GrimaH
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NOTE: This is still at the acquisition stage, so this whole thing might only be complete by mid-August.
Figured I'd start a thread since it seems pretty fun. This isn't, strictly speaking, a proper project, but I hope it provides a bit of entertaining reading and maybe a few good ideas.
A little background info:
I've currently got a pretty nice OC'ed SB setup in my room, and I'm using it for all sorts of purposes: full-on gaming, productivity (Microstation/AutoCAD), seeding of obscure torrents, HD media playback/storage etc. It's also being used by my mother for Facebook games and simple document handling.
Thing is, she's not too happy with the power bill thanks to the 24-hour on time, and I'm not too happy with sharing the rig with her (especially since the monitor faces my bed and she uses it at late night, when I need to sleep). Not to mention the times when both of us want to use the computer at the same time.
And besides, I'm itching to play my movies, TV and anime (and sometimes, games) on the 32-inch HDTV in her bedroom; but I can't be arsed to lug the whole setup there every time the urge arises.
So I had an idea: Let's try and build the cheapest 2nd-hand build that would
Ignoring the fact that she wouldn't be too happy about spending money on yet another computer when she could be using mine (and depriving me of sleep time
), I set out to define what exactly the parts I needed were.
Computer Parts Brainstorming
I had an existing CM Elite 311 ATX case with a DVD-RW drive rusting away in a corner, and they'd serve as the base on which to build the rig on.
Poor Elite-chan ;_;
Processor
If I were buying first-hand, the Ivy Bridge Pentium G20X0 processors would be an obvious choice. It's more powerful than the legendary Core 2 Duo processors while using a fraction of the power, and it can run games reasonably well. However, it is out, for the simple reason that just about nobody sells it (or its mobos) near the prices of the Core 2 Duos in the 2nd-hand marketplace, due to it being relatively new.
The next obvious choices were the AMD Athlon/Phenom IIs and the aforementioned C2Ds. They're both generations-old processors abundant in the marketplace that still hold up well in light gaming and general tasks without necessarily blowing the power budget; plus they could be OC'ed like mad too, and that was always a plus in the fun department. There was a slight issue though: my familiarity with their associated motherboard range was zero. Nevertheless, I decided that the best deals were to be found with these processors.
Graphics
What about the GPU? I knew I didn't want to rely on the integrated GPU (if the processors I found even had one) for the light gaming portion, so a half-decent dedicated card was a must. Because of the power consideration, high-power old-gen cards like the GTX260 were out, and complete cheapos like the HD5570, GT520 etc wouldn't be able to run anything well. Budget cards like the HD 7700 series would be best, but if I couldn't find one at a good price I'd have to turn to cards like the GTS 450 or the HD 5770.
PSU
The rule of thumb applies as usual: Always get a good PSU. The unbranded/unknown/uncertified PSUs floating around at bargain prices were sorely tempting though, even though I knew I'd just be inviting a disaster with any of them. The wattage would have to depend on what I picked for the CPU/GPU.
RAM
It's pretty much certain I'd be using a DDR2-restricted processor, so it all boils down to 1 question: Is dual channel required? I'd certainly be using a 2GB stick at least, but I had no idea (I still don't) whether dual channel will benefit this new rig. One decent 800MHz 2GB stick costs $20-$25 which, while not a big sum, is still significant. More research will be required.
With all that in mind, I started shopping around for my second-hand parts.
Virtual Shopping
And on my first trip to the online marketplace, I struck gold. Someone was selling an Intel C2D E6300 processor for $12! And not only that, it was properly lapped to a shine finish and confirmed (by the seller) to be working perfectly!
Not that I'd known what lapping was, but that's what Google is for. Apparently, during the C2D days when overclocking enthusiasm was at a high, some enthusiasts would sandpaper off the plated IHS cover to expose the copper beneath, for better thermal transfer. Of course, it had its risks, and the results were unpredictable due to variables in sanding skill, but here was a good old working C2D processor, lapped to perfection, for $12. Nobody else was selling comparable C2Ds at anywhere near that price. I jumped on the offer, hours after T0M3T0's VRZ thread was posted (talk about luck), and got myself my processor.
It came within the plastic protective thingy and foam pad too.
Shiney.....
Motherboards, on the other hand, took a good deal of shopping and on-the-spot googling. I've never been very familiar with mobo differences, and the fact that the percentage of my mobo knowledge related to the C2D architectures was approximately 0% wasn't helping me a lot.
