Stig of the dump!

[Geeba]

Whilst on one of my many runs to the local council refuse site to dump more of my house that I've pulled apart whilst doing a loft conversion my eye was draw to what looked like a Cooler-Master PC case.

I strategically started to walk closer to it and caught a glimpse of a very dusty copper Zalman CPU cooler... knowing that wouldn't be installed on an old dog of a PC I checked the coast was clear (our local dump wont let you remove stuff) I grabbed it and in seconds the computer was gracing the boot of my car!

Once home and on closer inspection I realized it was pretty much complete!

it had...

650W PSU
An Aluminum Cooler Master case - bit dated looking so will probably grace the dump again soon
500Gb Samsung HDD - in a fancy HDD Cooler case
1Gb ATI HD5770 GFX card
6Gb RAM
Core2 6600 2.4Ghz CPU
Copper heat pipe CPU cooler
Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound card
CD/DVD Burner

I thought well this machine must be dead.... nope! I plugged it in and it fired straight up! - well no one is daft enough to dump a HDD with anything on it surely???? oh yes they are! full of music, movies and family pictures! and scanning the HDD its completely free of errors too!

The mainboard is a pretty dated one, but its an Asus Nforce SLi board with a heap of overclocking features! happy days!

I got a spare HDD and installed SteamOS and it worked a treat! - today I stripped it down and washed all the parts with aqueous foam cleaner and ordered a cheap Zalman HTPC case... I'm going to run it as a Steam Machine... I'll keep you posted on how it gets on.

[Tayjelir]

Whilst on one of my many runs to the local council refuse site to dump more of my house that I've pulled apart whilst doing a loft conversion my eye was draw to what looked like a Cooler-Master PC case.

I strategically started to walk closer to it and caught a glimpse of a very dusty copper Zalman CPU cooler... knowing that wouldn't be installed on an old dog of a PC I checked the coast was clear (our local dump wont let you remove stuff) I grabbed it and in seconds the computer was gracing the boot of my car!

Once home and on closer inspection I realized it was pretty much complete!

it had...

650W PSU
An Aluminum Cooler Master case - bit dated looking so will probably grace the dump again soon
500Gb Samsung HDD - in a fancy HDD Cooler case
1Gb ATI HD5770 GFX card
6Gb RAM
Core2 6600 2.4Ghz CPU
Copper heat pipe CPU cooler
Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound card
CD/DVD Burner

I thought well this machine must be dead.... nope! I plugged it in and it fired straight up! - well no one is daft enough to dump a HDD with anything on it surely???? oh yes they are! full of music, movies and family pictures! and scanning the HDD its completely free of errors too!

The mainboard is a pretty dated one, but its an Asus Nforce SLi board with a heap of overclocking features! happy days!

I got a spare HDD and installed SteamOS and it worked a treat! - today I stripped it down and washed all the parts with aqueous foam cleaner and ordered a cheap Zalman HTPC case... I'm going to run it as a Steam Machine... I'll keep you posted on how it gets on.

rsz_img_20150601_142856.jpg

Did whoever leave the "How does I insert chip" sticker in the CPU socket?

[Geeba]

No - I stuck that on whilst I sprayed the board with aqueous foam cleaner... didn't think it was a good idea to get it in the socket....

[seriouslycgi]

Land lords dump some awesome stuff sometimes

[professor_jonny]

I think that board is the same as the asus striker extreme which I have and it was the top of the line $1000 model when I brought it.

I retired mine some time ago because nforce does not work with win 8 no drivers for the built in gaming features.

I put a socket 775 to 771 converter and put in a quad core xeon processor in mine.

all the ai features temp management etc wont work with win 8 which sucks.

[hawsey]

Nice one

[Geeba]

I think that board is the same as the asus striker extreme which I have and it was the top of the line $1000 model when I brought it.

I retired mine some time ago because nforce does not work with win 8 no drivers for the built in gaming features.

I put a socket 775 to 771 converter and put in a quad core xeon processor in mine.

all the ai features temp management etc wont work with win 8 which sucks.

Wowser! tell me more!!!! will the 771 xeon be ok for games? - will it have more grunt than the Q6600 over clocked? I think this board is limited to the 65nm Quads thou - the manual states Q6600 and Q6700 only as its the nForce 650i chipset..

Dam! didn't know nForce was no good with windows 8... thats a bit of a blow... I was going to put Windows 10 on with a SteamOS dual boot... well I suppose I could try OpenElec instead.

[spicemuseum]

Did you see an elderly lady unloading stuff whilst you were there?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19665632

[Geeba]

Yeah I did see that! - classic! bin the Steve Wozniak hand made collectors item, made of wood cant be worth much.

[asbo]

Nice find

(our local dump wont let you remove stuff)

That drives me nuts, why waste energy and money recycling something when it can just be reused? And why have the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' slogo if they don't follow it.

well no one is daft enough to dump a HDD with anything on it surely???? oh yes they are! full of music, movies and family pictures! and scanning the HDD its completely free of errors too!

People are unbelievably stupid, on several occasions I've bought used hard drives and laptops off ebay and found they're full of extremely personal things. Even if they don't know how to erase the data securely(or as much as is possible with tools you can download for free), you'd think they'd at least try and delete their personal photos etc.

I suppose they've all just been brainwashed by the throwaway culture, if its over a year old get rid of it and give no thought to its value and what might happen to it down the line.

[Geeba]

Here it all is, nice and clean waiting for the case to turn up! (excuse the spotty table protector - Mrs wont let me use the table otherwise )

I had 8Gb of RAM from my old Gaming rig so I've added that along with a 500Gb Hybrid SSD/HDD drive thats been kicking around a while.

