Heliodor: Industrial Resurrection

A simple clean-up and re-boot, that went a bit too far.....

I had an old ATX machine gathering dust. One thing led to another. The original motherboard went 'pop'. So more things lead to other things, that brought me to here. This may not be the fastest, prettiest, or most practical, and is mostly the result of a few random thoughts and scribblings.

I could have easily invested in a new M/B, CPU, and Memory.

Well I did, but that's another story. . .

That’s life. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I have zero qualifications in anything electrical.

History

“The plan was simple. Clean it up, replace what was needed, and do some overclocking.”

This system was originally assembled by a local computer shop, and it’s been a bit rough from day one. The PSU was dodgy as dodgy, handing out free volts when touched. Even after returning under warranty (i.e. put on shelf until customer returns), it was still bad.

Did some upgrades along the way. Then having kept running well beyond its shelf life, it eventually spat out the 3rd HDD. So was unplugged and left sitting in the corner.

Looking at it one day, I was deciding whether to chuck it or flog it.....

..... So naturally I decided to rebuild it!!!

The plan was simple, clean it up and replace what was needed. The end goal was to build something cheap I could mess round with and overclock, that if I completely bricked I’d only be losing some time and about $60. I was also planning to cable sleeve my current setup, so this would be a good place to practice. If it survived, then would become the “Kids Rig”.

What I started with...

So the system itself had a bunch of mid-tier budget parts. And when I opened the box, the mess hadn't got any better with age.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600

Reliable. Did its job, and was a fairly common bang-for-buck CPU in it's day. And looking at what it had to survive in, also a fairly robust grunt.

CPU Cooler: Intel OEM CPU Cooler

They are cheap. They are monkey butt ugly. And for the most part have been doing their job efficiently enough for a few decades now.

Motherboard: Asus P5B LGA775 P965

It's an ATX motherboard with all the usual ASUS stuff from that era. About 14yrs old now, covered in dust, had been subjected to a dodgy PSU for years, and some of the caps have been knocked around. But it looks solid enough with no physical signs of damage.

Memory: Kingston KVR 2GB (2 x 1Gb) DDR2-667MHz

RAM used to be stupidly expensive, and it's just lucky that games didn't need much.

GPU: GeForce GT 630 Palit Edition 2GB

It's at the lower end of budget GPUs. But it still managed WoW, Doom, and Duke Nukem.

Storage

Couple of well used Seagate HDDs;

• Barracuda 7200.10 400Gb, ST3400620AS

• Barracuda 7200.12 500Gb, ST500DM002

PSU: 350W Fire Hazard Waiting to Happen

As mentioned, the original PSU was bad, just bad. From day 1, it was a piece of crap. Not to mention the huge amount of dust that it had collected. There was no chance in hell I was going to even plug this thing.

Case

So far as post-beige era ATX cases go, this was a winner. Typical grey, pressed sheet metal, plastic, chrome trim, enough 5.25" bays to continuously rip CD’s and keep Napster going for decades, plus more 3.5" slots than I could financially afford to fill.

Case Cooling: What's that?

Apart from the Intel CPU cooler, and the small case opening directly above it, there was basically no cooling inside the case. Which begs the question; how the f**k does so much dust get inside a case that has no intake fans? I don't even own a cat, or any other kind of fury critter.

Burner: Lite-On: DVD/RW, LH-18A1P

Not much to say.

Audio: Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Fi, SB0790

Whilst the Motherboard does have on-board audio, you just had to have a SoundBlaster. They are the 'Motec System Exhaust' of the PC world.

Monitor: AOC E2070SWN

Original monitor was a 15" Viewsonic. It died, so this was the cheap replacement.

Keyboard & Mouse: Logitech G19 & Logitech G9

A months worth of beer money saved up to buy these bad boys!

What will be upgraded...

Upgrades were supposed to minimal, cheap, and mostly to just to get things going. Well that's how it started out.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400

Whilst stalking around fleabay I found some cheap CPUs. True. The E8400 was $2.95

I was so surprised at how cheap I picked up few spare, on the assumption that I may end up killing one or two with my attempts at overclocking.

The parts bin now included an E7300, E7500, E7600, and E8400, for like $5 each.

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper H411R

As I was planning to do some overclocking, I also decided Intel's finest had to go. Now I’ve always had some doubts about tower coolers v's down-draught, especially when a down-draught is cooling more than just the CPU. Whilst towers may be superior for CPU cooling, on an older motherboard with the down-draught cooler gone, the Northbridge and VRM's were going to run hotter. Just how much hotter I wouldn't find out till later.

