RamblingEpic’s PC Woes

A while ago now RamblingEpic‘s PC started making what can only be described as God-awful noise! It took us a while to narrow down what was causing the issue as it’d come and go, but eventually we noticed that his PSU had split up the side. His graphics card heatsink was also full of dust and the case was an old, kinda crappy one with no fans. It’s been something he’d made do with for a long time until this happened recently.

He’s a no frills kinda guy, so when I’d finally talked him into letting me replace the case and ESPECIALLY the split PSU currently being held together with electrical tape, he had a few requirements. I’d hoped initially for the Antec 300 or something like it, but he preferred no LEDs, no fancy bits in general, just ‘plain & simple’. After recently having a very good experience building with BitFenix using their Shinobi case, I started looking at their budget cases. RamblingEpic set his seal of approval on the Merc Alpha case and away we went!

The job of swapping cases and replacing the old power supply unit took around 2hrs total, mostly due to having to rewire and cable-tidy everything I could. The old PSU was a 400W so we’ve replaced it with a Corsair 430W Builder Series, the same one I used in my server build last month. Altogether, this little mini-project consisted of the following:

Components

RamblingEpic Case & PSU Swap
Case/PSU Swap Components

BitFenix Merc Alpha Case
BitFenix Spectre 120mm Fan – Black
BitFenix Prebraided Molex to 3pin x3 fan adapter cable – Black
Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 ’80 Plus’ Power Supply

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Server Build: Final

Firstly, apologies for the long break in posting. I actually built the server on the last week of May, but haven’t had the time to sit down & sift through all the pics I’d taken during the build to prepare this post properly. There weren’t many changes to the components list I’d posted previously by the end, but thanks to another ‘too good to pass up’ deal from Ebuyer I was able to add a superb Crucial M4 64GB solid state drive into the mix. The 64GB is MORE than enough to cope with Windows Home Server & even with a few programs installed already, it still has over 40GB left available.

Anyway, enough rambling! On with the home server build itself!

Components

Okay, lets refresh our memory with the list of components used in the initial build.

Server Components
Server Components Pre-Build

BitFenix Shinobi Case – Black, non-windowed version.
Gigabyte H61MA-DV3 Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
Intel Celeron G530 2.4GHz Socket LGA 1155 Processor
Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 ’80 Plus’ Power Supply
Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel RAM
Crucial 64GB M4 SSD – 2.5″ SATA-III
Seagate 2TB BARRACUDA – 3.5″ SATA-III Hard Drive – 7200RPM 64MB Cache
LG DVD 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter
BitFenix Spectre Plain Black 120mm Fan
BitFenix Alchemy PreBraided Molex to 3pin x3 Fan adapter
BitFenix Alchemy PreBraided SATA 6GB/s cable
Windows Home Server 2011 – OEM
(Everything here came from Overclockers with the exception of the hard drive from Ebuyer.)

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Server Build: Components

These days it can be a bit of a nightmare keeping track of all your media, especially when there’s more than one PC in the home. Right now all of our main media is kept on the other half’s PC, modest enough at 500GB with no back up. I know, I know, no backup – crazy right?! My own media, again 500GB is stored on a 2009 Mac Mini, and some more of it’s on my MacBook, the latter of which IS backed up to an external 500GB WD hard drive. This server is designed to centralise our media storage and give us somewhere to house our other PC’s backups. Thus begins the search for our server build components.

The budget for this project’s very modest, emphasising packing power per £GBP, hehe. The computer itself needs to be ventilated effectively as it’ll be on for long periods, even if the system won’t be pulling a heavy workload. Since it’ll be on more than most of our systems, it also needs to be quiet and draw as little power as possible. After  a lot of deliberation, I’ve chosen the following  components initially:

Server Build Components

Bitfenix Shinobi Case – Black, non-windowed version.
Gigabyte H61MA-DV3 Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
Intel Celeron G530 2.4GHz Socket LGA 1155 Processor
Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 ’80 Plus’ Power Supply
Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel RAM
Seagate 2TB BARRACUDA 3.5″ SATA-III Hard Drive – 7200RPM 64MB Cache
LG DVD 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter

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