How ghetto are your rigs?

[Ominous Gamer]

I know a lot of die-hard DCers use whatever parts they can get ahold of, at the cheapest price. So what kind of creations has XtremeSystems given birth to?

Here is my first entire. The parts are from an Alienware that was ordered the week XP was released. Its got a standard Intel motherboard with a 423 socket 1.8Ghz P4, using 512mb of rambus memory. The video card is an Geforce Ti 4200.

Parts to point out:
Case had crappy-ass intake, so its sitting on BRICKS cause the carpet was getting in the way of the bottom vents. I had to increase the rear bracket screw size cause I've screwed with this case so much they are all pretty muched stripped. Thats a Zalman CNPS6500A-Cu, but the 92mm fan has been replaced with a 120mm aspire fan from a DOA Aspire X-Qpack. The rear fan is also from the Aspire PSU in the X-Qpack, and is actually connected to the videocard. The video card itself is using the original stock 423 heatsink, and is attached using 8 zipties, through the mounting holes on the card!

http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/3126/1000696ma8.th.jpg (http://img223.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000696ma8.jpg) http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/5386/1000697an2.th.jpg (http://img130.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000697an2.jpg) http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/4122/1000701hf6.th.jpg (http://img139.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000701hf6.jpg) http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/5310/1000702rk9.th.jpg (http://img223.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000702rk9.jpg) http://img106.imageshack.us/img106/9386/1000703rm5.th.jpg (http://img106.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000703rm5.jpg)

Next I'll show how I took the Aspire PSU I mentioned and crammed it into a Compaq mATX case.

[Bloody_Sorcerer]

all my ghettoness tends to go in passing or has since led to casualties.
first and ghettoest, my old 9600.
This 9600 was a freebie from a friend who had just upgraded to an fx5700 ultra (is that an upgrade?). it was also my first foray into overclocking. naturally, i supposed that replacing the stock chipset-sized cooler with a real cooler could do me some good, so i did. i used my trusty hair dryer to get the epoxied chipset sink off and got a free socket A heatsink (probably a stock one) off of said friend. it hit some capacitors on the board, so we got out the trusty dremel and hacked off the offending corners of the heatsink. all was good. now, as for mounting, well... i felt creative and lazy. naturally, when i get creative and lazy i resort to bad bad bad ideas. this was probably my worst ever. i mounted this heatsink with... rubber bands. 4 of em. and it lasted for a few months, too, until i was at a lan party and one or 2 broke and my computer crashed twice (before i realized wtf was going on). so, naturally, to continue the trend of idiocy, i decided to tie the heatsink on. with wire. insulated wire, just to make it harder (read:impossible) to tie or get taught at all. well, that lasted about a week, then the "knots" gave out and the heatsink fell off. a delicious roasting smell emanated from my computer; the magical smoke contained inside my 9600's die had been released and the card was soiled forever! rest in peace(s).

next up, my power supply replacement. normally, not such a daunting task is it? well, my aspire poopy 500watter had just died for no good reason other thank generally sucking, and it was midnight, and i was pissed at it. even without a replacement i knew it was time to get her out just to cool off some anger. well, normally, not a big deal right? wrong. my iwaki's outlet happened to be positioned about 2 mm from the back of the power supply. jenius engineering on my part. when building my loop, i bolted my iwaki 20RZT directly above my PSU, before screwing on the brass barbs. i have the impeller housing rotated 180 degrees so that the outlet points straight down, through an 80mm fan hole. so here it is, the threaded outlet close to the back of the PSU, but above it, so i installed my PSU nice and fine. all would've been well if the supply didn't decide to die 6 months later (already had 1+ years under its belt at this point). so, back to me at midnight. i'm pissed at my supply, praying none of my crap hardware (hey, im poor) is dead, and this PSU must come out now and my water cooling gear is going nowhere fast. natural solution? get out my largest nearby wrench and flathead and bend the PSU opening on the back of my case enough for the switch to move sorta freely (fan control knob has long since popped off) and rotate the PSU 90 degrees on its lengthwise axis in hopes of being able to drop it straight down between 2 fat aluminum rails towards my motherboard, from where it can be removed. half an hour of borderline case mutilation and foul language, my poopy supply has beene extracted from my case in the most retarded way short of dremelling it to bits where it lay. i take the acrylic cover off because i'm bored and pissed and naturally aspire decided to suck at life and added 2+ inches for no good reason (well, to place some crappy fans in i suppose). i buy a S12-600 the next day at frozencpu.com's store (they're a local company for me) and install it; naturally, its got an inch plus of clearance because its built properly.

finally, my entire watercooling setup is ghetto in one manner or another. pump vibration? no problem, bolt it to the case through a layer of old mousepad. broke my motherboard backplate (was overtightening my HSF a long time ago and pop goes the standoff!)? no problem, feed 1 bolt from the back and wing nut it down, do the other 1 the "normal" way. radiator? lets go to autozone and pick up a 2-302 core('77 bonneville w/ AC), hack saw off the ends of the copper pipes, fab a shroud for it from an old computer case, paint said shroud poorly, bolt fans to shroud, bolt shroud to case, rivet shroud shut around core. ta da! works well as long as i never want a new case, i suppose.

and i'd post a picture of an attempted homebrew fan controller using a bigass FET but i don't feel like taking one or digging out the controller (it sucked), but just for a mental image: picture an oversized potentiometer, bigass FET bolted to half of my 9600's stock cooler (it got hacksawed in half), some wiring taped to molex connectors, all mounted on a stupid-sized piece of scrap acrylic.

EDIT: and i do believe this may be my longest post ever.
EDIT 2: and to say nothing of my smoothwalled dell P2 system or the 2 dead P3 systems (motherboard, chip, ram) sitting in my closet loosely...

[couppi]

I've got 6 motherboards with Pentium III-s processors at 1.13 ghz that I found after going dumpster diving after my company upgraded. These sit on cardboard on metal shelves in a closet. I have three psus, and two systems are wired to each one. They've got 128 mb ram each, but I hope to upgrade them to 256 mb soon. Sorry no pics, my camera died in the washing machine in my pocket :(

[Ominous Gamer]

Dumpster diving is always fun.

Here is my HP with a passive heatsink on an Intel Celeron at 580 something mhz. It was a freebie from a customer I built a rig for. She was tired of the PSU shutting down after a few minutes.

Well, I yanked the PSU and managed to fit the Aspire PSU from my DOA X-Qpack. The original PSU bracket is for SFF PSUs, which just so happens to be large enough to hold a 120mm fan. Its an Antec fan pulled from an Antec P160W. Its silent, no LED lameless, and its the only fan in the entire system. I also added a Voodoo 3 to handle the VGA output so the CPU could focus on Dimes and F@H.
To add insult in injury, it sits beside the cat food, just for the hell of it.

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5856/1000706io7.th.jpg (http://img145.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000706io7.jpg) http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/9439/1000708vq4.th.jpg (http://img95.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000708vq4.jpg) http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/7124/1000709nj3.th.jpg (http://img150.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000709nj3.jpg) http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/6219/1000710pr3.th.jpg (http://img95.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000710pr3.jpg) http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/3166/1000711cy5.th.jpg (http://img95.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000711cy5.jpg)

On the uncool part the PSU is very very poorly built, and I'm an idiot. I went to reposition it one day while it was still plugged it. Grabbed the heatsink and the thing literally floored me. You know how scary that is when you live by yourself?

[NickS]

Jeeze, you're lucky man. Sorry bout teh PSU incident, but I gotta LMAO at the PSU installation. :D