quad-g5

Because of a recent lightning-strike, my gaming-rig literally spiked... and died...

But, thanks to very nice family-members I got replacement components, very quickly ;) :P since I was getting quite a few bucks in insurance (eventually, may'16) I decided to completely upgrade the whole rig.

After spending an afternoon researching (after months of contemplating on models and makes), I eventually landed on the following choices:

Component selection

• Gigabyte Z170MX-Gaming 5 motherboard
• 2 x 8GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 2666MHz RAM-modules
• Intel® Core i5 6600K 3.5GHz CPU
• Intel® 535 SSD 240GB SATA 3.0 game-storage
• EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB GDDR5 PhysX graphics-adapter
• Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO CPU-cooler 

No fight to assemble the beast, at least not a lot. The CPU-cooler took some getting used to only having to screw together the mount(s), and pressing it into the motherboard (Cooler Master's *brilliant* Intel-type push-plugs -_-).

All components assembled into north+south-bridge(s)

It also helps to be prepared for a future lightning-strike, by using a 80-PLUS-Gold-certified PSU that sports: over-voltage protection, under-voltage protection, short circuit protection and over power protection.

Corsair RM850x PSU (Power Supply Unit)

Combined with a power-strip sporting surge protection, I'd say I'm much better equipped for the ominous scandinavian weather-system now, than before.

Giving a combined performance-boost of ~50% in heavy 3D and rendering cases :) and (roughly) around a 45-50% reduction in heavy-load temperatures as well as idle temperatures (Intel < AMD), I'd say I'm really pleased ;)

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Quite the OP setup, at least compared to my earlier rig (h3x). Geekbench3-results confirm this:

• quad-g5 geekbench3 multicore-score:
  13380 ('2016)
• h3x geekbench3 multicore-score:
  8305 ('2013) 

*** FINGERS CROSSED ***

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Update May 11th:

Added extra 92mm Cooler Master cpu-fan as exhaust-booster

h3x - upgrade part II

Upgrade-time! :) ...and this time h3x is undergoing a complete cabinet+gfx upgrade. From a rather minimalistic HTPC starter-cabinet, into a completely new 2-sectioned, airflow-designed multi-cabinet :)

Fractal Design Node 804 cabinet
Corsair CX600 PSU
3 x Corsair SP120 "Quiet Ed" fans

My new XFX Radeon R9 270X 2GB GDDR5:
1xHDMI - 2xDVI-D - 2xDP

Disassembly

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Silverstone MILO (ML03) when first built (nov'2011)

Silverstone MILO (ML03) disassembled.

The above picture shows my old HTPC cabinet after being almost completely stripped. Only things still left inside are the system-SSD (Corsair ForceGT) and the 400W PSU (Silver Power).

I did not foresee how hard it would be to dismantle the MILO HTPC mATX-cabinet, everything was so close together that it made it near impossible to figure out where to start off.

After viewing it from different angles, and bringing in a fresh set of eyes; everything got pulled out eventually

Then, the time to re-mount everything again came around.

Re-assembly

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• First: the PSU.

Right side.

Back-right profile.

• Then; motherboard + RAM + CPU.

Front-left profile.

Left side.

• And to finish it off: graphics-accelerator + HDD + SSD.

Left side: Component-compartment.

Right side: Storage- / power-compartment.

I now have a overhauled gaming-rig / workstation / hypervisor with 3-4x more graphics-processing power than I previously had :P and it WILL get tested ;)

I opted to using the 3 Corsair SP120 fans in the front, to complement the total airflow going through the cabinet. So that's a total of 4 fans in the front for intake and 2 in the back for exhaust.

I thought it was dead...

For the past year, I've been rummaging through my computer-equipment boxes, throwing out and putting aside components. Which was a good idea, I've saved MASSIVE amounts of space by binning a lot of my legacy boards, obsolete hardware/software and determining which of my computers are still worthy as computing-tools.

And last week, I just finished the whole ordeal.

Then.., my netbook failed to boot up. My ONLY surviving workstation, craps out on me...

SH*T!

Next up: forum-surfing in text-mode on my Slackware Linux server, because I haven't really bothered to configure X for my Samsung LCD-TV.

To my surprise, I found a possible solution and explanation why my Eee900PC just would not boot, in a mere couple of minutes.

Turns out, the Eee netbooks from Asus (the early 7-900 versions) have troubles utilizing JUST the power-cord when the battery is totally drained... WTF!? I've used quite the ensemble of different vendor-notebooks and laptops over the years, but I've NEVER run into this problem before.

"O-K" I thought, let's try to plug the power-cord in after I've removed and inserted the battery-case, and see what happens.

B-I-N-G-O! The netbook started flashing a red led-light (which means it's charging the battery), and it booted without any problems after charging the battery for a good half hour. But this was definately one of the most bizarre WTF-moments I've had in a long time. I had no idea super-compressed netbooks had to have battery-juice in order for the mainboard to draw power from it's PSU...

weird, for the sake of weird... huh?