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

ALXAndy

ALXAndy

ALXAndy

Soldato
Joined
23 Apr 2010
Posts
12,083
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 :)
 
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.

 
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 :)
 
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.
 
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.

 
Luggs said:
Excellent work, does the "alien writing" mean anything? ;)
Click to expand...

It does yes :) It says ALX Andy.

Recently when I rebuilt the 2009 ALX I noticed funny glyphs around the case. My wife and I ended up descrambling the messages using the font. I just printed out the font type face and we sat and decoded all of the writing hehe.

I thought they were nonsense at first and just for show, but they actually decoded into things like "Hard drive bay 1" and so on.
 
harry5522 said:
EDIT : I really hate to say this but according to alienwares official language conversion the last two characters are slightly wrong :(
Click to expand...

I know. The plotter mis-cut the last few tiny details so I have to add them in later. Basically they got left behind on the backing paper. It's a ten second job :)

OK so here is what I got up to today. Apologies for the awful photo quality but when it's dark there really isn't much I can do about it.

So I marked up the second and final cover panel. It needs a relief for SATA/Power cables to run through it.



Tools out.



And cut.



Then cover.



So the Mars came today.



So I figured I would create a graphic.



And done.



That can go in later..
 
harry5522 said:
Really glad to hear that :D! enjoying this project a lot! Also oh mars cards! Mars and ares are just... drool such a great " collectors " item :D
Click to expand...

Yeah the 760 isn't quite as prestigious as the others but it's still an enormous slab of plastic and metal :D

I only needed it for 1080p so the VRAM should be fine at least for now. Was cheap, too, really.
 
harry5522 said:
:D I don't think the GPU matters with those cards personally! They are just simply amazing :D!

Are you planning to do anything on case exterior :D? Sorry if you have already mentioned this i have missed it if you have :D!
Click to expand...

No I intend to keep the exterior/lighting completely mod free.

Not sure if you noticed but the Predator 2.1 ALX chassis does not come with any cable management holes near the board as stock. I cut those in years ago to help with the GPU and 24 pin power cables.

However, that's about as far as I really want to go with it. There are plenty of destroyed/altered/hacked up examples out there if you look hard enough, I want mine to all be as close to factory as possible just with a couple of cover panels etc.

So think of it more of a restoration than a mod.

I did the same thing with the 2009 model (the black one in the OP) however I do have a cut side panel for it. When I got it in 2012 I fitted two 670s on dual fan coolers and the top card (670 Jetstream) was hitting 103c and shutting the rig down. So I initially did a cut and bodge job on it to get more air in.

Now that it runs a Titan Black under an AIO that's not an issue any more, so I first made it look a bit more presentable then ordered a complete new replacement panel from the USA.

So right now the 2009 model looks like this.



And there is a mod to the 5.25 bays (removable of course)



But as soon as I put the solid side panel on it looks completely bone stock :)

Same goes for the 2014 model too, the only work done was a new PSU/braiding and so on and better fans.

 
Bossman said:
Never really been a fan of the Alienware stuff but credit where it's due the work done here is top notch. Love the restoration theme too. :)
Click to expand...

I'm completely obsessed with them tbh. If I had my way my entire flat would be full of them. Mind you having said that three in here is a lot..

Once the rig is finished I am going to hide it behind an arm chair. Then get a Xbone PC receiver so I can use my pad wireless.

Two of the three Area 51s I have are extremely rare. The two ALX Area 51s (where I get my username from) cost around £2700 starting price and quickly went north. The 2009 Dellienware one cost the original owner six grand.

When I bought the chassis (from an auction after Dell found a fault with it) it still had the original service code on it so I ran it for a laugh. Two 5970s, two 256gb SSD in RAID 0, Intel 980... Whoever bought it had serious dough !

Turns out it had a PSU fault (intermittent) and eventually the PSU failed.. That's probably why Dell took it back and sold it empty.
 
Yay I haves a 1055T ! Many thanks to Will for sending it to me :)

So I set everything up ghetto style.



And had a look.



