That's one pretty system.

Thanks! I'm not exactly sure what to do with it now since installing MacOS didn't work out very well... Hackintosh is still quite a PITA

I put a little more work into my OptiPlex 7010, getting it ready to take over the jobs of the two other Windows 7 PCs I have so I can sell them off.

Firstly, my drive caddies came in:

^^ I'm sure glad they packed these in an antistatic bag to prevent ESD damage.

When installed properly these mount the hard drive upside-down. Not sure how I feel about that.

Dell saw fit to equip this thing with a 275W power supply, because it was clearly 1997 in 2014 when they made it. Just as a reminder, this has a quad core i7 3770k with hyperthreading; it is not a low-end model.

Getting rid of this and swapping the GPU turned into a bit of a project. Here's a before pic:

^^ Pretty tidy in there, but unfortunately that's not going to last.

While I had it open, I cloned the drives one of the other PCs in the jankiest way possible:

Here's the old versus the new GPU. You can see why I want to upgrade the power supply. I'm actually fine with the performance of the FirePro, but I need it for my rackmount PC. I bought two of these GTX 460s a while ago for an SLI build that failed; they've been sitting in my closet doing nothing ever since, so I may as well use one here.

This machine will eventually get the GTX 750Ti out of my Core2quad system (on the right, above) but I'm still using that thing for now. This is the kind of needlessly overcomplicated problem that I have all the time & nobody else seems to.

^^ With the new PSU (and GPU) installed. Unfortunately after messing around for most of an hour, I decided there was no way my Antec EA-750 was going to fit (it's physically longer than the stock one by about 3cm, and I had to remove the case door latch to even get it in there.) This EA-380 was the next-best one I had my stash so it'll have to do. It's not a great PSU (these are known for cap deterioration, among other things), and 380W is kind of pushing it with a GTX460, but it seems to be doing the job alright. I had to sacrifice two Molex connectors to get a second 6-pin for the GPU.

Incidentally the GPU looks like it fits in pretty neatly, but it's actually blocking all four SATA ports. Why do they always insist on putting them behind the PCI-e slots?? I can still use them, but I'm going to have to remove the graphics card if I need to unplug or plug anything else in, which is kind of a pain in itself.

Let's not talk about the rat's nest of cables above the hard drive bays.

^^ I'm also not happy with how close the two-slot GPU sits to my VisionRGB Pro. It's really only about 8mm away and covers ~75% of the fan area. But I only have one “old-PCI” slot so this is my only option. I really hope it can still suck enough air through that narrow space.

Anyway, with that done & the drivers installed, I left it running Unigine Valley for a while, and it seemed to go fine despite the 380W PSU & restricted airflow. Performance is a bit better than the FirePro, and the GPU temp stabilized around ~66° with the case closed, so I’m calling it a success. Knock on wood.

BTW this benchmark/tech demo is gorgeous and you can even stop the camera and walk or fly around in it, and play with the weather. I could seriously mess with this all day. I didn’t know about it until this project, but it’s good stuff.

That's it for now... I want to find a couple 8GB DDR3 modules to bump it up to 24GB 😈 but I'll wait for a deal. And yes, I'm still using spinny disks rather than SSDs, because I have a bunch of them on-hand. It has a 500GB boot drive and a 1TB data drive which will be enough for my purposes.

So far my entire expenditure on this rig has been:
$30 for the system
$20 (seriously!) for 2 x 4GB G.Skill PC3-14900
$6 shipped for two drive caddies
$20 for one GTX460 (I bought two for $40 back in November)
$0 for hard drives & PSUs; had them all lying around, mostly from dumpster finds or free pickups.

Seventy-six bucks (CAD) in for a fully modern system that blows anything else I have out of the water is pretty good in my book.

Edit: argh, meant to post all of the above in the "modern activity" thread. I can't move three posts with pictures cleanly, so guess they're here now. Too many threads to follow.

xjas wrote:

Anyway, with that done & the drivers installed, I left it running Unigine Valley for a while, and it seemed to go fine despite t […]
Show full quote

Anyway, with that done & the drivers installed, I left it running Unigine Valley for a while, and it seemed to go fine despite the 380W PSU & restricted airflow. Performance is a bit better than the FirePro, and the GPU temp stabilized around ~66° with the case closed, so I’m calling it a success. Knock on wood.

6.jpg

BTW this benchmark/tech demo is gorgeous and you can even stop the camera and walk or fly around in it, and play with the weather. I could seriously mess with this all day. I didn’t know about it until this project, but it’s good stuff.

That's it for now... I want to find a couple 8GB DDR3 modules to bump it up to 24GB 😈 but I'll wait for a deal. And yes, I'm still using spinny disks rather than SSDs, because I have a bunch of them on-hand. It has a 500GB boot drive and a 1TB data drive which will be enough for my purposes.

So far my entire expenditure on this rig has been:
$30 for the system
$20 (seriously!) for 2 x 4GB G.Skill PC3-14900
$6 shipped for two drive caddies
$20 for one GTX460 (I bought two for $40 back in November)
$0 for hard drives & PSUs; had them all lying around, mostly from dumpster finds or free pickups.

Seventy-six bucks (CAD) in for a fully modern system that blows anything else I have out of the water is pretty good in my book.

Edit: argh, meant to post all of the above in the "modern activity" thread. I can't move three posts with pictures cleanly, so guess they're here now. Too many threads to follow.

