tammis' neurospice

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2021-11-01: Building the Shitbox Server

Even though I had sold the old main PC, I still wanted a second, ATX pc. Not for gaming or daily use, the ITX is just too convenient for that, but for home server use.

Since I had acquired both the semi-functional Dell (which had a modern-enough CPU – an Intel Xeon E3-1245) and the Vista prebuilt (which had an intact case), it was time to cobble them together.

The semi-functional Dell's motherboard was proprietary AF, and also missing some sensors giving it a stroke on every POST. Thus, I started looking for a cheap LGA 1155 motherboard. Luckily, I found one quickly from my local second-hand IT equipment store: a Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 (rev. 2.0).

The Dell bullshit presented a second problem: the CPU cooler fan had a proprietary header. However, it turned out the fan from the AMD Wraith Stealth (that came as the box cooler with the R5 2600 that I had bought for the mini-ITX build) had the screw holes in the right places in regards to the Dell heatsink. I just had to remove the fan shroud. The fan says "AMD", but it has Intel Inside:

the motherboard with the CPU cooler installed

With the Seasonic PSU and the SSD I had kept from the original main PC, and the 4 × 4 GB of DDR3 RAM from the Dell, I had all the components I needed:

Intel Xeon E3-1245 (from the Dell)
Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 (rev. 2.0) (second hand from the second hand IT store)
whatever DDR3 1,333 MHz RAM the Dell came with, 4 × 4 GB
Seasonic 750 W PRIME Ultra 750 Gold (left over from the old main PC)
the case from the Vista prebuilt
WD 240 GB WD Green, 2.5″ (left over from the old main PC)
WD 2 TB WD Blue, 3.5″ storage drive (left over from the mini ITX's storage upgrade)

I might've also put in other spare HDDs I had lying around, memories are a bit hazy. There was also a PCI (non "-e") FireWire card I transferred over from the Vista prebuilt.

This was already my third PC build, so the build process itself was a breeze. I tried to recycle the Windows 10 install from the old main PC, but even though you can get away with a lot in the way of hardware changes with Windows 10, this was a bit too much, and I ended up going with a fresh install.

This post was retroactively compiled on 2024-01-05 from a photo in my photo library.