Author: Shadow8472

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?

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today, I am not the hero of this week’s story. Let’s get started!

My laptop has had no business continuing to run for a few years now. It’s working on 10 years old, hardly ran Windows before I formatted over the wrong drive, and now it has suffered through a little more than a sprinkling from a water cup.

The first few seconds, everything was “normal” as I was panicking to turn the thing off, but capillary action won out, and everything shut off.

There was a minute of shock and confusion before I regained my composure enough to realise the possible danger of leaving a wet appliance plugged in. While liberating my laptop from its various plugs, I realized there might be hope if it could be dried out.

I can not thank my father enough for his help on this project! He literally dropped what he was doing to take care of my emergency while I was in no shape to handle it myself. I just shoved it into his hands wet side down and ran off and he did the rest.

I don’t know much about the actual teardown, but I hear the dust and critter fur at the bottom of the unit was dry. Parts were left to dry for around a day and a half. I wanted to do a rice bath, but my father told me that those are usually just for phones and then you gotta deal with any rice dust afterwards.

Before reassembling, there was an upgrade to make. I have a 1TB SSD intended for my desktop, but running Linux from a USB 3 drive with a small cable is kind of the opposite of portable, and with that sad excuse for a proper power port evicted, I’ve been able to take the laptop on Sabbath afternoon drives with my father, where we listened to a seminar by AWR. Two talks a week for roughly 45 minutes each, I had to mind OS’s umbilical.

Installing the internal SSD was straightforward. The original drive is the same length and width, but is noticeably thinner and much lighter. Most importantly, it fits the provided bracket so I don’t need some improvised block to hold things in place. Personally, I think the new drive is so lightweight that friction with the SATA connection alone would be enough to keep it from moving, barring impact from the wrong side.

Reassembly was delayed a few hours because my father wanted to try an epoxy to fix some plastic studs that have broken off over time. I always remember three of them rattling about, but one post’s superglue job was still holding and a small post with a fin was unfamiliar and didn’t fit any of the three holes. I surmised the later was from under the motherboard, a component that requires removing the whole screen assembly (not fun), but I actually identified the wrong screw hole. The remaining peg was located and all were affixed to their rightful positions once again.

I was not privy to most of the reassembly, but I did catch that going by pure memory has its drawbacks when you don’t have the teardown guide memorized. Also, the F9 key popped off, and we are waiting on a magnifying glass to aid in the particularly delicate work.

I brought a battery to the testing bench and arranged for the laptop to be booted to a live USB instead of my usual OS. I wasn’t there for the smoke test, as it’s called. My father reported, “The patient lives!”

Further operations are believable. There is a power status LED that’s broken off a tiny circuit board that I’d like replaced some time. We also have a faster CPU I might like to try, if neither are soldered in, the sockets are compatible, and my cooling system is up to it. For now, I’m just glad my old friend is still around.

Final Question: I have been trying to look into Firewalld for weeks now for my “supercomputer” project. Any ideas where to find a tutorial with some theory and isn’t just someone demonstrating a list of tasks?