"Old Boi" build and Upcycle projects

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Hi there again! It’s been a while. Work and life are going as they usually go. Prepping to go on a road trip back to California in late August, perhaps I’ll sell some of my builds while there!

Building that last desktop during the shortages, along with a Xeon-based guest gaming pc have taken up my time recently. I’ll add those build links below.

As I’ve already completed my iteration of Eggy’s xeon-based budget build, I’ll mainly focus on the Old Boi build that I’ve been working on getting together for testing ReactOS. The “Upcycle V2” build I linked above on pcpartpicker will be a more-future-upgradeable AM4 build centering around a used A12 series processor along with the RX590 and a drive I had in storage.

For this Old Boi build, It was centered around an i5 processor I had in storage and the cost of “renewing” an old radeon 6770 1gb card I had. This will mainly be for testing older software or games, such as the open source ReactOS based on Windows NT, or possibly HaikuOS, a rewrite of BeOS from back in the day. Maybe this setup may end its days as a NixOS system, who knows?

Above we have an image from my workbench as I was testing to see how things are running. After testing some video output from the motherboard and from the Radeon 6770 card, I learned that the cheapo Raidmax 300W power supply would not be enough. I went on to get a better Thermaltake unit from the nearby Micro Center. Perhaps I’ll save that 300W one for a tiny build in the future that has RDNA2 or greater integrated graphics.

Next, on to the testing with a better-wattage PSU!

The system legitimately booted with a better PSU, a Thermaltake 600W of sorts I picked up at the local micro center. Glad to see the ol boi build booting up fine now! Next, I made sure to rip apart this old Radeon 6770 from circa 2011 to clean it out and then repaste it. The extender that this thing has on it, to fit into older style full tower cases, is a bit annoying. After some jiggling around though, everthing looked fine!

I don’t have too many other pictures of the process outside of this side shot of the finished build. The cables, this being a non-modular power supply, were a bit annoying to manage, so there’s a bit of a rats nest of cables around the area where a CD drive would go, but that’s fine. Only thing mounted up there is the 480gb sata SSD. Look how red ATI GPUs used to be!

On another note, I think this machine could use a back exhaust fan, as the case only came with an intake fan on the front and the hot air kind of wanders. Once I add an exhaust fan in the future, the temps will be stable and this will be perfect for testing older software!

Though my week of testing operating systems so far, though, I haven’t been able to get Windows XP or the open source ReactOS to properly boot, so this guy might end up running some distro with KDE themed like Windows 7 for now, to give the retro feel.

I’ll likely end up selling this along with a Thinkpad T440p I’m finishing up soon and a Thinkpad X230 that is incompatible with flashing coreboot.