Memory: Hynix 2x 2Gb DDR2-6400 800MHz

Back in the day you could buy 5 cases of beer or 4Gb of RAM. Sliding on over to old mate fleabay, and $21 later the set of Hynix sticks were on the way.

GPU: Gigabyte GT 640 OC 2GB

Decided to see what cheap GPUs were available and found a Gigabyte GT640 OC 2Gb. Whilst it’s not a huge step-up, on paper the newer Kepler processor was an good upgrade over the Fermi. I considered a GTX 560 or 650, but wasn't planning any heavy gaming.

Storage: Gigabyte SSD 120Gb

The HDDs had to go, and logically replaced with an SSD. And yes, it's a 120Gb SSD.

Why? Well it's mostly just for the O/S.

Won't a small SSD gimp performance? Well, yes. But have you read the specs above!

PSU: EVGA W1-430W

Yes, it's a budget PSU. But it's not being asked to do much, except not try to electrocute me. And we are only talking Core 2 Duo and GT640, not i7 with a GTX GPU. And this is basically 'free' as it came out of my Amethyst build, so I already had it as a spare.

Case

With the rebuild to be as cheap as possible, a new case was off the list. And to be honest, for what I was planning I didn't really need a new case. So I thought grab a couple of rattle cans and give it a once over. . .

. . . But staring at that ATX Tower, the first word was ugly, then turn of the century (C.1900) heavy industry came to mind. As this build would be an update of an old rig, I came up with the name “Industrial Resurrection". And with that I decided to mod this butt ugly case, but not just some “RGB Unicorn Puke" build. So down the rabbit hole we go. . . . . .

Case Cooling: What's that?

Getting some good airflow in the case was on the list. There is a 120mm fan mount in the front, but no dust filter and is covered by the front panel with just a small opening in the bottom sucking up dust bunnies. It was time to re-think the front panel.

Being an ATX case, there’s like 20x 5.25" bays and 100x 3.5" bays, and I would only be using a single 5.25" DVD/RW and 2.5" SSD. So the spare 5.25" bays were the perfect spot for an additional intake fan. With 2x 120mm fans upfront there should be enough airflow coming into the case.

For the exhaust, again there was nothing with just the PSU basically acting as the exhaust fan, which also explains why it was so badly caked with crap. There is a rear fan mount that takes an 80/92mm exhaust fan. I had an 80mm Noctua Redux, but it just looked really out of place. For aesthetics I wanted a Deepcool fan (to match the intakes) but they don't make a 92mm. I had an Antec 92mm 3-pin fan that came in Barry's case, but had replaced it as needed a 4-pin fan, so decided just to use it here. Problem solved.

• Intake: Deepcool RF 120 (LED)

• Intake: Deepcool XFan 120

• Exhaust: Antec 'generic' 92mm 3-pin

Audio: Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Fi, SB0790

For that old school coolness I decided to keep it in there.

Keyboard & Mouse: Rapoo Cheapo Combo

Costs, so far

• $ 3 CPU

• $37 CPU Cooler + Paste

• $21 Memory

• $40 GPU

• $29 SSD

• $65 PSU

• $16 Case Fans

• $32 Keyboard/Mouse

The Build

First up was a quick clean and new PSU to see if it would POST.

After that everything was a stripped down. Some fresh Arctic Silver 5 applied to the CPU, Northbridge, Southbridge, and GPU. The new SSD went in and Win7 Pro loaded. Updated to the latest BIOS and installed all the drivers.

All good, and jumped on fleabay to find the afore mentioned Memory and CPU upgrades. It was about now I realised that Win7 32bit was installed (don’t ask), so started again with 64bit.

Installed HWMonitor and PCMark2000, and planned to run some basic benchmarks with each hardware upgrade. Ran a baseline benchmark with the E6600 and 2Gb 667MHz memory. Dropped in the 4Gb 800MHz memory. Fired up PCMark2000 and it refused to run, some error about minimum memory required. Did some searching, and decided was going to be a pain, so gave up on the benchmarking.

When my CPU upgrades arrived, I was looking at a bunch of Core 2 Duo’s: E7300, E7500, E7600, and E8400. As I’d already updated the BIOS, in went the E8400 and the Cooler Master H411R.

A few days later I noticed the memory was only running at 667MHz, when it should have been 800. Back into the BIOS and change the DRAM from Auto to 816MHz. A few more days later, and noticed the Northbridge was running way to hot. Like burning fingers hot. So dropped the Memory back to 667MHz for now and limited how much time I had it running. Which now everything was functioning, it didn’t really need to be on.