I've also dug out an old Q6600 Quad core CPU that I've lapped and polished, But the Prof has thrown a spanner in the CPU works now by suggesting a Xeon upgrade!! I want some of that 3Ghz/12mb/1333 goodness - so currently looking to see whats involved. it looks very possible and the Xeons are really cheap!

[Geeba]

Nice find

(our local dump wont let you remove stuff)

That drives me nuts, why waste energy and money recycling something when it can just be reused? And why have the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' slogo if they don't follow it.

well no one is daft enough to dump a HDD with anything on it surely???? oh yes they are! full of music, movies and family pictures! and scanning the HDD its completely free of errors too!

People are unbelievably stupid, on several occasions I've bought used hard drives and laptops off ebay and found they're full of extremely personal things. Even if they don't know how to erase the data securely(or as much as is possible with tools you can download for free), you'd think they'd at least try and delete their personal photos etc.

I suppose they've all just been brainwashed by the throwaway culture, if its over a year old get rid of it and give no thought to its value and what might happen to it down the line.

I know - its crazy... I would think this was a fairly expensive machine when it was built.... definitely a custom build, I was still rocking a machine of similar spec until last year when I made the X97/i5 jump - but the machine was stripped and sold on eBay and I have no doubt its still going now.... yeah the jobsworth's at the local tip drive me mad!

I've not erased the drive as yet - I had a scoot through to see if recognized anyone so I could return them, but nothing. It would probably be destin for a Chinese recycling center on a ship burning a few million gallons of diesel getting there... crazy world.

[professor_jonny]

It will work with the native drivers built into windows. None of the NVIDIA drivers support 3TB drives mo cd rom copy protection bypass and no chipset tools to tweak in windows ,if you can deal with that it will be sweet with win 8.

That board is a little cut down to my one but has the same basics.

I think I had a 4250 quad core xeon and it wiped the pants off any thing on the market at the time and was cheap compared to a 755 core processor. Worth while if you want a cheap fast rig. From memory it benched around that of a core 2 quad 9650 from memory.

[Geeba]

Case arrived! - it was on special at overclockers £59

Complete with a free 'Be Quiet' 120mm cooling fan.

It seems really good! - very well made, I was expecting a bit of a bargain basement item for that money... front panels are on popper catches and slow openers.

removable drive bay in the front...

Fan controller...

Nice HDD system... holds 3 drives and has sound dampers - it comes with a 2.5" SSD adapter too.

I've done some reading on the 771 Xeon CPU and apparently this board will support the X5450 which is still a bit of a beast and can be had on ebay for £20. - wondering if I should push my luck and try a X5470 at 3.33Ghz....

[professor_jonny]

you will Properly find it will work but you might have to update the CPU microcode/ id in the bios using the Awardtool to get it to boot properly, mine said it would not work with the one I picked but it did after a bios update.

if that model has a dual bios it is quite safe to try update the bios macrocode/ id and PCI option rom I did it on my one to update the raid rom to the latest one while I was at it.

you could also patch in a slic mod for a free upgrade to windows 10 then

[Geeba]

Cheers for the pointers prof - I'll get one ordered up on ebay, do you remember where you got the mircocode/BIOS update from?

I've got it all in the case now and connected up to the TV... still need a decent controller or small keyboard thou.

SteamOS - well I'm a bit disappointed in all honesty - I've had a look at the 'Big Picture' software they do for the Steam application so knew what it would look like, but it has a minuscule amount of games compared to other OS's - hopefully they address that, I know its beta but its not great, the two games I loaded (Half Life 2 and Bioshock Infinite) both have issues.

Now I might have to put the flame proof jacket on as I'm about to bad LINUX! LOL! - I KNOW this game/version plays smoooooooooooth as silk years ago on an XP PC prior to the Q6600 I had, which I seem to remember was a 3.4Ghz P4.... on SteamOS at 1080p to be honest it was junk, not smooth, juddering performance and I couldn't crank the settings up without it being completely unplayable.

Bioshock crashed every time, the characters where plain grey models completely un-rendered, I completed this game on my old Q6600 games rig and it never skipped a beat, so I know the hardware is capable... even 2K agree:-

http://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles ... quirements

I would think its the old AMD/ATI LINUX driver issues, and Bioshock being sold as an AMD optimised product they really need to sort that out...

I think my next move on stig-box is to go 771 Xeon and bag a copy of Windows 10 and give that a whirl.

[professor_jonny]

The cpu ID can be popped straight in the bios from looking on the model string of the chip or on the net.

the macro code you can get from Intel and it is around on the net from place to place.

with out the id the cpu is unknown to the system and some motherboards refuse to boot an unknown cpu, the macrocode tells the motherboard the features a specific cupid supports.

specific features may not be supported or the system may not be at all bootable without it as the mother board could try to access a feature the chip does not support and crash the pc or make it unreliable.

Most manufactures use it to fix processor bugs by workarounds so can make a big difference in stability of specific chips but generally it will boot without such mods.

some times you have to use a software solution to unlock speed step MMX or SSE for example that may enhance the performance of the chip.

the flasher motherboards will have all these patches enabled so you could pull the parts out of a similar motherboard like the striker extreme.

[Geeba]

Thanks for the pointers prof - I'm just looking on ebay now for a Xeon at the right money... hoping for 3+Ghz / 1333FSB and 12mb cache.

Fully rebuilt the stig-box with Windows 10 and she's flying! Sorry SteamOS but the difference is night and day, I hope they sort the issues with the beta stuff out.

Bioshock Infinite was unplayable in SteamOS... every setting detected as low, figures weren't rendered and it crashed every time ... now fully playable and all settings detected as High... same for Half Life 2 Update - these are all I've tested at the moment.

But the dump find is doing good!

Anyone know of a good keyboard/mouse combo I can use in the lounge? light gaming really... but small enough so as not to upset Mrs Geeba.