Building an Affordable "Skulltrail" System

[Hawke]

Hmm, I always thought computer hardware in general had a 5 year running time (I could have possibly confused it with hardware with moving parts (like hard disks)

Back a bit on the subject of Supermicro dual Xeon i7 motherboards, I was suprised that some of them have support for a 1.44mb floppy disk drive - old and new come together - I have a few old floppies that have some old Dos games on them, wonder are they still readable, better get the external floppy disk drive out and find out.

(BTW I found some Xeon E5472 on Ebay for £50, it is said "Guarantee to work" and it was stated that they were taken out of Dell workstation PCs, I am having a hard think of if it is worth it or not, I think Computer Sais No comes to mind)

 

[Kougar]

Fans can last as little as a year (most sleeve fans are lucky to make 2 years before they are shot, ball-bearing lasts 2-3 years roughly), and hard drives last 3-5 years roughly, although I have had many personally barely last 1 year and others last well beyond 5. High-end GPU's probably fall next in line as they get extremely hot, parts of the power circuitry attain even higher temps than the core! The hotter the card runs the hotter the voltage components get, and it really affects their lifespan. PSU's would come next in my opinion. One would think optical drives would wear out, but it seems to take around 8 years before they start to have parts go bad... (Had the rubber/silicone grommet that grips the disc while the motor spins it start to rot in one, Texas 115 degree heat at work I'm sure. Removed it entirely at the DVD drive still worked fine though.)

After that what usually kills a motherboard would be caps going bad, but as so many enthusiast boards use solid-capacitors that problem is mostly gone. (That said, many OEM machines still do not, and this is typically what I see that kills them. High heat from the computer being filled with dust, or poor designs with the GPU exhausting right over motherboard caps and cooking them accelerates this effect.)

DDR2 RAM got rather hot, and some of the STOCK voltages were downright frightening (IE 2.2v, when DDR2 spec calls for 1.8v!), but DDR3 seems to run very cool by comparison. I'd expect a properly treated and cooled motherboard, RAM, and CPU to outlast everything else in a system, and the CPU to last the longest by far. It's partly why I'm so willing to "abuse" any poor CPU's that end up in my computers, as even with all the abuse they will still last 10 years or more. At least to the point that they reach obsolescence and aren't worth the cost of electricity to run them anymore.

 

[Hawke]

After that what usually kills a motherboard would be caps going bad, but as so many enthusiast boards use solid-capacitors that problem is mostly gone. (That said, many OEM machines still do not, and this is typically what I see that kills them. High heat from the computer being filled with dust, or poor designs with the GPU exhausting right over motherboard caps and cooking them accelerates this effect.)

I think you have explained how my previous setup died (it was an AMD Athlon XP2200)

I am still toying with the idea of purchasing some "used" Xeon E5472 from eBay as they are quite cheap and the seller reckons that they have been tested and that they are pulled from Dell PCs, but I still feel that eBay is a dangerous place of purchasing stuff, I started to notice that Blender 3D is slowing down a bit due to high polygons but still plays Wolfenstein, Quake4 and Doom3 without almost any flaws (best upgrade for any Xeon work and play machines are Kingston HyperX FB-DIMMs IMO)

 

[Kougar]

Aye, those old Socket A / Socket 462 Athlon boards did tend to suffer from that issue, often the CPU heatsink would help heat the caps around the socket and cause them to fail first, earlier than usual.

eBay can be fairly safe if you're careful, just keep an eye on seller's feedback, date the account was created, and carefully read the listings, especially for what isn't mentioned.