[compnovo]

Evildave, on 17 March 2012 - 01:30 PM, said:

I like the 'Legos' cases. Way more fun. Buy a big bulk box of legos and base plate(s), and a sff power supply with more than enough juice. Go nuts! Just make sure it has good air circulation. Plus, EXPANDABLE! Need another drive bay? Add more legos!

https://www.google.c...r+case&tbm=isch

http://www.google.co...cts?q=lego+bulk
http://www.google.co...cts?q=lego+base

Those are wild

[compnovo]

LiveBrianD, on 17 March 2012 - 01:23 PM, said:

If you were to do this again, and had done more research, would you have stuck with an i5 and been forced to get a board that supports 95W CPUs, or would you have gone for an i3 (or S version of the i5) instead? That asrock looks good though. I'm not sure if I'd use one of those for overclocking, but for a basic machine, they sound fine. With the remote and wireless, I suppose they're thinking that you'll want that for an HTPC. Good luck with this!

If I were to do it again I would have started with the Asrock board to use with the 15-2400. It allows overclocking of the 1333 RAM to its full potential where the Foxconn didn't, it has the USB 3.0 ports which might come in handy some day, it has two SATA2 and two SATA3 ports on the board where the Foxconn had two and one, respectively, and it had those solid Japanese caps. Just a better board all around, I shouldn't been so concerned about saving money for my friend.

Some of the parts were at his request. He wanted something that compared to a $2100 custom build that had the i5-2400, 120GB SSD, and 4GB of 1333 RAM, and he wanted HDMI out on the video, all of this in the smallest possible case. I managed to bring it all in for under $700, and he'll be buying me lots of dinners to cover the labor.

[compnovo]

coastie65, on 17 March 2012 - 02:09 PM, said:

Yeah, I know what you mean. I have two wanting me to build one for them or actually their kids. One is a neighbor and her 14 year old daughter is a gamer, but not so much with her present desktop. She does have an Xbox 360 and PS3, but for some reason wants a Gaming PC as well. She does real well in school, so her mother agreed to to buy her one and was shopping around some. We were talkng about it and I told her I could build her one much cheaper. I showed them this thing that I built and they liked what they saw. The other one is someone who goes to school with nephew. He has a PS3, but the games are getting ahead of his PC ( early Gateway FX w/ 775 based intel Quad ). His father was looking at some of those boutique things, but wasn't happy with the reviews he had seen. My Nephew mentioned that I had just built a beast, so they came over to have a look and asked me I would build one. I said it shouldn't be a problem.

I like doing builds for friends but I did have it backfire one time. Early in my PC building days I put one together for a friend who turned to be computer phobic, and being his lifetime support was, let's just say, "problematic" at times...

[coastie65]

compnovo, on 17 March 2012 - 04:00 PM, said:

coastie65, on 17 March 2012 - 02:09 PM, said:

Yeah, I know what you mean. I have two wanting me to build one for them or actually their kids. One is a neighbor and her 14 year old daughter is a gamer, but not so much with her present desktop. She does have an Xbox 360 and PS3, but for some reason wants a Gaming PC as well. She does real well in school, so her mother agreed to to buy her one and was shopping around some. We were talkng about it and I told her I could build her one much cheaper. I showed them this thing that I built and they liked what they saw. The other one is someone who goes to school with nephew. He has a PS3, but the games are getting ahead of his PC ( early Gateway FX w/ 775 based intel Quad ). His father was looking at some of those boutique things, but wasn't happy with the reviews he had seen. My Nephew mentioned that I had just built a beast, so they came over to have a look and asked me I would build one. I said it shouldn't be a problem.

I like doing builds for friends but I did have it backfire one time. Early in my PC building days I put one together for a friend who turned to be computer phobic, and being his lifetime support was, let's just say, "problematic" at times...

That's always the probable downside to that. Heck I have a big family with lots of computers to go around, and guess what? My Brother-in-laws HP 9000 Laptop is sitting over here on the floor. I had that thing aprt and it needs a new MOBO and I'm pretty sure a Fan & Heatsink assembly. I think that will probably be the first and last laptop I tear into. Not Fun.

[Evildave]

LiveBrianD, on 17 March 2012 - 01:45 PM, said:

lol... I've heard that legos are a bit insulating though. Still, I bet you can do some pretty crazy designs with those if you like. (and yet someone did a completely plain black lego case: http://www.wired.com...lab/lego-pc.jpg boring!)

