Early-mid 2010s Gaming Machine
Some years ago, I picked up a couple of CRTs and an old turntable stereo from one of my old co-workers to save them from a dumpster, and while I was there, he offered me a gaming rig from the early 2010s which didn't boot for pretty cheap. It was in a Raidmax ATX case, and the case itself was worth more than the $20 he was asking.
Once I got it home, I pulled system apart, and it is fairly impressive for the time. It has external knobs for controlling some of the fans and their LED lighting, and at some point, a capacitor blew up and once of the wires started to melt, which caused a short. Also, one of the four 6GB RAM chips had apparently gone bad, and the hard drive had been removed as some point. It also had some random, period-correct, i7 CPU in it. Also, an NVIDIA Geforce GTX970 GPU, which actually caused a class-action suit against NVIDIA for intentionally designing it with 3.5GB of fast VRAM and .5GB of slower memory, causing performance issues. It had a clock rate of 1050Mhz and a boost rate of somewhere around 1170Mhz, if memory serves. The RAM situation was a serious bottleneck.
Recently, I've decided it take it out of storage and upgrade this to a somewhat period-correct gaming beast. I had a spare 8TB hard drive, so I decided to install it. I also had an NVIDIA Quadro M4000, which was basically the workstation version of the GTX970, but with 8GB of vRAM and a clock rate of something around 770Mhz. After some work, I managed to modify the video BIOS to set the clock rate to 1000Mhz and the boost rate to 1050Mhz. Not quite as fast as an actual GTX970, but as close as I could get without playing with power and voltage settings. A simple boost of the max power from 120W to 130W stablized the framerate, as it would hit 120W every now and then and throttle the speed down. It never goes above 120W, but giving that slight overhead stablized the speed.
The motherboard used is an Intel DX79SI, with 8 DDR3 RAM slots which support quad-channel memory. So, I have ordered 5 used sticks of 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws PC3-14900 RAM to match the 3 sticks already in it to max out the motherboard to 64GB of quad-channel RAM. I also flashed the bios to support the fastest CPU available, a 2nd-gen i7, a 4GHz i7-3960X Extreme, with 6 cores and 12 threads. I have one of those on order as well.
I ID'ed the Raidmax case as a Raidmax Augusta. It has five internal 5.25" drive bays, plus a separate chamber for six 3.5" internal hard drives, on easily removable trays.
I installed the latest release of the Devuan Linux distro, which is basically Debian without systemd. I installed MATE as my desktop to keep it as light as possible, and will be running most of my games throught Lutris and other emulator front-ends.
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