So on to cable sleeving. Here’s where the dodgy old PSU was actually useful, as I used it for some practice sleeving before the main event. Aside from a couple of pins that flat out refused to cooperate, cable sleeving isn’t too difficult. And assuming you can get some peace and quiet, it is kinda relaxing to sit and do.

Getting it all looking neat, especially the heatshrink, is the hard part. For a first attempt, I’m almost happy. Some of the sleeving is not as tight as I’d like it to be and some of the heatshrink isn't even. But it’s a non-modular PSU, and I didn’t want to use extensions or open the PSU.

The colour scheme started with using the standard colours for industrial piping; water, recycled, gas, etc, so blue, purple, green, red, yellow, etc. But decided it would be too much, so settled on blue as the main colour with the yellow and red highlights. Which meant I ended up using more blue sleeving than planned, so had to sneak in a few black sleeves.

Some creative cable organising and photography, and you'd barely know the black sleeves are there.

The case probably involved the most work, as a window was a must. But this behemoth didn’t have a window, so I’ll just make one. Cutting out the side window was easy, just time consuming to get it all neat.

A rotary tool would have been nice here. But with tin snips in hand. . . 30 minutes and 2 band-aids later (yeh yeh, wear gloves), I had the window cut out. A couple hours for some trimming, bashing, more blood, filing, sanding, and deciding I'd had enough, the side panel was ready for a base coat. For the window I opted for 3mm acrylic sheet rather than 6mm, mostly just for the cost saving.

With left over sheet metal I added a fan mount in the unused 5.25" bays for the RF 120. As there is no use for the 3.5" bays, the rack was removed, which also helps with air flow.

The ugly front panel was next on the list. To keep out the dust bunnies, the original intake at the base of the panel was blocked off. Three new intakes were created, two in the sides adjacent the 5.25" openings and a third using the double 3.5" opening. The side intakes were fitted with some Silverstone Aeroslots. The 3.5" opening was fitted with mesh taken from the old side panel. The 5.25" block-outs were removed and replaced with tinted plexi to show off the Deepcool RF 120mm LED fan. A Deepcool XFAN 120mm now resides in the lower mount.

The case was then stripped down and prepped for painting in satin black. Ended up doing the final coat in matte black, then clear coat. The paint finish isn't as consistent as I'd like, and was taking way longer than I wanted. The side panel window could have done with some extra work to get it smoother. And I was a bit lazy and didn't use a primer coat, which is already coming back to bite me in the arrse. Also thanks to random creatures finding their way onto the fresh paint, forcing my to sand back and re-coat, a few times. In the end I conceded defeat and just wanted it done.

Costs, Case Mods

• $60 Paracord, Acrylic sheet, Other bits

The End

Unfortunately while testing the GT 640 something called it quits. Swapped back the GT 630 to see if the GPU was bad, but trying to boot and instantly shuts off. Re-seated ram, looked over motherboard for any failing cap's, still nothing. So it had a catastrophic failure somewhere. At this point I'm guessing motherboard, maybe the Northbridge. Either way, it was dead.

By now I was a long way down the rabbit hole, and I hadn't even installed anything in the case yet. So I decided to pack it all away, and think about it later.

“If you're wondering why the photos suddenly have a different motherboard. . .”

The Build - Part 2

(Some of this is a bit out of order)

A few weeks later, and I wanted to see this thing running, so went on the hunt for a replacement motherboard. To keep the build as "original" as possible I was initially after a replacement P5B, but they were scarce and way over-priced. In a haze of frustration I started looking at new hardware, beginning with a Celeron G4900 that was on “sale"... But that's a whole other story...

Now realising that I'd gone well beyond a simple rebuild and replaced most of the original parts, I expanded my motherboard options and found a Gigabyte GA-EP41-UD3L (R1.2) from the same supplier as the GT 640. Being a G41 chipset, versus the Asus P965, the Gigabyte M/B is at least a few years younger.

As I knew all the original parts were good, I dropped in the E6600, GT 630, and a single 1Gb stick to test the new motherboard. All good. Pulled it all apart to get everything ready. Just to be safe, I got some Arctic MX-4 for the Northbridge. The Southbridge had a thermal pad so left it as is. Also gave the GT 640 some fresh paste. On went all the previous upgrades; E8400, H411R, 2x 2Gb memory, GT 640, and SSD. Fired it up and let the BIOS do its thing, checked everything registered ok. All good, and then booted into Windows.

Lighting & Other Bits

As this would potentially be the kids PC, it had to have some flashing bits. For most of this I tried to use parts that had lying around, so this was fairly cheap addition. Spent a few dollars on some new LEDs.

