garycase Posted January 5, 2017 Share Posted January 5, 2017 ... found a happy medium between what I really wanted and what I thought I needed ... "Needs" are in the eye of the beholder !! Clearly I NEED anything that I WANT ... the trick is convincing the spouse that this is true As I've said before, she gets anything she wants, and I get anything she can't talk me out of. That's how it works at my house as well ... fortunately, my wife never tries to talk me out of anything Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted January 30, 2017 Author Share Posted January 30, 2017 Decided to pull out the Stock CoolerMaster 3x4 Cages and drop in some ICY Dock Black Vortex Cages. $44 Each of Amazon The reason I wanted these because they more or less fit my needs. - Large 120MM fans up front - Drives pull out front the front - You physically disconnect wiring inside so there is no worry of a back plane failing in the future. **Im aware many people have had zero issues, but Its always been a concern knowing my luck.** I think the only downfall to these you will notice in the last pic with the first cage installed is the extra space that occupies the case. I wanted mine to sit so I could re-install the original grill so I had to push back the cage a bit, but it occupies an additional 3 or so inches. Not a biggie, but it does make for a tighter case and could make the wiring a bit tighter as well. Now I just need to grab my Label Maker and throw some serial numbers on the pull outs and drive numbers. Man sometimes I wish I had more time in the day to keep up with everything. Quote Link to comment
garycase Posted January 30, 2017 Share Posted January 30, 2017 I've been a big fan of the Black Vortex units ever since I bought my first one a year or so ago -- they have by far the best cooling of any of the multi-drive cages. Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted January 31, 2017 Author Share Posted January 31, 2017 I've been a big fan of the Black Vortex units ever since I bought my first one a year or so ago -- they have by far the best cooling of any of the multi-drive cages. Yeah when I was looking at a lot of the others I kept finding smaller fans in the back and honestly I didn't want the nose or the reduction of fan size seeing my machine has always had 120's in it. Just seemed to make so much sense for my needs. Glad you have good results with yours too. Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted November 13, 2017 Author Share Posted November 13, 2017 Spent some time this weekend and swapped out my Mother Board, Processor, Ram and all the cabling. I dropped in the following: - E3-1225 v3 from a Dell T20 box - AsRock Z87 Extreme 6 - Removed the AOC-SASLP-MV8. I'll eventually pick up a LSI Card, but for now I'm using the 10 on board Sata connections - Dropped in a bunch of 11 inch 6GB Sata Cables, yeah I know I should of gone a little shorter now that its all stuffed in there. Lol - 8 GIG of Non ECC Ram - Some Cheap Video Card I had laying around for Output. I'll eventually switch to On Board, but I don't want to deal with HDMI or DVI at the moment My Reasons for doing this was simple. I wanted to update my Budget box and get a bit more current with the times. The 4Core Athlon was cutting it pretty well and was very stable. I just wanted more Horse Power and thought I was for sure it was on borrowed time. Things do feel much snapper when I'm running Plex and it does Transcode much faster. I'll eventually update my first post and my signature. Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted November 13, 2017 Share Posted November 13, 2017 Great! I love my Haswell! You also appear to have an eSATA onboard - so you could get an 11th port with a eSata to Sata cable should you need it. Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted November 13, 2017 Author Share Posted November 13, 2017 Oddly enough my Biggest reason for getting this Board was I wanted to get away from the SASLP. I never had a BIG issue with it, but when it glitched it took down 4 of my drives or all of them at the same time and I was reading way to many horror stories. So I figured lets go for the Maximum amount of drives on the board and then shoot for a additional controller card. Might pick up a LSI, but who knows just yet. I do like my CPU runs pretty cool and damn its so speedy. I'd like to look into possibly a Windows VM Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted November 13, 2017 Share Posted November 13, 2017 I have the E-1270v3. I run a Windows VM with 3 CPUs and 16G of RAM (32G total in the box). Using an nvidia 1050Ti video card and passing through USB controller to get smooth mouse action. You just need more memory, a video card, and an SSD (if you don't have) and you'd be in business. Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted November 14, 2017 Author Share Posted November 14, 2017 Sounds like a Plan. I'll check here later when I do it and might pick your Brain some along with everybody else. Quote Link to comment
