50 Euro pc including a 1000watt power supply

[mtb_kng]

Hi guys,

Myself and 2 friends as a challenge tried to build the best pc we could for E50 (less than $70). The following is copied from another forum, but I think you guys might find it interesting.

Firstly, it ended up being more of a donation, than actually getting it for E50!

We started off trying to get an pc together out of all the parts we had lying about, but it turns out all of our motherboards were dead.

After all the ideas we had at the start, turns out we didn't use of our old pc parts, bar the harddrive, cpu fan/heatsink, a few cables and one of the power supplies, but more on that later. The cases were mATX so we couldn't use them with Wenchs' motherboard/ram/cpu.

Bought a nVidia branded GTX 285 for a guy just around the corner off adverts.ie for ?35.



Then purchased an E8400 for ?15.



This was followed by a good while bidding and failing to get a motherboard on adverts and ebay. Then wench offered us a motherboard and we were going again!

Searched all the recycling bins in UL, came across a server power supply. It had proprietary connectors and we found out it only had a 12v supply (although, it was 730 watt and 60 amps on that rail). We thought it would be useless, but kept it anyway, turns out it was very useful!

Deejer then offered a the Coolermaster case which brought us almost to the end!



Here's the interesting bit (maybe, you mightn't be into this sort of thing! :pac: )

We found a pinout for the Dell server power supply (Dell NPS-730AB A) and proceeded to combine this with a 300 watt power supply, after the last attempt at using a 450 watt (which died) and 300 watt failed.

The 700 watt would power all the 12 volt parts, such as the 4 pin, 6 pin and motherboard connectors and the 300 watt would power the 3.3 and 5 volt. This gives us about the same power as a normal 1kW power supply! We only had one 6 pin connector so we had to make another one out of an 8 pin and rewired it.

Disassembly of server PSU:


300 watt power supply:


Connectors:


More bits to be salvaged from the dead 450 watt PSU:



Tried to use some of the old case side panels to make a new case for the two power supplies, but the steel was too tough to cut through:

[mtb_kng]

And now the real fun begins!








Does it work?!?!



Finally, she's running at 3.4ghz (Prime95 stable) on lower than stock voltage (1.3v down to 1.225v) and temps are fine. Graphics card is running a little toasty, so no over-clocking there yet. But with this much power available, we could always just get more graphics cards! We have 3 more SATA hard drives coming today which will be put into RAID and then we'll be done for a while!





Thanks all!

[[XC] Lead Head]

Xtreme Thriftiness?