Month: June 2023

Alienware Liquid Cooler FAILED

Yeah the old cooler was a piece of crap. I was able to fit this cool master in there & that’s plenty of cooling for this i7-7800x. I removed the radiator & put the chassis fan back in place. This runs even cooler than it did before & actually what happened was the old radiator did what they always do in these, it failed. They had a small radiator, look at how there appears to be no room in here for one, well, they managed it, but it ran out of coolant, overheated, & actually the ram bank next to the CPU even failed!

Fortunately for the customer, the three other banks work & he only wants 32GB of DDR4 anyway. So, he’s upgrading to two 16s since not only did the ram slot fail, the ram stick failed too. I imagine it got really hot being right next to the overheating CPU & radiator & yeah, fortunately, all is not lost, he’ll replace that workstation memory with some G.Skill gaming memory. The G.Skill memory has heatsinks, not that it will overheat anymore because this new configuration will be vastly superior to what Dell had in there. I’ll install that ram when it arrives later today.

It’s funny that Dell decided to save money by putting workstation memory in their Alienware gaming PCs. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’ve also reinstalled Windows since that was corrupted. He should probably upgrade his M.2 but it’s working & he has 2TBs in other drives.

Prior to this I had a guy’s PC he was using as a racing simulator in. I basically updated the BIOS & the AMD chipset + AMD graphics drivers & it ran great. It was still crashing for him but I advised him to lower his settings since his card was really only spec’d to run at a maximum 30 fps at 1440 & perhaps 60 fps at 1080. Sometimes there are hardware limitations like that which people do not foresee. As with this Alienware, it’s running a 1080 TI, which is a bit outdated, but the PC was still worth fixing.

That’s the majority of the machines I get. Sometimes I want to take more photos & make more notes & explain everything I’ve done, but I just don’t have time to do that. I used to keep paperwork, physical paperwork, starting in the 90s, each machine had a sheet of paper I’d then file away. I used to have just thousands of these but those files were destroyed long ago.

Fixing Up PCs

Things are going pretty well in that department. I do my best with people & try to give them a nice deal. I am currently working on an Alienware R5 Area-51 Desktop & I’ll post about that later. Here are some systems I worked on earlier this year.

I built this other computer..

But then I listed it as well as the parts & yeah, now I’m just going to part it out & use the case for another build next month. There’s nothing wrong with the parts, it’s just that the 2080 TI sold & now I don’t have an extra graphics card. I now have several spare motherboards, including two MSI z370 gaming plus motherboards.

Picked up like 5 of these, down to one. Not bad for an extra SSD or a laptop, or whatever, not that fast compared to an M.2 but for a secondary drive or for an older machine it’s an increase, plus it has a 5 year warranty. I am glad I picked these up but the next batch I get will probably be 1TB. I have a 2TB M.2 & two striped 1TB M.2s in my main machine & I have room for three more & even with my 12TB Ironwolf I’m always seemingly out of space.

I also have various 1TB to 3TB drives just sitting around, I need to collate all my data so I may turn my old gaming machine into just a data server but it seems like a waste of an i9 since it’d only be me using it so maybe downgrade it with an older i7 & sell the i9 & then on the new i9 build put my GPU in, but eventually I’m thinking the next generation of GPUs will be out, maybe, maybe not, depends on how soon I build.

I am planning a 13th generation build since the forthcoming 14th generation sounds to be focused on laptops & may not see a heavy desktop release, if at all. I guess we’ll see but people are speculating that 15th generation will be the next desktop platform next year, we’ll know likely in a couple months at the most.

Sold my old Alienware

I picked this thing up at a Goodwill & had to gut it entirely & even take apart the power supply & clean it & replace the fan. I cleaned all the other fans & bought a replacement side panel. I also replaced the M.2 & upgraded the ram. In addition to that, I took apart the graphics card, cleaned that, & reapplied thermal paste. I then installed an oem version of Windows 10 & all the latest drivers. I had updated the bios earlier & yeah, it ran great, the guy who bought it got an incredible deal, I sold it for a mere $350. Still, it’s an i7-7700 w/ a 1070 so it’s pretty much entry level at best at this point, despite how well it runs things. I guess I do have a 6th generation i7 with a 960 that can do basic things, but the 1070 at least can hit or break 60 fps in most things.

I never really used it much, it was another box for Save the World sometimes.

I won’t miss it & likely won’t ever buy another one, this just came at the right price at the right time. I actually have another Alienware case, which I’ll get rid of here at some point.

Food I Ate

Here we go, photo bomb of just a small amount of food I ate because honestly I’m sure there is ton more food I could post so eventually I may with categories get that all organized somewhat, at least here.