D's G5 Mod

[Detale]

Hey clock you lit the fire under my ass again, Thanks. I went downstairs to see where I actually was in terms of being able to complete the project. I realized I used the PSU I had designated for this rig for my brothers machine I built last year so I need a new one. I have a gift card so I 'm going to get a new PSU just for this mod. Looking at this one here from OCZ.
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Fatal1ty 550w. It's modular, it has an 8 pin mobo connector and it's only $65 on the egg and in micro center.

[clocker]

I'm thinking this might be my first "modern" PC build.
No optical drive (I haven't burned a disk or even inserted a disk to read in well over a year and with Win 7's ability to load from a flash drive- sooo much faster-an optical seems as dated as the floppy).
Very limited on-board storage- my external dock is much more flexible.
Not sure about cooling, leaning towards water (mainly because I have so much equipment to use) but we'll see.

After the motherboard, the second biggest hassle seems to be the PSU...Apple's solution being predictably proprietary and useless.
I'll think about this after the motherboard is set.

I'm moving forward, albeit slowly.

[Detale]

Hey at least it's a step on the right direction. Clock you really haven't burned a disk in that long?! TBH I haven't burned a disk for myself in prob about that time but I am constantly burning stuff for others. Have you no tech-tard friends or are people in Co just all into their computers and such?

Currently I'm fucking stuck between ideas. As I mentioned I got a gift card for xmas (one of those mastercard giftcards, so it's good anywhere) Now my issues are these:

1. Do I want to watercool this rig and give it to my sister in law as a hackentosh. I have a v8 cooler brand new I can use I just need a PSU as I mentioned so the more I think about it I'm prob not gonna WC this one.

2. Upgrade my rig with a new cpu block and rad ( currently I have a swiftech rad and an apogee GTZ block) OR a new vid card like a GTX 240 or something. Honestly though my GTX 260 still runs like a champ playing everything I throw at it.

3. Upgrade my server storage. Now I have 2.64 TB ( 3-1 TB drives in raid 0) but it keeps filling up and I find myself deleting things that I'd like to save. I want to get at least 2 more 1 TB drives or maybe 2-2TB drives depends on the prices at time of purchase.

So what would you do in this situation bud?


Oh and BTW Game on old man!!!

[clocker]

Hey at least it's a step on the right direction. Clock you really haven't burned a disk in that long?! TBH I haven't burned a disk for myself in prob about that time but I am constantly burning stuff for others. Have you no tech-tard friends or are people in Co just all into their computers and such?

I rarely work on other folks PCs these days but when I have, a flash drive is all I've needed.
Tip: You can greatly reduce stress (primarily, your own) by refusing to work on machines still running XP.
They are old, have shit hardware and the owners are obviously not interested, so why should you be?

Currently I'm fucking stuck between ideas. As I mentioned I got a gift card for xmas (one of those mastercard giftcards, so it's good anywhere) Now my issues are these:

1. Do I want to watercool this rig and give it to my sister in law as a hackentosh. I have a v8 cooler brand new I can use I just need a PSU as I mentioned so the more I think about it I'm prob not gonna WC this one.

2. Upgrade my rig with a new cpu block and rad ( currently I have a swiftech rad and an apogee GTZ block) OR a new vid card like a GTX 240 or something. Honestly though my GTX 260 still runs like a champ playing everything I throw at it.

3. Upgrade my server storage. Now I have 2.64 TB ( 3-1 TB drives in raid 0) but it keeps filling up and I find myself deleting things that I'd like to save. I want to get at least 2 more 1 TB drives or maybe 2-2TB drives depends on the prices at time of purchase.

So what would you do in this situation bud?


Oh and BTW Game on old man!!!

1. I would never build a watercooled machine for someone not capable of maintaining it themselves.
It's a disaster waiting to happen.

2. What's the point of new hardware that doesn't appreciably improve your machine?
Good benchmarks are one thing, real world performance, another.

3. You run RAID 0 in a server?
More storage seems to be your best choice here...it's the one upgrade that would materially increase your enjoyment, so that's what I'd do.

The game will be "ON" when I get off my ass and apply power tools to G5.
Till then it's game "PENDING" (which really lacks the drama/impact).

[Detale]

As usual bud, you have a great point. I've been taking your sound advice for years now, since my first Water rig. Thanks, yet again man.

Tip: You can greatly reduce stress (primarily, your own) by refusing to work on machines still running XP.
They are old, have shit hardware and the owners are obviously not interested, so why should you be?

This may be the most important tip in this entire section! As I'm sure you know from this statement, it does turn out to be a huge pain when something on an outdated machine goes out and you lack the replacement parts to test things properly.

Yes I run raid 0 on my server. I know I shouldn't but there were an odd set of circumstances. Originally I had an old dell server (P4- 512mb ram) running Freenas. My transfer rates were dead slow and I had no idea why. Knowing absolutely nothing about servers I tried a raid array and it worked somewhat. Then I tried a bunch of different thing including but not limited to upgrading the entire machine to my e6600 wolfdale ( it was just sitting there collecting dust anyway) This needless to say fixed all my issues but all my movies were still on the raid 0 array and I didn't feel like losing them all so I just left it like that. Also I remember I wanted to have one location called Movies when I pointed my WDTV Live box to it instead of seeing multiple drives I only wanted 1. Now I know I can use JBOD but as I mentioned I know fuck all about servers. Artemis helped me out a great deal with Freenas.

Game Statusending... get off your ass man. cut that bitch up!