Insulating, yes, but that's where the 'air circulation' comment comes in. Though I'm sure you could baffle the air in/out to get manage some sound insulation, as long as you prevented vibration wherever you mounted fans and spinning hard disks.

[LiveBrianD]

compnovo, on 17 March 2012 - 03:52 PM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 17 March 2012 - 01:23 PM, said:

If you were to do this again, and had done more research, would you have stuck with an i5 and been forced to get a board that supports 95W CPUs, or would you have gone for an i3 (or S version of the i5) instead? That asrock looks good though. I'm not sure if I'd use one of those for overclocking, but for a basic machine, they sound fine. With the remote and wireless, I suppose they're thinking that you'll want that for an HTPC. Good luck with this!

If I were to do it again I would have started with the Asrock board to use with the 15-2400. It allows overclocking of the 1333 RAM to its full potential where the Foxconn didn't, it has the USB 3.0 ports which might come in handy some day, it has two SATA2 and two SATA3 ports on the board where the Foxconn had two and one, respectively, and it had those solid Japanese caps. Just a better board all around, I shouldn't been so concerned about saving money for my friend.

Some of the parts were at his request. He wanted something that compared to a $2100 custom build that had the i5-2400, 120GB SSD, and 4GB of 1333 RAM, and he wanted HDMI out on the video, all of this in the smallest possible case. I managed to bring it all in for under $700, and he'll be buying me lots of dinners to cover the labor.

$2100 for that???? Wow... I could build a machine with an i7 3930K, 8GB of 2133MHz RAM, a 256GB SSD, and ati 7970 or two for that price.

Btw, I was at Frys yesterday and happened to see an ibuypower machine. The case felt cheap and had a bad design (USB ports on top of the case??? Optical drive that's hidden so well that I can't figure out how to open the cover??? Micro-ATX motherboard in a full size ATX case?). I sure prefer my machine to that.

[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 17 March 2012 - 05:33 PM, said:

That's always the probable downside to that. Heck I have a big family with lots of computers to go around, and guess what? My Brother-in-laws HP 9000 Laptop is sitting over here on the floor. I had that thing aprt and it needs a new MOBO and I'm pretty sure a Fan & Heatsink assembly. I think that will probably be the first and last laptop I tear into. Not Fun.

I don't have a huge close family, and am the tech support for them. It hasn't been a big deal, for the most part. Come to think of it, one of my grandparents has a Dell (total piece of junk), and another has a shuttle machine my dad built. As it is, when I finally replace those, I'll likely go the diy route. It's a lot more fun that way.

Fyi, coastie, when you disassemble the laptop, BE VERY CAREFUL!!!! What I did when disassembling a laptop was I took a piece of paper, and when I took out the screws wrote on the piece of paper where they went, and put the screws on the paper. (you can tape them down if you want) Putting it all back together wasn't too hard. I was looking at the manual on my laptop while doing this (kinda annoying - for instance, it says you need to remove the screen, look at this manual for that, which tells you to go to that manual to get instructions on doing a little thing you need to do that...). Anyway, be careful and you won't have problems.

[coastie65]

Acually the screws were marked to some extent, The Case stuff had a red pint like strip on the and trhe interior stuff was blue. The spooky stuff was the straps as you had to pull them out ans those things are hard to get back in there.

[LiveBrianD]

Ribbon cables aren't that hard to deal with, as long as you proceed carefully and don't try to force anything in/out the wrong way. They're not much harder to deal with than IDE cables in my opinion.

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 18 March 2012 - 07:34 PM

[Evildave]

Actually, look up youtube videos about the cables. Because every one potentially has a different trick, once you open a notebook of any description. There's usually a 'tear down' video.

[coastie65]

Evildave, on 19 March 2012 - 12:29 AM, said:

Actually, look up youtube videos about the cables. Because every one potentially has a different trick, once you open a notebook of any description. There's usually a 'tear down' video.

Hey ED, Yep you sure can and I did just that. I think you can find pretty much anything you are looking for over there.

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 18 March 2012 - 07:33 PM, said:

Ribbon cables aren't that hard to deal with, as long as you proceed carefully and don't try to force anything in/out the wrong way. They're not much harder to deal with than IDE cables in my opinion.