That is a cool demo. Reminds me of Anteworld which, incidentally, you should be able to run on your system 😀

Optiplexes never came with a 3770K... unless you upgraded it yourself. The best it came with was a 3770.

I'm still regret that I bought a 1070 3 months ago, should've waited for rtx 2060. eek.

I sold my 9700K build and doing a Ryzen sleeper build. More to come when it's done.

pote2639 wrote:

I'm still regret that I bought a 1070 3 months ago, should've waited for rtx 2060. eek.

Supposedly there's also a GTX-1170/GTX-1180 coming very soon, that are supposedly real and we have AIB partner card information about em, so they're actually coming soon. New cards based on Turing, but with no RTX cores and no AI cores. Just rendering/CUDA cores like previous gpu's.

A coworker and I traded some hardware yesterday. I gave him a 4GB DDR3 stick of desktop RAM and he gave me 2 video cards...

HIS AMD RADEON HD6570 1GB... never seen a dual slot HD6570 before. Not my pic but the same card.

And a BFG Tech NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT. Both work fine and he redid the thermal pastes on both cards.

kithylin wrote:

pote2639 wrote:

I'm still regret that I bought a 1070 3 months ago, should've waited for rtx 2060. eek.

Supposedly there's also a GTX-1170/GTX-1180 coming very soon, that are supposedly real and we have AIB partner card information about em, so they're actually coming soon. New cards based on Turing, but with no RTX cores and no AI cores. Just rendering/CUDA cores like previous gpu's.

Yeah but I kinda doubt that nvidia would release those to compete with rtx series, they seems want to push raytracing craps so much.

Also my 1070 is capable of playing 1080p ultra for a year or two I guess.. till then I would upgrade again but I'm kinda bummer that I thought 2060 wouldn't bumping this much of speed, just like 2070 is 1080 and 2080 and 1080ti. but then 2060 is very close to 1080, and I was like wow dammit.

So this just happened: https://www.ebay.com/itm/323660158216 PDF: http://www.plexxi.com/wp-content/uploads/2012 … et_Dec_2012.pdf

I'm upgrading my NAS and 3 computers to 10gbe and this came up in a search. I was hoping to get something smaller with 4-8 ports and I'd be happy. I didn't want to build my own out of a 2nd system ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p39mFz7ORco )

Naturally, I'm getting a 40gb card now, because if your going to overkill a solution, you might as well totally obliterate it. > https://www.ebay.com/itm/223215337657 And I have a small pile of these cards for my computers: https://www.ebay.com/itm/132913286273

Still need to get 2x 100 meter fiber cables for that one computer clear on the other side of the house. (gotta have a spare)

So the planned upgrade to socket 2011 has gotten pushed back a few months. I'm still on track to be on that platform before CP2077 comes out. (hopefully)

That's an insane deal you got Luckybob. That's a great switch and sfp modules are cheap and so are fiber patch cables.

update: the switch 'works' but I dont know how to configure it, so its sitting, another abandoned project money sink. *shig*

Speaking of spending money, I just blew my tax return:

mobo: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboa … /C600/X9DAE.cfm Supermicro X9DAE
CPU (x2): http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon … -2643%20v2.html Intel Xeon E5-2643 V2
RAM: https://www.ebay.com/itm/183706909402 (times EIGHT)
And $100 in cpu coolers.

gotta wait to get a new video card, looking at the 1660ti and a nvme boot drive. Hopefully I have a proper case around here...

That sucks about the switch. Is there any references or youtube videos on configuring it? That's some nice hardware you got coming should make for a nice system that should have a good length of usable life.

pote2639 wrote:

kithylin wrote:

pote2639 wrote:

I'm still regret that I bought a 1070 3 months ago, should've waited for rtx 2060. eek.

Supposedly there's also a GTX-1170/GTX-1180 coming very soon, that are supposedly real and we have AIB partner card information about em, so they're actually coming soon. New cards based on Turing, but with no RTX cores and no AI cores. Just rendering/CUDA cores like previous gpu's.

Yeah but I kinda doubt that nvidia would release those to compete with rtx series, they seems want to push raytracing craps so much.

Also my 1070 is capable of playing 1080p ultra for a year or two I guess.. till then I would upgrade again but I'm kinda bummer that I thought 2060 wouldn't bumping this much of speed, just like 2070 is 1080 and 2080 and 1080ti. but then 2060 is very close to 1080, and I was like wow dammit.

So I was off on the model numbers a bit back when I posted that because it was all leaked info but.. it's real now. Go to newegg.com and look, GTX 1160 Ti's are for sale now. About equal in performance to a GTX-1070 but with -2GB Vram.

Got a "gaming" case for my x9dae (which arrived today)

Got $20 off on the Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F1YSB9M/ … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Not a "fan" of the fans. I haven't been 13 years old since 1997. But I can always change them later to something less garish.

However 75% of the deciding factor was the 2x 120mm exhaust fans behind the cpu area, something that is vital for a dual cpu system. I'm not 100% on the glass front, but worst case scenario, I just drop it on craigslist and get something else.

Got myself an Aten PS/2/USB/VGA 4-fold KVM switch to reduce cable clutter on my desk.

Picked up a Surface 3 (non pro) for real cheap. No type cover though and they seem to go for crazy prices online.