[clocker]

[tiny violins]

Originally I had an old dell server (P4- 512mb ram) running Freenas. My transfer rates were dead slow and I had no idea why. Knowing absolutely nothing about servers I tried a raid array and it worked somewhat. Then I tried a bunch of different thing including but not limited to upgrading the entire machine to my e6600 wolfdale ( it was just sitting there collecting dust anyway) This needless to say fixed all my issues but all my movies were still on the raid 0 array and I didn't feel like losing them all so I just left it like that. Also I remember I wanted to have one location called Movies when I pointed my WDTV Live box to it instead of seeing multiple drives I only wanted 1. Now I know I can use JBOD but as I mentioned I know fuck all about servers. Artemis helped me out a great deal with Freenas.

[/tiny violins]
Buy two 2TB drives.
Transfer movies onto the new drives, new drives installed as standalone units (i.e., not part of the array).
Break now empty array and reinstall drives as individual drives.
You now have five separate drives- @6.5 GB.

Create a folder in your OS drive (SSD?) called MOVIES (pretty fuckin clever name, eh?) and point the WDTV Live box thingie to it.
Create shortcuts to each individual video file and place them in the MOVIE folder.

I have no idea if this would work, have never done anything remotely like for myself and pretty much just made it up right this minute.
That said, I'm totally convinced it's a great idea and if you can't make it work, it's probably all your fault.

Edit:
Might be even easier to just use the Win7 Library feature.
Just include all your files in the video library and point your box creature at the library...let Windows do the manual labor.

[Detale]

Well I am going to get 3 1 TB drives later today and start the upgrade process. As for the folder shortcut thing. I don't know if it would work but I am going to try it before I upgrade. I don't think it wil work but it's worth a shot. The reason I started using a server though was to completely free up my machine when someone wanted to watch a movie. The headless system just runs, it waits for someone to access it and I can restart my rig whenever I need to without fucking anyone's movie time. So yeah it's all my fault as usual

[clocker]

OK, I finally got as far as doing some layout.
I'm also going to use a Lian-li tray/backplane but want to try and tie it to the stock Apple standoffs (except for the few bizarre "ball-headed" ones that will either get decapitated or snapped off).
When you cut your case back, how did you deal with the stock section where the vid card/etc. was?
I can't really see how that's put together.

Oh, BTW...one of my OCZ SSDs went belly up yesterday.
Tried new cables and even attempted to get another PC to recognize it but alas, she's dead.
Started the OCZ RMA process this morning, should be interesting to see how that goes.

Also...
I'm building two more PCs for one of my brother's companies.
Last month I built six little Shuttles with Atom CPUs for the packaging production line but these two are for the main office in California and needed to be slightly more capable.
I'm using i3-550 CPUs on Intel boards, 8GB RAM, 64GB OCZ SSDs (also have 640 GB storage drives) and Win 7 Pro 64 bit.

They've had theft problems at this office so I found two ancient beige Enlight cases- still have Windows 2000 product stickers on 'em- in hopes that the PCs will look too old to bother with.
I have been out of the game for so long now that this actually seems interesting to me.
Apparently the graphics are integrated on the chip, so no vid card needed...I hope.

[Detale]

On the g5 case. It looked to me they were tack welded on to the back so I just hacked em off. I did my cut just along side of it so I knew it would be straight. As for those ball standoffs. What the hell were they thinking other than to fuck modders?? No pics???

As for the SSD. Dude that sucks. Hopefully the RMA goes well bud.

About the i3 it does have the on board graphics but you need to use an H55 Mobo. I believe it to be that the chip has half and the mobo has the other half of the GPU. I plan on using an i3/H55 combo that's been sitting in my hallway for over a year now. I got it at micro center for $99 on sale. Now that they have the "gen 2" processors you should wait a few weeks as I believe a huge price drop is coming soon. Actually a quick look on the egg just showed me that may already have happened . I can't comment on the performance as I haven't used it yet but I have read it's pretty decent overall. especially if your they're not gaming at the office. Also what a brilliant idea putting the good hardware in a crappy case! Can't say that I think the old win2k sticker could be considered a theft deterrent though. Would thieves really read the sticker in consideration of stealing it. At the UN office I was working in last year they simply bolted the bottom of the case to a 1/2" steel plate about 2' square. It added about 60lbs to the weight and made it too bulky to steal without someone noticing a large steel square hanging on the bottom of it. Honestly you could do the same thing with a piece of air craft cable and a few "crosby" clips and cable it to the desk. If they want the computer they have to take the desk too. A man of your substantial engineering skills can surely come up with an easy equivalent here.

Also sorry for the typos my keyboard is sticking a bit, time for a new one I guess.

[clocker]

This is what I'm getting...


It'll be here Monday.
I prepped the Enlights...mostly just cleaned them up, although I did have to make some standoffs.
The original motherboards (already gone by the time I got the cases) only needed six standoffs and I required nine.
Naturally, they were an oddball size that I couldn't match, so I had to make six more (three per case)...somewhat of a PITA but not too bad.

If Rick (brother) wants to go to extreme lengths, he can bolt/chain the cases down but my theft prevention efforts ended with picking generic beige boxes.
I certainly wouldn't give 'em a second look.
They're the ancient design where you have to pop the front bezel off to get the sidepanels free (they slide out the front (??!!) and feature two floppy spaces.
Maybe I can dig up four floppy drives and install them as dummies...no self respecting thief would bother with a dual-floppy machine...

No word on the RMA, all I've gotten is an acknowledgement and a trouble ticket # so far.
OCZ makes me pay for shipping back to them, fortunately these are tiny and will fit in the cheap USPS Priority Mail box, so it won't be onerous.

I assume the ball headed standoffs are simply locating pins to hold the Apple motherboard (which is apparently gigantic) while you screw it down.
I might make the first cuts to the case tomorrow.
If so, pics will begin.

Edit:
D., if I do start posting pics, should I start a new thread or shall we combine both projects into this one?
Your call.