Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am shopping for parts to re-refurbish Derpy Chips, an older tower I turned into an Ubuntu box for a while. Let’s get started!
Overview
My computer tower is old — going on nine years here. Some day, it will be going up for total replacement, but not today. Still, I find myself in need of a second tower for my personal use — something with a little more heft than my laptop maxes out around.
My father built a computer tower long before I got into Linux. It served as the family’s main computer for several years, but it had a habit of crashing with the vague error: “Power Kernal Failure.”
I eventually took over on the machine to turn it into a Minecraft server. I swapped out its 2 TB HDD for a much more modest 250 GB SSD, and the crashes stopped. I still named it Derpy Chips, part in endearment, part in reference to its past. It has since fallen back into disuse for lack of RAM when I swiped it for Button Mash, our new dedicated Minecraft server, and more recently, I grabbed the replacement SSD for installing Manjaro on my production machine following long after its liquid cooling pump started making a horrendous noise (presumed worn out).
That about brings it to today. I would like to move Derpy back into use, but it needs cooling, a hard drive, and RAM. I did some preliminary investigations, and estimated a cost of about $250 with minimal thought for compatibility. All I need is a holdover to the next rig.
CPU cooling
The options are almost limitless, and almost all of them are incompatible. Derpy’s case is pretty deep, so I’m not terribly worried about height, but different CPU sockets have slightly different shapes.
While it’s entirely possible to hire someone to pour liquid nitrogen on the CPU all day, even a fancy water cooling system would be more reasonable. A properly functioning liquid cooling system would definitely be quieter, which is something I need. All I have to say to that is that I was impressed with my sister’s Noctura cooler, so we ordered one from them.
Hard Drive
As stated earlier, Derpy’s first hard drive, a spinning platter HDD, was defective and the problem wasn’t isolated within the warranty period. Lacking a cooling block that wasn’t the size of a teacup, I yoinked its second hard drive, an SSD, for another computer I have yet to finish stabilizing.
Western Digital is a respected brand, and I’m happy with their products thus far. I don’t need a full terabyte for a holdover machine, but it would be nice to have one in my production model. We therefore went ahead and bought a 1 TB with the plan of migrating the original replacement to it and reworking the smaller SSD again.
RAM
Probably the most picky of the components I’m looking at today, RAM is the sort of thing I hear you can try and see if it works and as long as you aren’t using so much force that things are physically cracking, you should be fine come your “smoke test.”
The most noticeable factor in RAM is what kind it is. The current standard is DDR4, but the technosystem I’m tending is all on DDR3. Other factors come into play as well, such as how fast the motherboard runs it, the voltage supplied, how much memory per stick there is, and in the case of matched sets, how much memory there is total. When shopping online, many sites will have some sort of filters so you can hopefully find the perfect match for your needs.
One important consideration I wanted to take into account was how good Derpy’s original 4 sticks of 4GB of RAM compared against Button Mash’s motherboard and CPU. Obviously, they’re compatible, but I wanted to know if the RAM was too good for the computer it was in. We ended up looking up the specific parts and found it was a perfect match for max clock speed and overall capacity, leaving me free to explore other options.
We pulled in the original box for Derpy’s motherboard and looked up the specs. Turns out it can take up to 32 GB of RAM across four slots where it previously was fully booked with a total of 16. While shopping, I considered buying either another set of four 4 GB or a set of two 8 GB sticks. Hypothetically speaking, If I expected to rotate a future new tower in, I could put my relatively newer tower over where Derpy is now being staged, and the possibility for future upgrade could be left open.
This plan ran into a time wall and was laid down before fully explored. I learned how CPU generation matters to RAM. Derpy has a 2nd generation i7 while I’m presently on a 3rd generation i5. Such a set of RAM would need to service both, and while such a product exists, we ended up just grabbing a 4 set of RAM intended for just Derpy without making sure it shipped from the US.
Of note, we also learned about RAM latency timings. Long story short: while lower numbers are better here, they aren’t as important. “Latency for the less-complex DDR2 RAM can be lower, but it can’t process data nearly as quickly as a modern DDR4 chip.” [MakeTechEasier (author comment)]
Of course, some motherboards might have a capacity to auto detect the voltage and adapt. All I know is that I’m tired of numbers for now and I’ll be happy when I see everything working smoothly.
Final Question
Have you ever built a computer from components and had something go wrong, even if things technically worked?