My GTR Power Com PS530 Plus ‘Chinesium‘ PSU blew up.

Well, Roy called it. It’s a shame I don’t have footage as I didn’t really expect anything to happen, but I let the system run for a few days nothing much to report, I had mostly left it to idle, until the kids came in, and it became a YouTube, music machine. Again nothing much to report, I loaded some program to report CPU temperatures, and it was hovering under 30c. Not to bad.

With the kids gone, I thought I’d run FurMark to see how the GPU cooler is scaling as I suspect I should disassemble the video card, clean it up some, add new paste at least. So basically at 600×400 it was scaling about 1c ever second, just going vertical until it was in the 80c range. I’m not sure of the exact temp, but it was at least 80c and then the PSU shorted, shot electricity out the back, and let out some magical blue smoke. I yanked the power cable, and pulled the PSU, which was still hot to the touch.

Yikes!

Now granted the TDP of the E5-2620 v2 is 80 watts, and what I suspect is the killer, the graphics card, an ASUS Radeon R9 290x can consume up to 300 watts. I don’t know how much 4 sticks of RAM, and a M.2 drive will hit, but considering the PSU says 550 on the box, 530 on the sticker, I suspect going anywhere near 450 is really pushing it to the limits.

I pulled the card, and cleaned it up, and put in an ANTEC 650 PSU, and was amazed that the system powered up just fine. I even reran FurMark until it hit 75c, and killed it, and let it drop back to it’s idle temperature of 35c.

So yeah, the GRT PSU killed itself under load. I though that disclaimer in FurMark was a bit crazy, but no really it really can kill hardware! And I got lucky the only thing that died was the PSU, the machine is still happily running.

Im going to detail it later, so all of this will change, but I was back in my favorite “junk” mall and a few places are selling new kit!

So I thought I’d do one of the Xeon boards up with what I thought looked good, but new. However they don’t offer remanufactured GPUs so the Radion 200 something is a used card I picked up for $350 Hong Kong dollars.

While I’m not the biggest fan or all that knowledgeable about ATI/AMD GPU’s this Radeon R9 200 (something) seems to perform okay. At the least it ran FurMark for a minute without catching fire.

Going with this idea, that means the PSU, case, motherboard and all in one liquid cooler are brand new.

I think the overall cost should be below 200$ USD but I need to go through my receipts and check. Although it is a cheap build for sure. More than enough punch for excel, and enough graphical punch for some gaming.

While not the cheapest case, the aigo Mini case was the least terrible looking one I could find. And at $160 HKD, that puts it in at around $20 USD. Nice

For cooling I found the Alseye H120 cooler for a cool $280 HKD or about $35 USD.

While I’ve used multiple AIO’s before this one really didn’t feel all that different from the rest. And it was the cheapest one I could find.

Contents were pretty much what I’d expect. The cooler block, radiator, and some adapters and whatnot to connect it to the CPU. What is nice about this one is that it includes mounting hardware and explicit ability to mount to the socket 2011. I’m pretty sure that this AIO is technically cheaper than the fan kit I have on my dual processor board.

I picked the 550 watt ‘POWER COM’ GTR power supply, since they bothered with a box. There was a 650 that just came plastic wrapped for cheaper, although I think I should have gone that route.

While the machine does power up, I really have to wonder about the overall power budget. But this is a cheap machine so…. I’m more so happy it powered on.

And amazingly the machine not only powers up, but after a few minutes inside the BIOS the CPU is running at a cool 21c. Nice!

So from what I can recall:

• Motherboard / CPU / RAM 450RMB
• Case $160 HKD
• PSU $150 HKD
• GPU $350 HKD
• AIO $290 HKD

So this puts me at a mere 187 USD. I could have gone cheaper with a discount air cooler, and a very simple 2D graphics card. But I was thinking of going with the ‘best of the worst’ type thing, so that means going with the water cooling, and the best looking graphics card I could find on the cheap. As you may have noticed storage is missing as I had expected some M.2 drives to have arrived by now. But for sub $200 prices this little box packs quite a good little punch.

I needed to get some new PC’s for some temp workers, and I didn’t want to spend all that much. At the same time they need to work with fine Chinese programs like WeChat and TaoBao, which means they have to load up on all this spyware that bogs down damned near everything.

The old Celeron J3455 just wasn’t handling the load, and then I saw this cheap bundle, the Atermiter x79 Mini-ATX motherboard E5-2620 v2 Combo:

The kit includes the board, processor, and 16GB of matched DDR3 ECC RAM. And I was able to get the kits for 450 RMB ($65 USD) as I was ordering more than one. I don’t know if this kind of negotiations are available to anyone outside of China. Although I don’t know if doing this would be some kind of service to resell? It’s crazy enough that I already employ someone to help buy stuff, maybe I should turn it into a business.

Anyway, scoring the Celeron J3455 vs the Xeon E5-2620v2 shows that the Xeon is 2x as fast per core, and with 6 cores / 12 hyper-threaded vs 4 cores on the Xeon. So this should be great.

The board showed up the next day, granted it’s because it’s from the province adjacent to Hong Kong, Guangdong so it didn’t have that far to go.

Contents were pretty bare, the memory nice foam packed, a SATA cable, and a heat sink adapter to sit on top of the LGA 2011 socket to let you use other more common heat sinks. I went ahead and used a LGA1151 3 wire fan kit I had lying around.

The board is TINY. It really is Mini-ATX. I don’t have any spare M.2 storage on hand, so that’ll have to be for another day, instead I just have a disk & SSD from the old Celeron, which booted up just fine in this board. Naturally bring your own CR-2032 as they are so scared of shipping lithium ion batteries for some reason. Xeon’s don’t have iGPU’s so you will need a graphics card. And I just used a super cheap NVIDIA Quadro FX 580. Not an awesome card, but you can see what you are doing, so it’s more than enough for back office work.

So yeah. Another China Xeon special. I know it’s not that exciting, I should fire up the other one and see if I can get XP x64 on there. I have a GTX 970, it’d be a killer HL2 machine!