I decided to go in a different case direction

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Caminokid

Member
Its been awhile since I have been here. I forgot I was part of this forum. Yeah that sucks.

I got to thinking about this next build a long time ago. I have an old state of Illinois metal desk with the fake wood top on it. 5 drawers. I came up with a thought of putting my computer in the desk. I recently had a Dell blow up on me so it has been used as a template. My thought has been all along to use the top left drawer for the case. So with various tools of destruction I began.

I started by taking the Dell apart. This was a 5100 series. I pulled the board, power supply, HD cage and the dvd drive. I sat all of them inside the drawer. I cut the back of the drawer for the power supply to fit and have ventilation. Mother board went in next behind it. Now the Dell board is 10 3/4 X 10 3/4. I have 12 1/8 width, so I can use a full ATX board. Next I put the HD cage in. I am going to use 2 drives in there. 750 GB for the OS and a 1.5 TB for extra storage. I cut out the front of the drawer for the optical drive fit in there. I am going to use a Pioneer Blu Ray burner for this.

Far as cooling goes I want it to be cool as possible. So down both side of the desk, I am using 6 120 MM fans. These are going to be mounted in between the desk case and the drawer. This taking time to do this. All the drilling and cutting as tedious. I plan on running a 160 MM fan on the back of the desk.

Now as far as what I have planned to put in there for a system is AMD. Starting out with the mother board:
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0

CPU
AMD FX-8150 Zambezi 3.6GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor FD8150FRGUBOX

Video Card
XFX Double D FX-785A-CDFC Radeon HD 7850 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support

Power Supply
COOLER MASTER Silent Pro Gold Series RSC00-80GAD3-US 1200W ATX 12V v2.3 / EPS 12V v2.92 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC

Sound Card
Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D Fatal1ty Champion (70SB135400000) 5.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card with Sound Blaster I/O

Memory I havent really decided on. I know I will be going to the max at 32 GB.

I still have alot of work to do. As soon as the new camera comes in I will get pics. The old cam after 5 years puked. Not sure what happened. Put in the desk and 6 months later tried to turn it on and nothing. Not even with new batteries.
 
salvage-this

salvage-this

Active Member
Sounds like a fun project. Depending on what you are going to focus your system on you would want to use the FX 8320 rather than the 8150 if you want to stay with AMD or go Intel and grab the 3570k or 3770k.

If you are gaming only get 8gb of 1600/1866 RAM. For photo/video editing I can see going up to 16gb but I'll let someone who edits more than I do comment on that.

Unless you are planning on 3 way crossfire. you do not need a 1200w PSU.
 
StrangleHold

StrangleHold

Moderator
Staff member
Save some money and get the GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3.

Get a FX 8320

Way overkill on the power supply. If you want overhead get a good quality 750/850W. Corsair/PC Power & Cooling/Antec/XFX/Seasonic/Silverstone.

Get DDR3 1866 or 2133.

With the money saved get a HD7950/7970
 
wolfeking

wolfeking

banned
Sounds like a nice project.

1. You really don't need the UD7. Look at the UD5 or UD3, I would get the UD5.

2. PSU is complete waste of money. you need 600 watts for a single card or around 750 watts for dual card. above that you are going to be wasting money on GPUs anyway.

3. GPU. Just no. XFX is decent of you get a reference design. If you get teh double D, then you are getting one of teh loudest cards on the market. Look at Sapphire, Asus, Gigabyte, or Powercolor for GPUs. Like said above though, look at a 7950/7970. You could also get a GTX670 if you wanted to.

4. Sound Card. Creative is decent, but their drivers are not the best. Look at Asus or HT|Omega for sound cards.
 
FuryRosewood

FuryRosewood

Active Member
Not sure the whole driver complaint...i installed my card about 2 months ago, drivers are solid, id recommend creative.
 
wolfeking

wolfeking

banned
the source of the drivers issue is thousands of complaints all over forums everywhere. Personally the 2 creative cards I have had did not even get drivers installed properly ever.

If you have good luck with them, go ahead and use them, but I am not going to recommend a company that historically and currently has issues. AMD and Creative are the ones there.
 
spirit

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
You're not ever going to be able to guarantee that drivers for anything are going to work for absolutely everybody because at the end of the day everybody has a different configuration.

To be honest, unless you have either really good speakers or really good headphones or both, I wouldn't even bother with a sound card at all. I'd spend the money on a better graphics card: 7870 or 7950 probably. There are other ways of saving money too which have already been mentioned.

