TL/DR at the bottom.

I had to let go tonight. Have you ever had a dog, and the vet gave you some bad news. You ask, "how long does he have?", and they invariably reply; "you'll know when". I've had this friend with me every night since 2008. Had several surgeries over the years to transition from one camp to the other. But for the longest time, have just had almost nightly fun until about 6 months ago. Was playing Civ6 and just out of nowhere my friend just shuts down, goes completely dark. I got the help required, but the prognosis was grim. It turns out, the way we were gaming together was destroying my friends memory and that night, it took a final toll. And honestly, it was all my fault.

Everything changed after that. After some TLC, we restarted gaming together again. But it wasn't the same. And slowly we gamed together less and less. Tonight, was the last straw. The memory problems from 6 months ago returned and this time were completely fatal. Literally died in my hands.

Not all is lost, my friend was an organ donor, and almost all the parts are going to be reused in some fashion. Honestly I'm doing my best to just remember all the good times we had together. We got together for Fallout 3 and I'll never forget how well it ran on my friend. At the time I built him, he was a lowly dual-cpu 604 xeon, and a Nvidia 260. those were good times. Games were still games, and not "pay to win monthly services". The last original piece died as I was dismembering his lifeless body.

In the beginning;
He started his life as a case for my dual P3 server. http://www.chieftec.eu/en/marketing/archive/b … wer-detail.html Solid as a tank, and just as ugly. The dual p3 was replaced by a Supermicro H8DA6+-F and a pair of 2439SE's as this case was the only one I owned that could even hold such a monster of a motherboard. A monster is was, had zero issue running quad 260's in SLI ( I had to borrow 3 from friends). It was the only board I ever bought "new". I got many years of service out of this board. Other parts came and went. The nvidia 260 was replaced by a ati 5870. A 2nd 5870, then a 7970, 2x 7970's (thank you bitcoin), before I finally had to upgrade the motherboard. The whole time I was running a raid for my steam library. A quartet of 640gb WD black drives I got back when I also got the SM board. These drives went out of warranty 5 years ago. And still work fine. It was the 4x SSD drives that failed, but I'll get to that later. I spent many many hours playing WoW and FO3.

The 'golden years'
This big upgrade was a major transition from the ati camp to intel. Amd is a total red-headed stepchild in the multi cpu world, at least until very recently. So the only hope was a cheap dual Intel board, that I found locally for a song. A Supermicro X8DAH+-F and a pair of X5687's. What an upgrade! I went from an H to an X! But if you look at the spec sheets of the boards, they are worlds apart. Everything possible went from the old machine into the new one and for a long time it was good. The 7970's were traded for a single R9 290x as I was tired of Xfire being a dick. (not to be confused with the Xfire client) Its hard to remember all the games I played, but it was always amazing. But upgrades became fewer and fewer as my job situation became less and less stable.

The end?
One of the last upgrades I preformed, was the upgrade to Ati RX 480. A competent card still! The plan was to eventually get it a sibling. Something I've done since the beginning of time, but it never happened. The end started suddenly. One of the 4x 60gb SSD drives I had in a stripe raid died (Mushhkin Chronos MKNSSDCR60GB). For those that aren't aware, putting 4x 600mb/s drives in a stripe array is a highly destructive thing. It prevents the drive from getting TRIM commands from the OS. I had thought this would not be an issue. And honestly it will be a practice that stops. Anyway, It dawned on me that day, as I was looking up the drive's warranty that it only had a 3 year warranty that was already 4 years over. These drives lasted a good 7 years of 24/7 uptime. They all have ~3TB in writes and honestly I can't even be mad. That is phenomenal performance. I updated the firmware and secure erased the drives in my garage pc and they all sprung back to life. But in my heart, I knew the end was near. It was a simple matter to restore the machine from a backup, but in the downtime, a blow was struck that put another nail in the coffin. As my friend's "vet", I know the time was neigh.

In the meantime, my garage pc upgraded from a dual 462, to a SM X7DCA-L and most recently, a X8DAL-i. I had bought it a pair of X5687's as well, and they arrived damaged. I swapped some X5530's into my main gaming system to test the new chips and I ended up leaving them in my garage pc( the good X5687's). I thought I would just return the chips and get new ones, but I was wrong. It ended up being several months of limping along on failing SSD's and under powered cpus. I couldn't play the new Civ6 expansion pack. Even playing Oxygen not Included (a unchallenging game for the computer) was a mess. And tonight it finally happened. One of those 4 SSD drives just failed completely. I haven't found which one, but it doesn't matter. This machine is tired. I got a little angry as I hadn't saved the game in a while and slammed my fist against the solid steel chassis that had housed my best friend. It decided to give up too. The door panel has a plastic handle/lock that just shattered. I sat there impotent, as it finally dawned on me. "its time".

I took apart the system tonight, just before I typed this all up. I was inspired to tell this story as I was disemboweling my friend. I have my tax return coming soon, so my friend will live again, but I'm looking at this pile of parts and I see almost nothing that will make it into the new system. I want to build a system powerful enough to run Cyberpunk 2077 at full power. Thats going to mean everything gets replaced. Honestly the only parts going to stay is the ZXR sound card and the 10gb nic. I might be able to re-use my 16gb ddr3 dimms, but if I skip to the later 3/4 generation of 2011, thats not going to work as those boards are ddr4. Even still, with a 1/2 socket 2011, I'll need to buy 2x 16gb sticks as the cpu's are quad channel. Right now, I'm torn between a X9DAE and the X10DAX. The latter would be a setup that lasted longer, but would cost 2x as much as I am willing to pay. its $300 vs $500 just for the motherboard. Honestly, I'm leaning towards the X9.

TL;DR
Reply "F" to pay respects for my old gaming rig with 10+ y/o parts. Any suggestions on a new chassis to house a E-ATX board, are welcome.