Whilst checking for RAID I noticed this board also did AHCI which I was quite surprised about given its age !



OK so let's see what overclocking options I have..



Everything you need is there. I am a little confused about the memory right now though. I stuck in 210mhz from the standard 200 FSB and I was then greeted with this.



Not good. I need that to be 400mhz or lower but no matter what I did it just continued to rise. Now usually the memory divider is on the same page as the FSB and NB etc so you just adjust it all there, but I found an old article showing it on a different page. Bit of a PITA, but I'm sure now I know what to look for that I'll find it :)
 
/forehead slap.

It took me about an hour before it finally sunk in.. Those speeds being offered in the memory divider are the actual full speeds of the ram after the bus increase.

I was looking at it thinking DDR so dual data rate means 400 in the bios means 800 in the OS. That's how it used to work on my old EVGA 680 board.

It actually makes it easier as it gives you the exact full DD rate of the ram.

Needless to say I've started overclocking already and have already managed 3.4ghz using 1.4v.

The voltage is high but I like to get stable then work backwards.. I've also bought a set of 4x2gb DDR2 dimms from the UK so I'm not going to do anything else until they go in now.

Overall I'm very happy though, she should make a cracking 1080p gaming rig :)
 
harry5522 said:
:D I remember trying to explain this to a friend who was livid at kingston because he thought they had sold him some 800mhz ram because that's what it was showing in the os :D Could be displayed a little more user friendly as i expect a lot of people do this :D
Click to expand...

It's really odd tbh. Usually the motherboard shows you the single data rate speed and you have to double it. I guess being such an old board Asus decided to do it differently lol.

I do have an update.. In the end I found a guy selling four sticks of Hynix DDR2. Four 2gb 667mhz sticks. However, he promised me that they would do 800 easily. So, I ended up settling on £20 which I thought was very reasonable..

And yesterday I managed to build the rig, though right now I am finding it close to impossible to take any sort of photograph. But, just for now here is a shot of the rig fully built.



As you can see I fitted a Phobya bricky grill to the back exhaust fan because I usually always catch my knuckles on those sods !

I've currently got the CPU @ 3.4ghz. I had it much higher (3.8) but as soon as I fitted the Mars it all became unstable. I'm not quite sure why, maybe it's because the Mars pulls far more power from the PCIE slot and this was causing fluctuations? god only knows.

I also had a strange issue fitting the 8gb ram. I booted fine from one stick but as soon as I added the second it would lock down and I got no display.. Reset cmos and yay, 4gb. However, adding all 8gb would again cause it to go weird and I would have to reset cmos.. In the end I discovered that if you started with 2gb and added 2gb more per cmos reset it would pick it up OK..

So yeah, basically all 8gb is now usable and everything works as it should.

I still have a few small things to do (like pretty much buff the whole case with Tcut metallic to remove all of the small scratches it's picked up over the years) and RAID the two drives (right now they are running separately) but other than that it's all pretty much done as I did all of the spade work long before anything went in :)

I've found that I can run Fallout 4 on ultra with FXAA so long as I reduce the shadows to low and reduce Godrays to low. TBH after playing it at 4k it looks like doodoo any way at 1080p but I will be sitting about 18 feet back from the TV once it's all hooked up.

FPS go from 24-solid 60 depending on the area, but it all seems to run along fine :)
 
That's one of my Living Dead dolls :D Well actually they aren't mine they're my lady's, but they're so cool I have a couple of them in my desk area haha.

I thought about adding some accents to the outside, but seriously, every time I have ever seen some one "get creative" with an Alienware they have usually always failed. The only two mods I have ever seen that got my approval was Bill's (MNPCTECH) original Mk1 ALX and Kier's Aurora. And both probably cost hundreds to do (airbrushing, changing the whole shape and layout of the case).

The trick really is to keep the outside of the cases bone stock. As they get older they increase in rarity..

Sadly since I got up today there has been pretty much 0 sunlight so I can't take any more pics. I have ordered some nice long cables so I can hook it into the TV though after testing it with Fallout 4 yesterday :)
 
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