sakh1979 Posted March 25, 2018 Share Posted March 25, 2018 On 11/13/2017 at 4:00 PM, kizer said: Spent some time this weekend and swapped out my Mother Board, Processor, Ram and all the cabling. I dropped in the following: - E3-1225 v3 from a Dell T20 box - AsRock Z87 Extreme 6 - Removed the AOC-SASLP-MV8. I'll eventually pick up a LSI Card, but for now I'm using the 10 on board Sata connections - Dropped in a bunch of 11 inch 6GB Sata Cables, yeah I know I should of gone a little shorter now that its all stuffed in there. Lol - 8 GIG of ECC Ram - Some Cheap Video Card I had laying around for Output. I'll eventually switch to On Board, but I don't want to deal with HDMI or DVI at the moment My Reasons for doing this was simple. I wanted to update my Budget box and get a bit more current with the times. The 4Core Athlon was cutting it pretty well and was very stable. I just wanted more Horse Power and thought I was for sure it was on borrowed time. Things do feel much snapper when I'm running Plex and it does Transcode much faster. I'll eventually update my first post and my signature. Helle Kizer - Are you happy with this configuration? Did you face any problem, example system lockup/freezing etc? Like you, I am in the same boat, looking to upgrade my budget build which is about 8 years old. Is it a typo, or do you actually have ECC RAM on your system? I asked this because (at least the website says) the AsRock Z87 Extreme 6 does not support ECC. Here is my final goal for the new system: I would like to use my new build as a workstation, use GPU passthrough, use peripherals (keyboard, UBS devices, etc). Run about 1 - 2 VMs (Windows 10 or Ubuntu Desktop). Run about 10 - 15 dockers, for example Plex, MariaDB, custom Docker containers mostly running JVMs. Use my current Cooler Master 590 case (same as yours) Budget $1500 - $2000 Also, the processor, motherboard, etc you have listed has been discontinued. How do I build a system with current hardware and still have full compatibility with unRAID. I don't want to have another dire need for system upgrade any time soon. Thanks, Sagun Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted March 26, 2018 Author Share Posted March 26, 2018 Nope not running ECC Ram. My particular processor doesn't require it. I was going to, but decided I really wanted the 10 SATA ports because I was simply trying to get away from the use of any Expansion Cards. Not that I have any issues with them, but I wanted to simply remove on more connected issue. I can't think of one time when my machine has locked up. Its actually been running really smooth since I swapped out all my stuff from the Athlon to the Xeon Build. I really liked my Athlon build, but lets face it a PassMark of 2000 to a PassMark of 7000 it was a no brainer for me. Honestly and I do mean honestly the last 3 Builds I have built all stemmed from What I needed at the time, NOT what I needed in the Future. You more or less know what you want and when I built mine all I wanted was a File Server so I built a Single Core AMD 2.7ghz machine and it worked great. Then I decided I wanted to tinker with Plex and realized a machine I had build only had a PassMark Score of 700, which was way to low to insure Plex could transcode, but luckily for me I had all my content ready because I spent a lot of time converting what I wanted things to run on, but it made me double up on Space. 1 Rip for HD and 1 Rip for iPads and other devices. With my Original machine dieing I sought out to build my second machine which was my Athlon. Anyways needless to say and minus all of my Ramblings. Figure out what you need and using something like PassMark to figure out how your Processor Rates and build from that. I built every machine so far literally shopping around picking the best deals I could. I've recycled everything except my Motherboard, Processor and Ram. Yes I know those are typically the most expensive, but I've gone from PassMark of 700 --> 2000 --> 7000 1st machine $400 all in minus drives 2nd Setup $35 for used Processor, $100 or so for new Power Supply since it appeared to be dieing 3rd Setup $180 for Mother Board since it was a pain to find, $55 for used Processor, $80 or so for new Ram So just think of it as Swapping in Upgrades now and then and you have a Case that can grow with you. I personally don't use VM's, but I do have 10 or so Dockers running. 1 Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted December 11, 2020 Author Share Posted December 11, 2020 Installed 32GB of Ram at 1866MHZ Swapped out my Xeon for an I7-4790K that I found on Ebay for $120 Dropped in a GTX-1050Ti The reasons I swapped out the above was son is upgrading his Gamming Machine and I figured it was easier to recycle the GTX-1050Ti into something vs putting it in a box and having it collect dust. He picked up a GTX-1660Ti and some faster Ram so I took that too. Now with the Faster Processor I'm noticing the system seems snappier and using Nvidia drivers Transcoding's are a breeze using the GPU. Before I noticed with my Xeon 1220 my processor would hit around 30-50% with some easy Transcoding via Plex and now I'm seeing GPU-30% and CPU-20-30%. Leaves me a lot of headroom incase there are some other things that need to be done or other Videos start. Quote Link to comment
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