Made a lot of progress on the mATX "sleeper" ... crappy looking eMachine with half decent parts. Was diverted a little by putting together a vacuum cleaning setup. Got going on the build, side panel still not found yet, but screw it, it will turn up. Think it might have got somewhere stupid, like down behind stuff, or flat on the bottom of a box. Used Coolermaster 525W EX2 PSU, put a 120mm at an angle in the front, very few front panel vent holes, I think the side panel has perforations low down, so kinda trying to pull from front and side to get some airflow over RAM and chipset, and feed the GPU (not yet installed) Wired it to the 2nd 4 pin ATX power with a PCIe shell, because board only uses one. (Shhh don't tell Bill Gates) Skinned the external LS-120 I bought the other day and stuck it in the floppy hole. Leaving the default optical in there for now, styled to fit case, see if it's super crappy or not, might be bearable. Board is M4A785-M currently has an X2 260 in it, which it came with, gonna do some testing on that, before slapping an Athlon X4 in. 4 Sticks of Kingston Value went in for now, supposedly goes well with voltage, so might stay in. Slapped a Kingston 128GB SSD and Seagate 500GB in it for now.
Not super sure what I'm gonna use this for, might be an emulation rig, might also do a lot of 2005-2015 GPU testing. Might be a general eff around and find out rig, software wise, so I don't screw up others. Sort of a trainer too, get me back in practice with moderner hardware before I screw up my nicer AM3+ DDR3 board and X6-1090. Might get the 1090 in a while if I decide I really really need SSSE3 and SSE>4.0
I didn't want something too massive for cooling, it would fill the whole case 🤣 Turned up an old TaiSol, that looks about right for the X4, got a minimal sink on for the X2 right now. TaiSol is a 754/939/940 unit, very hard to find info on, but some tests (In Chinese so I hope I read them right) seemed to be showing about 45C at full load on an FX55 which is a 104W chip, so hopefully that means a bit of headroom. Ran some calculations on other random data points and seemed to be getting between 0.22 and 0.25 C/W which is acceptable.
Haven't hit the go button yet, was getting tired tonight, thought I'd give it another look over in the morning then try it. (I've blow crap up before doing something stupid when tired, sooooo)
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.