There were a couple of the famed Asus P5Qs in their various iterations being sold, but they were all at stupid (read: not ridiculously low) prices. I needed something which I would cost me at most a fraction of the PC. SATA-3, Crossfire/SLi, USB 3.0 and all that jazz was unnecessary; a basic board that worked fine and allowed some OC would do fine. I found a couple of mobos going in the $20-30 range, and eventually got myself a $25 Biostar TP45D2-V7 complete with I/O plate, foam backing and anti-static bag, with much love to IzumiYuki. (No homo.)
This mobo was taken care of really well. You can feel the previous owner's love. (No mobo-mo. Or something. Never mind.)
Closeups of the sexy lines and alluring cleavage. Warning: May cause arousal.
It got much harder to get great prices for the other items. My next target was a HDD, an item which my requirement mandated a 1TB capacity or above, and at that level it would be risky to get a very old drive. After some searching, I managed to uncover Yunnnn's sale of a 1TB Caviar Green with warranty till late 2014; it was $55. The Caviar Greens have a bad rep due to the retarded spin-down tech, but the community had found a fix for it, and I wasn't going to find any better prices. I took the plunge.
[HDD pic placeholder]
The graphic card department gave me a small dilemma. It took a while, but I narrowed it down to a Gigabyte HD7750 OC (going for $89) and a MSI N460GTX Hawk 1GB (at $80). The 460 is naturally much more powerful, but its power consumption can get pretty high (it takes nearly 200W at max load according to some reviews). The HD7750, on the other hand, beats every other card at it, but the issue was whether it provided playable frame rates at a decent setting at 1080p.
I decided to flip a coin And the coin said HD7750. HD7750 it is then!
[HD7750 pic placeholder]
Getting a power-sipping GPU gave me an added benefit when I started looking for my PSU: it lowered the required wattage. Snooping around, I sniffed out Benleesg's sale of the Coolermaster G500W bronze-rated 80+ PSU at $65, BNIB. Price wise it wasn't the greatest, but its brand-new condition, 4-years-plus warranty period and rating made the decision for me.
[PSU pic placeholder]
Now that I had that processor, I needed a decent LGA775 cooler to pair it with. A well-used Hyper212 would be the natural choice, but it works so well that there aren't many people letting it go. I wasn't going to get a stock HSF either, because, well, it's an Intel HSF. And my relative unfamiliarity with the other coolers not branded Noctua made some research necessary.
*Work In Progress*
Figured I'd start a thread since it seems pretty fun. This isn't, strictly speaking, a proper project, but I hope it provides a bit of entertaining reading and maybe a few good ideas.
A little background info:
I've currently got a pretty nice OC'ed SB setup in my room, and I'm using it for all sorts of purposes: full-on gaming, productivity (Microstation/AutoCAD), seeding of obscure torrents, HD media playback/storage etc. It's also being used by my mother for Facebook games and simple document handling.
Thing is, she's not too happy with the power bill thanks to the 24-hour on time, and I'm not too happy with sharing the rig with her (especially since the monitor faces my bed and she uses it at late night, when I need to sleep). Not to mention the times when both of us want to use the computer at the same time.
And besides, I'm itching to play my movies, TV and anime (and sometimes, games) on the 32-inch HDTV in her bedroom; but I can't be arsed to lug the whole setup there every time the urge arises.
So I had an idea: Let's try and build the cheapest 2nd-hand build that would
- Sip power at idle (inc. seeding/FB-ing/MS Office activity), for 24-hour uptimes;
- Have the power to drive games at decent settings;
- Comfortably drive all media playback;
- Be able to do the above without driving the room temps up 10C or sounding like a turbojet.
Ignoring the fact that she wouldn't be too happy about spending money on yet another computer when she could be using mine (and depriving me of sleep time
), I set out to define what exactly the parts I needed were.--------------
Computer Parts Brainstorming
I had an existing CM Elite 311 ATX case with a DVD-RW drive rusting away in a corner, and they'd serve as the base on which to build the rig on.
Poor Elite-chan ;_;
Processor
If I were buying first-hand, the Ivy Bridge Pentium G20X0 processors would be an obvious choice. It's more powerful than the legendary Core 2 Duo processors while using a fraction of the power, and it can run games reasonably well. However, it is out, for the simple reason that just about nobody sells it (or its mobos) near the prices of the Core 2 Duos in the 2nd-hand marketplace, due to it being relatively new.
The next obvious choices were the AMD Athlon/Phenom IIs and the aforementioned C2Ds. They're both generations-old processors abundant in the marketplace that still hold up well in light gaming and general tasks without necessarily blowing the power budget; plus they could be OC'ed like mad too, and that was always a plus in the fun department. There was a slight issue though: my familiarity with their associated motherboard range was zero. Nevertheless, I decided that the best deals were to be found with these processors.