The bottom line is for gaming you want to put as much money into the graphics card as possible.
 
C

Caminokid

Member
There is several different things I do with my computer. I do alot of music and video editing. Here recently I have started playing games on the computer. I am on a dual core AMD right now. Games are laggy sometimes. I am running a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT. OS is Vista.

The sound card I am using I have had for a long time. Its a Sound Blaster Live. I think I bought it in maybe 2000. Now I have driver issues since it is so old. I have the computer hooked up to me stereo. That is a Pioneer SX 1980. 270 Watts per channel X4. Yeah its old and not a surround sound but man its loud and I have had it since 1984. I restored it 2 years ago. The sound card, Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D Fatal1ty Champion, I pcked it out cause of the front RCA,s so I can also plug a mixing board in there and record records and tapes and digitalize them back to CD's. I have 3 sets of headphones. One set I have had since the 80's. The second set is a set of Turtle Beach X11 I use for my Xbox and computer gaming. The third set is a set Motorheadphones, Motörizers. These headphones kick ass! At 129.00 I was a little worried about how they would sound and was surprised.

I was going with the 8 core CPU cause of how much I do when it comes to video.

The 9800 gt video card I have now gets choppy sometimes when editing. Wasnt bad in the beginning...but gets worst with age. This is the third computer it has been in. the video card I want to be able to run HDMI out to a TV. 32 inch cause I dont have alot of room here for anything bigger. I want to be able to run 2 24" monitors too. When I doing anything on here I am running videos or music at the same time. I have Deejay Video System on here. I load it up with music, Music videos or movies and just hit play. It will play the whole list in order or shuffle the list. So if I load up music videos, its like the old school MTV...no reality shows! LOL. So I want that all up on the 32". I would rather play the video games up on the 32" too.

The power supply...There might be a second video card in the future. I was figuring go big now while I have the cash so I wont have to buy it later, Now the second choice was a 850 watter. Now as far as running the fans, I am going to run a separate power supply. Now this isnt going to be a computer supply. I have a 12v 10 amp power supply on this desk since one of the TV's power supplies crapped out on me about 2 years ago. I needed a 4 amp 12v supply and couldnt find one. I modified the power supply with a 80MM fan on top of it so it would stay cool. Its been running for 4 years straight now. So I think I am going to use it for the desk fans.

AMD has been good to me for alot of years. I am happy with AMD. Me and Intel hasnt got along to well. Not sure why. I am a Chevy person. Everytime I touch a Ford it leaves me sitting along the road somewhere...Intel is my Ford of the computer world.
 
MyCattMaxx

MyCattMaxx

Active Member
Just remember when using the Dell Dimension 5100 MB for a template that it is a BTX board and the back panel is the opposite of an ATX type.
 
C

Caminokid

Member
MyCattMaxx said:
Just remember when using the Dell Dimension 5100 MB for a template that it is a BTX board and the back panel is the opposite of an ATX type.
Click to expand...


The motherboard is sitting behind the power supply. I have to set all of this flat on the bottom of the drawer. I have 12 1/8" wide. So I cant set the power supply and board side by side. So I wont be cutting any hole close to the motherboard. I will have to extend all wires. Just is just a dry fit to see what I have to work with.
 
C

Caminokid

Member
Ok so the search is on. I have been comparing prices on alot of the stuff I am looking for. Finding out Newegg and Tigerdirect is really close in price. I decided to check out ebay. I seen Newegg is on there and had at least the memory I was looking at 10.00 cheaper then on their web site. I was checking out some of the other things I am looking at and seen that there is alot of people on there selling things that Newegg and Tigerdirect has for anywhere from 20.00 to 70.00 over what you can get from Newegg or Tigerdirect websites. Do these people not know?
 
C

Caminokid

Member
I have thought about the balls to the walls 8 core computer. I am now wondering if I can get away with a 4 core at 4.0 Ghz?
 
C

Caminokid

Member
I went to a new computer store here in town and got almost what I wanted. I did get 8 core FX8150. Not bad. Got 16 GB of ram. They had a decent video card, AMD Radeon 7700. 850 watt power supply, cooler master.

Now here is the kicker.... I told the guy how much I disliked ASUS. He told me how wrong I was and he would make me a deal in writing. He told me that if I had any problems with this board within a year...bring it back and he would order me any board I wanted. So he sold me the M5A97. So I took the chance.

I tried Dirt Showdown and played for an hour flawlessly. So I am happy so far. I will get pics up soon. I have some of the rough pics not done... but running.
 
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