With the case lighting I was originally going with yellow LED, to kind of resemble the dirty glow from old incandescent lights. More details to come. . .

The LEDs will be powered from 5V on a Molex. I've routed wiring to the front USB enclosure and added an on/off switch.

Wanting to go a step further, I decided to do something useful with a bunch of Arduino stuff that I’d accumulated after some late night ebay sessions. Using an Arduino Nano I knocked up a simple Northbridge temperature monitor with a thermistor module and RGB module. Coincidently, this is the only actual RGB item in the case.

Then I remembered an old temperature probe from an old motherboard, can't even remember which it was, that never got used. Hooked it up to the Nano to see if it worked, and it did. As it's quite small, it's perfect for the Northbridge heat sink. So the larger thermistor module now sits near the Nano to measure ambient temps in the case.

To give some more info than just an RGB LED I've added an OLED display in the front to show the Northbridge and Case temperatures. The whole setup isn't as accurate as using add-in software to pull values, but tested against an electronic thermometer it's within a couple degrees.

I’m powering the Nano from +12V Molex. This means the PC needs to be shut down before I can upload new sketches, but it’s no drama.

As I didn’t want to continually pump 12V into the Nano, I put together a 9V Regulator. The thermistors were sharing the Nano's 5V, and the Northbridge probe also needed a 10k resistor, and then everything was sharing the same GND pin. So to keep it a bit simpler I added a small breakout on the same board as the 9V Reg, and ran 5V & GND from the Nano to the board.

I then decided this could be done better and didn't need to pull power or ground everything through the Nano. From the 9V Reg, the power steps down again to 5V, and then reconfigured the breakout so that 5V & GND is now directly to the PSU via the 12V Molex, with only data going to/from the Nano.

The breakout board is mounted on some smoked Perspex, which is then mounted over the internal 3.5" opening in the case. This serves two purposes, somewhere to mount stuff and secondly it blocks off the opening so the front fans aren't recirculating hot air back through the case.

I’m currently working on controlling a cooling fan for the Northbridge, and some lighting effects via a push button mounted on the front panel.

The GT 640 cooling fan is a semi-transparent, and would be perfect for getting some lighting in there to match the H411R. And I had just the LEDs for it. How these came about is a bit of a random story. . .

. . . We had a fairly big storm, and later the kids found a string of LEDs in the front yard. They look a lot like some Christmas 'icicle' lights that you normally hang from the eaves. Gave them a quick test and all worked. . .

. . . They have a nice bright icy blue colour, and are small enough to easily mount under the GPU fan shroud. At this point I also made the decision to dump the yellow idea for the case lighting, as these would look better. Just needed to think of how to mount them so they don't look like some random LED 'point lights' inside the case.

Costs, Case Mods

• Free 'icicle' LEDs

The time finally came to start fitting everything in the case. Managing the cables was a bit annoying. The motherboard tray has cut-outs, but naturally the side panel sits flush so you can't actually run the ATX cables behind the tray. About all I could squeeze in are fan and sata cables.

Got all hooked up, and did a test boot. All good. Shutdown to plug in the case fans, then tried to boot. Dead, again. Are you joking!

Stood there for a few minutes thinking. Checked everything was ok.... I should mention at this point that the front panel connectors are still just hanging loose.... Thinking. Did I press the button on the yellow or blue cable? Ah, numbnutts, blue is reset, yellow is power.... All good now!

However the exhaust fan was failing to spin. It has some life, and kicks during boot but then stops. It's a 3-pin fan, so tested on a 3-pin header, all good. Tested a spare 4-pin fan on the 4-pin header. Hmmmm, a dud 4-pin fan header? Will come back to that one.

Cable Sleeving - Again

Since doing the sleeving in this case, I started sleeving my main computer, but decided to go heatshrinkless. Considering how much easier that was, and how unsatisfied I was with the heatshrink here, I decided to redo the ATX and CPU sleeving as heatshrinkless!!!

The Build - Part 3

Turning my attention back inside the case, I needed to get the Nano and all of its bits tidied up. Fitted some smoked plexi into the now defunct double 3.5" hole. This gave me somewhere to mount the breakout board and also the RGB LED, which can then be seen through the front panel.

The GPU and Soundcard at least were both blue and matched the motherboard. But nah, still looks crappy. So I've made some back plates from gloss black perspex. The Soundcard had spare holes which helped with mounting the perspex.

The GPU only has one usable mounting hole, so three of the bolts are really just supporting the plexi.

Lots of sanding and buffing with car polish to get the edges nice a smooth.