Graphics
What about the GPU? I knew I didn't want to rely on the integrated GPU (if the processors I found even had one) for the light gaming portion, so a half-decent dedicated card was a must. Because of the power consideration, high-power old-gen cards like the GTX260 were out, and complete cheapos like the HD5570, GT520 etc wouldn't be able to run anything well. Budget cards like the HD 7700 series would be best, but if I couldn't find one at a good price I'd have to turn to cards like the GTS 450 or the HD 5770.
PSU
The rule of thumb applies as usual: Always get a good PSU. The unbranded/unknown/uncertified PSUs floating around at bargain prices were sorely tempting though, even though I knew I'd just be inviting a disaster with any of them. The wattage would have to depend on what I picked for the CPU/GPU.
RAM
It's pretty much certain I'd be using a DDR2-restricted processor, so it all boils down to 1 question: Is dual channel required? I'd certainly be using a 2GB stick at least, but I had no idea (I still don't) whether dual channel will benefit this new rig. One decent 800MHz 2GB stick costs $20-$25 which, while not a big sum, is still significant. More research will be required.
With all that in mind, I started shopping around for my second-hand parts.
Virtual Shopping
And on my first trip to the online marketplace, I struck gold. Someone was selling an Intel C2D E6300 processor for $12! And not only that, it was properly lapped to a shine finish and confirmed (by the seller) to be working perfectly!
Not that I'd known what lapping was, but that's what Google is for. Apparently, during the C2D days when overclocking enthusiasm was at a high, some enthusiasts would sandpaper off the plated IHS cover to expose the copper beneath, for better thermal transfer. Of course, it had its risks, and the results were unpredictable due to variables in sanding skill, but here was a good old working C2D processor, lapped to perfection, for $12. Nobody else was selling comparable C2Ds at anywhere near that price. I jumped on the offer, hours after T0M3T0's VRZ thread was posted (talk about luck), and got myself my processor.
It came within the plastic protective thingy and foam pad too.
Shiney.....
Motherboards, on the other hand, took a good deal of shopping and on-the-spot googling. I've never been very familiar with mobo differences, and the fact that the percentage of my mobo knowledge related to the C2D architectures was approximately 0% wasn't helping me a lot.
There were a couple of the famed Asus P5Qs in their various iterations being sold, but they were all at stupid (read: not ridiculously low) prices. I needed something which I would cost me at most a fraction of the PC. SATA-3, Crossfire/SLi, USB 3.0 and all that jazz was unnecessary; a basic board that worked fine and allowed some OC would do fine. I found a couple of mobos going in the $20-30 range, and eventually got myself a $25 Biostar TP45D2-V7 complete with I/O plate, foam backing and anti-static bag, with much love to IzumiYuki. (No homo.)
This mobo was taken care of really well. You can feel the previous owner's love. (No mobo-mo. Or something. Never mind.)
Closeups of the sexy lines and alluring cleavage. Warning: May cause arousal.
It got much harder to get great prices for the other items. My next target was a HDD, an item which my requirement mandated a 1TB capacity or above, and at that level it would be risky to get a very old drive. After some searching, I managed to uncover Yunnnn's sale of a 1TB Caviar Green with warranty till late 2014; it was $55. The Caviar Greens have a bad rep due to the retarded spin-down tech, but the community had found a fix for it, and I wasn't going to find any better prices. I took the plunge.
[HDD pic placeholder]
The graphic card department gave me a small dilemma. It took a while, but I narrowed it down to a Gigabyte HD7750 OC (going for $89) and a MSI N460GTX Hawk 1GB (at $80). The 460 is naturally much more powerful, but its power consumption can get pretty high (it takes nearly 200W at max load according to some reviews). The HD7750, on the other hand, beats every other card at it, but the issue was whether it provided playable frame rates at a decent setting at 1080p.
I decided to flip a coin
And the coin said HD7750. HD7750 it is then![HD7750 pic placeholder]
Getting a power-sipping GPU gave me an added benefit when I started looking for my PSU: it lowered the required wattage. Snooping around, I sniffed out Benleesg's sale of the Coolermaster G500W bronze-rated 80+ PSU at $65, BNIB. Price wise it wasn't the greatest, but its brand-new condition, 4-years-plus warranty period and rating made the decision for me.
[PSU pic placeholder]
Now that I had that processor, I needed a decent LGA775 cooler to pair it with. A well-used Hyper212 would be the natural choice, but it works so well that there aren't many people letting it go. I wasn't going to get a stock HSF either, because, well, it's an Intel HSF. And my relative unfamiliarity with the other coolers not branded Noctua made some research necessary.
*Work In Progress*
Last edited:
