Alienware Area 51 ALX #3 - The Silver Server Saga.

ALXAndy

ALXAndy

ALXAndy

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Joined
23 Apr 2010
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Location
West Sussex
Hi guys. Been a while since I have posted anything here. I've been super happy with my new Area 51 and with Fallout 4 all of my spare time has been put into that. However, last week my old neighbour phoned me up and basically offered me back my old Area 51 ALX that I sold them in 2009 for free..

I've always regretted selling her in the first place, but I wanted the Dell Aurora and finances were tight.

Any way, as some of the keen eyed among you will have noticed, I already have two post Dell Area 51s. I have this one with a 5820k and Fury X for 4k.



And this, with an 8 core Ivy Xeon and Titan Black for 1080p



And now finally I am being reunited with this, which will be our home server/web server/NAS etc.



So here is the rig back in 2009, as I waved a tearful goodbye.





And the inside*



*Before I sold it to them I removed the GPUs (two 5770s and a GT 240) as well as all of the Noctua fans other than one for the cooler. They are not into gaming any way.

Now my neighbours are quite proud people (they're in their 60s now) and the outside of the case had been kept extremely well. However, the inside was a train crash. The side panel had not been off in nearly six years and everything was absolutely and utterly caked in dust. Thick, dense black dust.

I've spent about five hours cleaning now and here is where I am at.



As you can see I have ripped pretty much all of the panels off. I am going to have to take the side panels apart to wash the mesh as dust gets trapped in there. It will take a couple of hours per panel so I have not done that yet.

Here is the motherboard.



An Asus M3A32 MVP WIFI Deluxe (with the wrap around copper memory coolers)

This is to give a rough idea of what the dust was like.



Ugh.

One thing my neighbours did do was remove the 250gb hard drive. Not sure they're really into pron but obviously they don't trust me knowing how knowledgeable I am about computers but it was no biggy. I have a couple of 500gb laptop drives I will set in RAID 0 and ordered this for £39.99 (240gb) yesterday.



I also needed to replace the GPU. I remember clearly buying the one that I left in there for £23 six years ago (so I could keep mine). And whilst it served them well it only has 256mb VRAM which I am sure Win8/10 would struggle with. So I bought this.



For £20. It's an Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 768mb. It's basically a 9600GT but that's fine for me. I also ordered 8gb ram for it (4x2gb) for £9.



And finally a new PSU. The old one still seems to work flawlessly but I am a little concerned about age.



Viva OCUK !

And finally the supposed final spec.

AMD Phenom 2 940
Noctua NH-C12P
Asus M3A32 MVP WIFI Deluxe
8gb DDR2 800
Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 768mb
240gb SSD
1tb storage
600w Cougar PSU
All Cougar Vortex fans.
NZXT touch fan controller (LCD)
Silver DVD drive

More to come soon :)
 
Nice to see a new project from you as I always like your ideas/tweaks/modifications. It's also good to see a new clean-up build log. I'm Looking forward to seeing the system being cleaned out and re-purposed. :)

Only thing is won't it cost a bit to run power wise or is not going to be running 24/7/365?
 
So yesterday the PSU came. Thanks OCUK !. Immediately though there were issues..

Firstly it only comes with one molex run and two SATA runs. That was merely the first of its crimes. Secondly all of the cables are very short, which creates other problems, most namely.

1. The molex run was not really long enough to go where I needed it to (but thankfully I had an extension or two)

2. The SATA cables were not even long enough to reach the sodding hard drive bays.

I knew that this PSU was cheap but did not expect Cougar to bail on very important features like this.

So the fix? well it's one of these. Total cost £9 and it's saved my sanity and the build. One molex to four SATAs. I only need three :)



I also ordered 1m x 75cm of this.



As the machine will have two cover panels. One for the PSU, one for a large cut out in the front of the case near the bottom.

The only other thing I have done is fit the fan controller, DVD drive and PSU as well as cover the Nvidia Quadro with silver Dinoc and put a new Quadro logo on it. Sadly it's been so dark here lately that it's not even worth getting out the camera.
 
OK so one of the things I remembered when I ran this case with the Phenom 2 940 and a GTX 470 was that it always had trouble getting the hot air out. Whilst a Quadro FX1800 isn't exactly known to be a scorcher I still wanted a way of making sure it stayed cool.

Enter the Evercool Fox One. (not mine)



Step one, take it apart.



Step two was to braid the cable.



And step three, paint the fan, back bracket and top.



The top part where the fan opening is will be covered in silver dinoc...
 
