Retro Rocket Build

[Quigly]

So I came by an old PC (circa 2004) someone was chucking. The case is still in fantastic condition and cleaned right up after a bit of elbow grease. The paint is in great shape, not much yellowing (a bit around the front left hand side) and basically no bending of the metal frame etc. Minuscule amount of rust around the bottom makes me think it was stored under very good conditions. Built like a tank!

The original parts included a no-name Foxconn P4 board, 512mb DDR ram, 2.4ghz celeron. Caps were all popped and in any case I'm not so interested in this low end old-but-not-so-old stuff so that's going to the recyclers pronto.

It's been a good many years since I had one of these beige wonders and I'm astounded how over engineered some of the old low end steel frame cases were at the time. Even the motherboard tray comes out with four screws on this guy, it has support for 2x80mm fans (1 front, 1 back) + 1x 80mm/100mm fan mount on the door (behind the mesh). I didn't chuck the floppy or the cdrom (not sure if they work but I wanted them for the face plates at least.

Interestingly, the side panels come off only after you take off the front face plate which was a little bit of a head-scratcher. The catches for the 5.25" bays are mechanical / metal too. the 3.5" bay has metal catches + screws and pops out whole so you can add / remove the drives as needed.

The black plastic casing at the front is where you can add another 80mm fan and provides routing for the front USB cable (this looks like it's pretty standard hardware in a small metal cage so it might be possible to replace it with a USB 3.x casing from one of the Chinese e shops. Will need to look and measure out once I have decided on a motherboard for this thing.

Next up, going to start looking for affordable parts for making a good powerful workstation from this. Will update thread once I've gotten somewhere with it

 

[Quigly]

Okay, update - found myself a board and a processor for the retro rocket, at least until something better comes up. For $15 on a local message board I found a Gigabyte GA-M68MT-SP along with a Phenom II x4 840 (which looks to be a relabeled Athlon x4 chip without the l3 cache that stocks at 3.2ghz, but potentially goes to 3.6-3.8 with the right board according to the internets.)

It came with an interesting looking master cooler fan that looks an awful lot like the one in the jpg (sorry, no camera.) Will update with pics when it's all put together. No idea about the quality of the board, but I figured it was an OK deal for the three. Will be curious to see if it has any useful overclocking features. It looks like a middle of the run board from yesteryear, but I never really worked much with this platform before so it will be interesting to see how it is.

I will be pairing it up with a couple of 4gb sticks of AMD branded patriot ram (1600mhz, though the board only does 1333 according to what's printed on it) I have kicking around.

gpu shall have to wait for now.

 

[phill]

Looking forward to this!! Subbed!!

 

[r9]

Looks like if you lucky you might get to unlock to 6 cores.

I had Athlon x3 450 that unlocked to Phenom 4 cores and cache the whole package.
Those were the good times!

 

[Quigly]

Nice! Sadly that board is a bit lacking, also noticed issues with the 16x PCIE Slot I'm in the process of troubleshooting (artifacting on a known good NV GT 730 card).