Yeah, but with IDE cables, you just unplug them from the socket, you don't pull the strap out and then have to feed it back in.

[compnovo]

The new motherboard came in the mail yesterday so I put everything together last night. I haven't had much time to play with it but I can tell you it is a very fast system, what with the i5-2400 and the SSD. The board has the H67 chipset and I'm using the onboard graphics, which are showing a WEI score of 5.3. Not enough for us gamers but I think he's going to be very happy with the results.

The only glitch I've run into is with the IR remote. Win7 won't install the IR driver on the included driver disc since it isn't "digitally signed", something I've never run into before. I downloaded the most current driver from the Asrock site and will give it another try this evening, after I go into the EUFI and make sure the IR function is enable. This is important to my buddy, his plan is to tuck the PC away and he wants to be able to control startup and shutdown with the included remote.

This post has been edited by compnovo: 22 March 2012 - 09:10 AM

[coastie65]

Evildave, on 19 March 2012 - 12:29 AM, said:

Actually, look up youtube videos about the cables. Because every one potentially has a different trick, once you open a notebook of any description. There's usually a 'tear down' video.

Yeah, I did that and it was helpful, but that HP dv9000 still wasn't a lot of fun. After I told my brother-in-law whay I found and the approximate cost, he said it was about 5 Years old ( Bought in July '07), but I already knew that, and guessed it was time to replace it. It sits here on the floor in it's travel bag.

This post has been edited by coastie65: 22 March 2012 - 04:44 PM

[compnovo]

Thought I'd post an image of the new build. I placed it beside my desktop to give some idea of its size.

I'm a bit jealous, it's more powerful that my rig
(processor wise, anyway....)

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

This post has been edited by compnovo: 22 March 2012 - 04:38 PM

[LiveBrianD]

compnovo, on 22 March 2012 - 09:07 AM, said:

The new motherboard came in the mail yesterday so I put everything together last night. I haven't had much time to play with it but I can tell you it is a very fast system, what with the i5-2400 and the SSD. The board has the H67 chipset and I'm using the onboard graphics, which are showing a WEI score of 5.3. Not enough for us gamers but I think he's going to be very happy with the results.

The only glitch I've run into is with the IR remote. Win7 won't install the IR driver on the included driver disc since it isn't "digitally signed", something I've never run into before. I downloaded the most current driver from the Asrock site and will give it another try this evening, after I go into the EUFI and make sure the IR function is enable. This is important to my buddy, his plan is to tuck the PC away and he wants to be able to control startup and shutdown with the included remote.

If I remember correctly, you can't use unsigned drivers on 64-bit Windows (not sure about 32-bit). Perhaps there's a more generic driver Windows has for it?

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 22 March 2012 - 05:10 PM

[LiveBrianD]

compnovo, on 22 March 2012 - 04:34 PM, said:

Thought I'd post an image of the new build. I placed it beside my desktop to give some idea of its size.

I'm a bit jealous, it's more powerful that my rig
(processor wise, anyway....)

lol... So, this is like the smallish business SFF cases? The type you can easily put a monitor on top of? Nice... just remember, your desktop can still play games a lot better than your buddies! How is the build quality and noise level of the case? What about the temps?

[compnovo]

If I remember correctly, you can't use unsigned drivers on 64-bit Windows (not sure about 32-bit). Perhaps there's a more generic driver Windows has for it?

You must be right. I downloaded and installed the 64-bit driver from the Asrock site and it worked perfectly.

How is the build quality and noise level of the case? What about the temps?

The build quality is very nice, although the included fan is noisy. I would replace it if I was going to keep it under the TV, but he'll have it hidden away. According to the included utility the CPU temp ranged between 27-30C, very acceptable. This rig isn't going to be heavily stressed.

The mobo came with a WMC remote that can turn the PC on and off (it's actually a deep sleep state, it reboots instantly) and onboard wireless with antenna. I hooked it up and connected to my home network with no issues. Everything seems to be working right out of the box.

This post has been edited by compnovo: 22 March 2012 - 05:22 PM

[coastie65]

Hey Comp, that is really nice for what it will be used for. Good job.

[compnovo]

coastie65, on 23 March 2012 - 05:35 AM, said:

Hey Comp, that is really nice for what it will be used for. Good job.

Thanks coastie, I think he's going to be happy with it.