Building a Sleeper Computer Again
Well after my last attempt at building a sleeper spectacularly blew up in my face, to the point of deleting all progress posts from my site, I have decided to try again.
Originally I planned to stream the teardown of the pc today, but issues with life, internet, and the camera caused me to cancel streaming and just take pictures as I went through the process of taking it apart and removing the old parts. All pictures of the computer will be continually added to an imgur album, which will be embeded at the bottom of this post as well.
The computer was listed on Ebay as a “Custom Gigabyte Computer” giving the motherboard model to identify it since they could not identify the case. Below is some of the specs they entered in the listing.
- CPU: AMD Sempron 2300+ @ 1.6Ghz
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7VT600 1394
- RAM: 1.5GB DDR (during teardown I found this was 2 sticks of BUFFALO Select, and one stick had no brand listed, all 512MB)
- GPU: VGA (this turned out to be a 32MB Nvidia e-TNT2 AGP card)
- Other PCI: RJ-11 modem; 2x USB 2.0, full and mini 1394 card
The computer was a little worse for wear when I received it. It was packed well, and besides the dents and stuff shown in the pictures on Ebay, the cover to the floppy drive was falling off and the black cover for the power/hdd activity lights had fallen off when I received it. The cd drive was also slightly ajar, though it was listed as not working originally. Interestingly I found the cd drive had the “slave” jumper set while being in the “master” slot of the IDE cable. The motherboard did have one exploded resistor or capacitor near the bottom, and a few capacitors that had begun to swell, which unfortunately will probably prevent reselling the board. A shame since it’s pretty nice board for the time period. USB/1394 card and the GPU may be sellable to people building retro gaming pcs, but the modem is probably junk these days.
Plastics of the front bezel were a bit worn down, with broken clips on the left side, and one in the lower right. They stayed within the case so hopefully I can reattach them. Some of the structural part of the case is bent at the edges but this shouldn’t cause many issues as it all came apart easily. There was one exhaust fan installed in the back of the case, but there is space for a second fan at the front, and it even has a dust filter installed. I requires removing the front bezel to access so I definitely need to sure up the clips if I keep this installed.
Still thinking on the parts list for the build, right now the thoughts are:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- Cooler: [Uncertain] I wanted to use the Scythe Mugen 5 again, but it is most likely too tall as I appear to have >15cm from the board to side panel
- Mobo: MSI Mag B500M Tomahawk
- RAM: Team T-Force Vulcan Z 16GB
- Storage 1: Western Digital Blue 500GB M.2
- Storage 2: Seagate Barracuda 2TB, reused from a previous build, will add more newer drives if the need arises
- GPU: Yeston RX 5700XT Sakura, again reused will probably need changing if I’m going to use the pc often as it didn’t perform well
- PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 750W G3, you guessed it, reused - the power supply that used to be in my main rig
- Case Fans: [Uncertain] need to research on manufacturers of 80mm fans besides noctua, thinking of having some blue lighting which may tie in here
And there we have it, pretty much everything that’s happened with the sleeper so far. I’m already feeling better about this one as long as the actual build goes fine. Just need to clean, fix, and modify the case some before then. Will most likely list what parts I think can be sold on Ebay later. Enjoy the images below, and hopefully I’ll be back with this build soon.
Sleeper PC Images