components

RamblingEpic’s Dying Graphics Card

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A little while ago, I swapped out RamblingEpic’s old PC case for a Bitfenix Merc Alpha & added a new power supply when the old one split up the side (never good, right?!) and started making a God-awful vibrating noise! Since then, we’d done everything we could to source and solve the small whine from his graphics card. The culprit has eluded us to this day, but currently at best guess, it’s something on the inside of the small fan included on the cooler attached. I’ve had the heatsink off completely, the fan’s been painstakingly cleaned out several times until completely spotless and yet the noise remained. We were happy enough leaving the card in as performance wasn’t being affected and it was apparently something RamblingEpic could live with – not so sure I could’ve done the same if it had to sit right next to me!

At the end of October, completely randomly, the whine suddenly evolved into an all-out mechanical cranking noise! Fearing any sort of proper damage, we removed the graphics card altogether and finally caved in on buying a new card. Time to say a fond farewell to the Asus Nvidia ENGT 220 1GB DDR3 and welcome the next phase of RamblingEpic’s gaming!

Sapphire Radeon HD 7750
Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 1GB DDR5

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Server Build: Final

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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

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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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