Project A340-750

[Ms Mercedes - Trijet Girl]

I know, I know, I haven’t shown everyone my 2nd or 3rd build yet. I’ll get to it!!! Lately I’ve been distracted by building a cheap sleeper.

 

This idea came out of nowhere. I got a SuperMicro X8DTU-F dual socket board with 4 CPUs for free (2x Xeon E5645 and 2x Xeon E5630). I can’t say no to free hardware so I decided to make something out of it!

 

I was considering buying an acrylic case and just doing that route, though ultimately I decided to get in on the sleeper route.

 

I began looking for prebuilts that use ATX and that had a little extra room to possibly accommodate a server board.

 

After finding out that old Dell units don’t have super proprietary front panel connectors, I decided on a Dimension 4100.

 

Upon receiving the old beauty, I tore it down to the bare case...and quickly learned that I suck at measuring. In order to fit the server board, I had to remove the drive cage and pull back the metal support for the floppy.

 

With the board now fitting in, I’m now going to mod the case a little further. That jaggy metal “flap” will be cut off and the drive cage will be cut to half-size so I can both have a disc drive that looks period-correct and the board in there. A SSD will occupy the space once held by the floppy drive, and one of the 3.5 expansions will hold a USB front panel painted to match the case.

 

Of course, everything is subject to change as I build it.

 

Cooling will come from the front panel, the rear, and the PCI expansion slots. The graphics card will only take up two of the 7 slots. Not sure if some giant heatsinks plus those fans will be enough for these Xeons, so that’ll have to be played by experimenting too.

 

Estimated completed specs:

- 2x Xeon E5645 (Nehalem-EP)

- GTX 750

- 16 GB ECC 1333 memory (8GB per CPU)(to start off)

 

Sticking to my aircraft + GPU nomenclature:

 

Airbus A340 + GTX 750 = A340-750

 

What am I going to do with it? I’m not even sure, I’m kinda just doing it for fun!

 

More progress to be posted as it happens!

 

Edited: Had to fix some sentences.

[ProjectBox153]

Wow, looks good! I had a Dimension 4100 for a short time. It's gone now sadly, but I'd love to get another and restore it to factory condition.