B-Grade Bodger Build!

[Kinsy]

Walking into the office one day, I see an Asus G20 lying around in bits. GPU removed, no power brick, apparently won't start. Has a i7 6700 non-K, 256GB SSD, 2TB HD, 16GB RAM (WHY is it SODIMM?!) and I think even a Blu-Ray drive in it.

I asked if I could have a go at getting it working. £25 later on an exact replica PSU (genuine ones are £190 - no ****ing way am I spending that) it still won't start.

So here I am thinking, what could I do with it and the same amount of money, £190, to turn it into a working PC again? I have an 800W PSU in the loft, a GTX1050 from an old work project...all I need is a board, RAM, and case, and I've got a working PC I can use for....something?

Right?

Just £190.

Just make it work. Turn it into a Hackintosh or something like I did with my old backup PC I'd just given away. Which didn't work very well because Apple hate Nvidia for ~reasons~.

Yeah. That's almost what's happening!

 

[Kinsy]

Here's some photos of the G20 before I get started.

Stripping for parts; got the CPU and RAM out.

Now for the shopping! Picked up an Inwin 301 from McPhee for £40:-

Board, Supremacy EVO and EK-XRES DDC from JoeF1 - £110 for the lot (dammit I should have had one of your rads dude, too late now I've bought one). Yes, I am an idiot and am watercooling this. Mainly because I had a Black Ice Stealth 240mm rad lying around and plenty of the evil Mayhems Red X1.

Had to give these a good clean - TIM clean isn't the stuff mate, you want vinegar on everything except the Nickel block. All cleaned up very nicely.

Looks good!

Test fitting what I have for now; just waiting on RAM (picked up a single 8GB DDR4 stick from Atari for £20). Inwin why didn't you put in another 10mm height!

We can solve this problem easily enough. There will be a 120mm fan blowing at this from the rad so it'll be fine. Plus this card is not staying. Picked up a R9 270 on here for £35, and a EK VGA Supremacy block for £25 on the bay secondhand.

Here's where I am so far, next to my enormous LianLi which I still, after 4 years, haven't had the nerve to cut the side of!

I've managed to find with some intense researching, Der8auer's modded BIOSes for non-K overclocking. This took a lot of time to find! If anyone wants the links I can post it but I don't want to fall foul of any rules.

Raiding the OCUK clearance page I picked up 5 EK Vardar RGB 120mm fans, a EK Coolstream PE 240mm rad, and a fan controller for...ehm..£150. Ooops guess the budget's blown!
Hopefully everything should be here Monday.
In the meantime I will be busying myself with the front panel, which will definitely be getting fan cut outs to help with airflow. I know this case apparently sucks for it but I think cutting the fan holes will help a lot.

 

[Kinsy]

So with no RAM Sunday I did this to the poor thing. Apologies for the dogs blanket, ruined carpet stained with the blood red Mayhems it and general detritus. We're decorating the house and this room will be last with the whole floor going. We paused for the summer to work on the garden so between working full time (no furlough for me) and working on that I'm playing with this for an hour or so a day.

Yes I did just buy a pop rivet gun to put it back together!

Finally today got the RAM today, slotted it in and we have a machine that posts, result!
Of course being the idiot I am, I immediately set the BLCK to 130mhz and tried to overclock it on the stock cooler. No bueno wouldn't boot. Guess I need the BIOS. To add insult to injury, nobody can remember the password to the Win10 install on the SSD at work so I'm currently nuking the thing from orbit. Of course I will end up doing this anyway once the R9 270 turns up and put OSX on it. At which point I bet the overclock doesn't work anyway with it, but that's not the point really is it?

Fans turned up so I popped them in with the radiator to see how it would fit. Yep, I knew it would, especially with the fans moved to the other side of the bracket!

Connected the Alphacool controller which controls the LEDs great. The fans...don't change RPM at all. Might have to send this back which is really annoying as I am trying to save money on this. The EK controller was twice the price, but it does work over USB so I guess I'll just have to get it?

Lastly I picked up a 114mm holesaw and did this. Til my drill battery went flat and the holesaw blunted after one hole. Ah well, that's why we invented files? Almost finished up the second hole but I'm sure the neighbours would prefer I make a din tomorrow.

 

[Kinsy]

Well that was fun...
Found links to a load of guides written by der8aur on overclocking.guide which is now dead.
Trawled the links via Wayback Machine and found the article.
Then found the filename of the BIOS and googled it, leading me to a Korean website with links to ALL Asus BIOSes from the Z170 era (yes, I downloaded them all)
Then had to work out how to flash the BIOS which was write protected and generally not letting me downgrade at all to try and stop this.
A lot of messing around later and...

Yep, that works! It's on the stock air cooler and this is just proof of concept for me for now. It didn't seem to like 4.6Ghz that much with no load at all but did post. With this I'll move onto delid, liquid metal and lapping the HSF.

The case also finally has it's 2nd 120mm fan hole. What a pain in the arse that was, and thanks to the cutter slipping all over the place it's off centre big time. I'd use some sort of jig next time to try and hold the holesaw in place. It's not horrendous and I have some edging coming to sort of fix it.

I'm returning the Alphacool controller as it's just not controlling the fans at all tomorrow, I've been playing with fittings and I've got a good layout for the watercooling. Which is just as well as the escalation continues...the EK-VGA Supremacy is back up for sale and I made an offer on this that actually was accepted...Vega 56 with the block already fitted!

I need to work out how to mount the pump in optimal location...I might make something out of a bracket and wood for now then see if I can get it translated into some metal later.

 

[Kinsy]

You have to use the older version of Afuwin and use the /GAN parameter. What board are you trying to mod?

 

[Kinsy]

Have you got the BIOS already? I don't have the -E model.

 

[Kinsy]

Ok, well the principal should still apply. You need to find Afuwin 3.05.04 as that works for me.