Wastelander

Moldy Stir-Fry · February 12, 2018

So, this build has been together for 4 or 5 years. However, Wastelander tells a pretty "Fallout" style story. Having been cobbled together numerous times as random parts broke, somehow, in 2018, this tired old dog still runs like a champ!

Originally, this machine was built starting with a Themaltake G41 Commander mid tower, having all kinds of modular accessories to toy around with. The motherboard was a Gigabyte... something-or-other that couldn't even support the 700 series GPU. 16 GB G-Skill Ripjaws DDR3 ram, running a core i5 4670 CPU with a STOCK cooler, an EVGA Geforce GTX 760 4 gb, all powered by a Raidmax thunder V2 735 watt PSU (because blue lights...)

As time went on, more fans ended up being jammed, jury rigged and even BUTT SPLICED in via Molex connectors, one day --- poof. will not turn on. Turns out, fancy LEDs in a power supply don't overcome the 80 Bronze rating on the tin. NEW POWER SUPPLY! Upgraded to an EVGA SuperNova 850 Gold, not too shabby, not too pricey. Next, one day I was doing a DXDiag report for hardware analytics and.. wait a minute, only 8 GBS RAM?? That can't be right... One stick of RAM somehow jarred itself out of the slot (presumably in transport while moving temporarily). Ok, so push it back in and pray! Right? Wrong. The half-way installed RAM shorted out the DIMM on the motherboard. So, switch DIMMs? Did not work at all. Even with one stick installed into any DIMM, only half of the RAM was recognized. Also, the graphics card was literally being held up by fishing line because the motherboard had no form of support to hold a rather hefty card. Ordered a new mobo. The MSI Z170A gaming pro carbon! Which has an LGA 1151 socket... not at all compatible with my 1150 socket I5. So, after 1.5 years of saving, finally had enough to buy a CPU! And by that time, the i7 was actually affordable, so went ahead and made the purchase. Also went ahead and got a 16 GB pack of DDR4 ram, just in case the old sticks shorted out as well, and better safe then sorry. Also, its faster and stuff. Put it all together on the bench and...OH NOES! This motherboard doesn't support a 7th gen i7 7700K without a bios update! After much research on how to upgrade said bios, bought a 6th gen Celeron CPU to do the bios upgrade, (after 2 weeks of having the old setup running outside the tower mind you) upgraded the bios and, voila! Brand new i7 and 16 GB of RAM, SWEET! Only now, the stock cpu cooler just can't handle the "girth" of heat that this 7700K produces. bums. JAM MORE FANS IN IT! Repeatedly added more and more fans that were found laying around the house, and well, one by one, they started howling, or throwing bearings, or becoming so clogged with dust (I was not aware there was a way to remove the front case fan until like last week... oops) that they just keep failing. Finally saved up enough for a closed loop CPU cooler from EVGA and a couple new case fans from CoolerMaster. Will be here soon. So, yeah! There you have it. The story so far of Wastelander - the "I can't believe it's not dead yet" gaming rig.

A little open air at the moment, because that's how we rig it 'round here

And I never said cable management is great with stock cables, but hey, it works. Kinda.