclocking. 

 

CPU/RAM/Mobo = $80

Graphics Card = $80
SSD = $45
HDD = $20
Sata Cables = $10
CPU Cooler = $23
Everything else = Free!

That's a total of $258! Not bad If I say so myself. Shipping is going to hurt, that will most likely be $100.

Maybe this Christmas a group of 3-5 friends can pool together some money to buy used parts to build a PC for another friend in need.

Zach and I are planning a road trip to the States to meet up with Steve in August of 2017, nothing like a 14-16 hour drive! I'm excited to meet him in person, and I cannot wait for his reaction when he receives this PC.

Thanks for reading this build log, I hope everyone enjoys the holidays this year.

Edited November 28, 2016 by thebootknifer
Took out a duplicate photo, and fixed some of the poor writing, but not all of it.

[Waqas409]

You Should have modded a xeon x5460/x5470 or e5450 CPU Cheap ( costs Ranges from $20-$30 ), as you have the motherboard which is supported by lga 771 mod.

By doing that its gonan provide you the performance of Core i5-4th gen CPUs ( if you OC xeon to 4GHZ, which is quiet easy, if u have decent CPU Cooler, as you have 1 ). 
I'm Running one.
CPU: x5460 ( costs $20 )
CPU COOLER: Xigmatek Loki SD 963 ( Costs $15 )

MOBO: Asus P5K-Premium ( $21 )

RAM: 8GB ( $24)
GPU: GTX 960 ( $204 ) [ I bought it new before doing this mod ]
PSU 550W + Chase ( $21 )

[KuJoe]

This is very nice and very cool of you and your friend to do but my one issue would be the overclocking. I know you're trying to be nice but I don't like the idea of overclocking somebody else's PC, I would have left it at the stock clock and let them decide to overclock it or not. You're already using old, used hardware so now you're tempting fate with overclocking it without the recipients input. Even if it's stable, if Steve gets rid of his current PC and this one dies a few months down the road he'd be stuck without a PC. At least if you let him decide to OC it or not then nobody has to worry about whether the OC had any impact on the duration of the PC's life. In reality it's not a huge issue, I just think that overclocking should be decided by the user and not the builder. Just my two cents.

[thebootknifer]

14 minutes ago, Waqas409 said:

You Should have modded a xeon x5460/x5470 or e5450 CPU Cheap ( costs Ranges from $20-$30 ), as you have the motherboard which is supported by lga 771 mod.

By doing that its gonan provide you the performance of Core i5-4th gen CPUs ( if you OC xeon to 4GHZ, which is quiet easy, if u have decent CPU Cooler, as you have 1 ). 
I'm Running one.
CPU: x5460 ( costs $20 )
CPU COOLER: Xigmatek Loki SD 963 ( Costs $15 )

MOBO: Asus P5K-Premium ( $21 )

RAM: 8GB ( $24)
GPU: GTX 960 ( $204 ) [ I bought it new before doing this mod ]
PSU 550W + Chase ( $21 )

I never knew about those Xeon's. If I had known that I would have gone that route! Perhaps if I end up doing this in the future, or if I know of someone on a very strict budget I will tell them about this route. I wish I thought of it!

[matexoza]

i agree with waq i love any kind of gaming rig built on server hardware the things work incredibly well my little girls been jamming on one for a while now 

 

i would have oc it as well it doesn't matter if its for someone else or not really they spent the money might as well have the fun of pushing it to its limits  

[thebootknifer]

6 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

This is very nice and very cool of you and your friend to do but my one issue would be the overclocking. I know you're trying to be nice but I don't like the idea of overclocking somebody else's PC, I would have left it at the stock clock and let them decide to overclock it or not. You're already using old, used hardware so now you're tempting fate with overclocking it without the recipients input. Even if it's stable, if Steve gets rid of his current PC and this one dies a few months down the road he'd be stuck without a PC. At least if you let him decide to OC it or not then nobody has to worry about whether the OC had any impact on the duration of the PC's life. In reality it's not a huge issue, I just think that overclocking should be decided by the user and not the builder. Just my two cents.

I'm sure he will keep his old pc as a backup, as he won't be able to replace anything if it dies. Or at least I will tell him to now that you mentioned it.

To be fair, I never added any extra voltage!

[Waqas409]

22 minutes ago, thebootknifer said:

I never knew about those Xeon's. If I had known that I would have gone that route! Perhaps if I end up doing this in the future, or if I know of someone on a very strict budget I'd  tell them about this route. I wish I thought of it!

My OLD CPU was core2quad Q9400 Running @3.6Ghz but it was failling to give me playable fps in most of the games like h1z1, BO3, Rainbow six, overwatch at 1080p
Now i can maxed out

-overwatch (50-60fps)
-Rainbow six maxed out (50-70fps)

-H1z1 some high-medium-low settings ( 40 in towns, 60+ in open area )

 

Prove Videos of above mentioned Games.
Overwatch
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege

H1z1 KOTK
 

 

The Main issue of Q9400 with GTX 960 was Massive Bottleneck. But now i only had my xeon went up to 99% along with GPU 99% in two games, overwatch and Rainbox six, other then that it was fine ( i mean its is the best you can get, when you talk about Price to Performance ). 

[thebootknifer]

That's pretty impressive Waqas409. This is why we need a PC community, so many great ideas floating around.

I'm happy with how everything went, and I'm glad I did everything I could and then posted the final results. I had a lot of fun!

However, if I do this in the future, I think i will make a topic with my ideas, and then collect as much information from everyone on the forums before I collect any parts.

[Waqas409]

12 minutes ago, thebootknifer said:

That's pretty impressive Waqas409. This is why we need a PC community, so many great ideas floating around.

I'm happy with how everything went, and I'm glad I did everything I could and then posted the final results. I had a lot of fun!

However, if I do this in the future, I think i will make a topic with my ideas, and then collect as much information from everyone on the forums before I collect any parts.

Thankyou.
here are the detail information about how you can mod or about compatibility of CPU/Mobos incase if you want to do it in future.
http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/2/

[Heesleemer]

I believe that is a Dell oem 750ti

[thebootknifer]

2 hours ago, Heesleemer said:

I believe that is a Dell oem 750ti

That makes sense. he did pull it out of his Dell. it runs surprisingly cool idle, and only hits 70C under load. The heat sink and fan are so small! It blew me away how well it runs.