Project Oddball

almoststew1990 · 21 May 2020 at 13:43

I've been hankering for a project for a while now and I've found myself purchasing PC parts that are a bit unusual and making an unusual build, for no real reason whatsoever.

First up! The motherboard:

What crazy loco thought to put the RAM slots on top of the CPU, clearly the engineer has spent too much time holidaying at *******-on-Sea to come up with something like that.

However, it's an AM2+ motherboard with nice compatibility (sata, IDE, a very wide range of CPUs).

Next, the CPU:

This an an Athlon II X3 450 3.2GHz. Three "fairly fast" cores but with crippled (i.e. none) L3 cache compared to the Phenoms. Will it be like a limited quad core or a slightly faster dual core?

The CPU cooler is up next and has got to have the worst footprint for cooling potential I've seen. The mounts extend really far beyond the footprint of the CPU socket; thankfully some genius designed the RAM slots to be out of the way on top of the board.

Here it is all assembled rady to be put in a case. That's 4GB of Low Profile RAM but, I think that's just a bit to conformist for me so I'll probably dig out my full height stuff and go for a nice round 5Gb. It's DDR2 800MHz stuff in there.

What sort of case should I put it in? This new(ish) tiny case from Tiny in 1999 is the obvious place to build a 2009 system I feel.

I'll be assembling it all tonight, but I am still missing a graphics card. I've got an unusual (and cheap) card on the way...

LewisRaz · 21 May 2020 at 14:07

I miss the old asrock that did whatever they wanted!

pugheaven · 21 May 2020 at 16:23

hahaha that's ace, it'll be really interesting, you gonna try and wun windows 10 on that? I've recently found windows 10 unstable on my ASUS PC5 board I sold to a friend... and for the first time ever had to run Windows 8.1 on it... works perfect now. That's circa what 2006 tech so, with yours blimey that's older, reckon 8.1 could be your l;imit?

Keep this post going though and wanna see some benchmarks hahaha

almoststew1990 · 21 May 2020 at 21:35

A nice man delivered by graphics card this evening which was a nice surprise.

It's an ATI 4830, an unusual card because it is out of place in the product stack, being slower than the 4770 which replaced it. So why didn't I get the 4770 which is the one that is actually unusual? Because I forgot which card replaced the other

Ah well, these cards at least have a lot of overclocking potential, but it's only 512Mb so won't be playing any modern games *CPU glances around awkwardly*

Time to get it built up. First things first, I cable tied a fan to the front as there was no air circulation in the case whatsoever (It originally houses a Pentium 2 which were like 18watt CPUs, and the ATI Rage Pro Turbo didn't have a heatsink on it at all!). I pulled out the 8.4Gb HDD from the drive bay and put a 3.5 to 2.5" adapter and a 500Gb 5400RPM drive in there. A bit of a shame but my only SSD I've got floating around is a 128Gb one which isn't really big enough for what I have in mind. The floppy drive is staying put!

Looking good!

Then the rest of the kit went in...

The sharp eyed reader will notice that I've changed the cooler, as the little tower cooler was really quite loud. The fan controller on this board is a bit rubbish; it is set to dynamic with a target speed of slow, but it was still spinning rapidly. Changing the target CPU temperature from 45 to 60c didn't slow it down so I moved onto a quieter cooler.

I quite like the design up top with the ancient DVD drive (which replaced the brand new 1999 DVD drive that was already in there, as it was too long) and PSU kept out of the way but allowed to blow air onto the components below. It takes SFX and the one smaller than that PSUs as the case is really small.

So 90s.

Just for a size comparison, here is my mid-ATX case snugly fitting into my Ikea desk "legs"

And here is the Tiny PC in the other table leg:

I'm typing this up on this PC, running Windows 7. Time to see if it is bearable!

pugheaven · 21 May 2020 at 23:18

hahaha fantastic look at that tiny thing, wow, you do get a grip on how things went mega large around 2006 onwatds big cases, neon lights etc, it's actually weied seeing that old school PC, nice work though I bet it is workable tbh... for windows apps

DJai · 27 May 2020 at 08:11

How are you finding this? Wow, a Tiny PC. Those things were everywhere at one point.

I think it would be cool to put current tech in ther and give it a paint job, maybe black because at the moment it's so conventional and true to the original design?

almoststew1990 · 27 May 2020 at 08:58

incredibly unstable. I think it's partly due to the system, and partly due to Windows 7. I've updated the BIOS and now it won't complete a Windows 7 or windows 10 install. After one of the scheduled reboots, it gets stuck on an illuminated black screen, I think at the point it would ask you to make log in details.

This project was meant to be a trial run for putting something like a mATX AM4 motherboard with a 2600 in there. I'd use M2 storage so that the detachable 3.5mm caddy could come out and I wouldn't need any sata cables or SATA power cables (it's a module PSU). The DVD drive kept only for aesthetic purposes (it's IDE after all so I doubt an AM4 board has IDE!) It would be a quite nice and tidy build!

DJai · 27 May 2020 at 09:03

You could change to Linux and see if that runs stable for you, there are some nice distros out there. Pop OS is nice, not sure whether it would run on that hardware though.