And completed. I also wrapped the front of the GPU and cut a decal for it because it was quite badly scratched.

 
This server looks nicer than my first gaming PC :D
Seriously though, I always like your build logs as you do a superb job wraping components in the mesh wrap. I never see any blips or issues with it. Is it easy or are you just extemely good at it? :)

Looking forward to more updates :)
 
I got a lot of experience wrapping things when I worked doing car audio. I also like wrapping presents too :)

It does look a bit cheap but it's tidy, and very easy to wipe down when it gets dusty.

However, this build may be changing direction. Yesterday I was very kindly offered a Thuban 1055T which is about on par with a recent AMD 6350 (it's 50/50 give and take) in which case I am now strongly considering making this into a gaming PC.

I usually always carry a 1080p capable gaming rig as a spare, and I think the 1055t would just about cut it with 8gb ram and something like a used GTX 780 to go with it. Well, either that or a stock 290 which also sell quite cheaply these days.

It pretty much has everything else (240gb SSD 1tb RAID storage) so yeah, this may change direction a little :)
 
ALXAndy said:
I got a lot of experience wrapping things when I worked doing car audio. I also like wrapping presents too :)

It does look a bit cheap but it's tidy, and very easy to wipe down when it gets dusty.

However, this build may be changing direction. Yesterday I was very kindly offered a Thuban 1055T which is about on par with a recent AMD 6350 (it's 50/50 give and take) in which case I am now strongly considering making this into a gaming PC.

I usually always carry a 1080p capable gaming rig as a spare, and I think the 1055t would just about cut it with 8gb ram and something like a used GTX 780 to go with it. Well, either that or a stock 290 which also sell quite cheaply these days.

It pretty much has everything else (240gb SSD 1tb RAID storage) so yeah, this may change direction a little :)
Click to expand...
I don't think it looks cheap, in fact it looks classier than the big logos some manufacturers have plastered all over their products.:)
Either way though if it becomes a system or a server I'm sure it will be perfect :D
 
The Molex - SATA arrived today. I will get that fitted and routed later :)

Not made any of the cover panels yet but will likely do that tomorrow when I get bored :D
 
Well this came up and I could not help myself.



I've been wanting to use my 65" TV for gaming ever since I bought it but 30hz 4k really put me off so I bought a 60hz 4k monitor. So I am going to finish this PC as a gaming machine and connect it up to the TV 1080p 120hz.

There are probably better things to buy for £125 but I really liked the look of it. Plus of course there's the irony of Mars and Alienware (OK I will get my coat).

I did some more cable management yesterday and now all of the hard drives are fitted. I have two 512gb laptop drives that I am going to RAID 0 and a 240gb SSD I got in the Black Friday sales.

Maybe today I will finally get myself into gear and cut the two cover panels I need, but one of them worries me because I have a feeling I am not yet done on cable management in that area. Last thing I want to do is cut some acrylic, paint the edges silver and then cover it only to find it needs adjusting at the last minute.

I also have a full set of orange and black cable extensions but I'm a bit worried about whether or not this case has enough room to hide them.
 
Nice to see the system returning to it's gaming prime (Not that it would have been a bad server) :)
I'm looking forward to seeing the acrylic panels being cut and fitted in the system (Something I always like in your builds) and seeing the system up and running. :D
 
One of them is already cut I just have to make it a cooler shape. I can't cut the other one until the rig is built which is a PITA..

At some point today I need to get it running on a desk and flash the bios so that it supports the 1055T.

Still waiting on the memory.

Edit. Well that was a pleasant surprise :) just fired it up on the desk and apparently I installed the latest bios before.

I also found out the board is 8+2 which made me happy :)
 
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Update. So I got a couple of things done today.

In the bottom of the case there is a piece of trunking that hides all of the lighting wiring. However it had faded and gone very flat. So I first repainted it (removing the Noctua logo) and then designed this for it.



Take into plotter software.



Cut.



And then fit. I think they look nice, giving it an accent to the black.



Then I moved onto the PSU cover. Thankfully I had a piece of scrap that was the perfect size and shape. So once again it was off to the plotter.



Start picking out all of the excess pieces..



Remove waste..



They say that there's no I in team. Well it took me about five minutes before I even noticed there was no I in this logo. I then started to panic because I had used the very last piece of matt black vinyl... Desperate thinking eventually led me to glue a spare piece (very small) to an A4 sheet of paper and cut an I out of that.



Then mask and fit.



Add one of these that I cut from a tiny scrap piece of 3M carbon dinoc...



And the PSU cover panel is complete.

 
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