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Our 2008 Dream Machine rises from the, well, not quite ashes
The Mission Our 2008 Dream Machine was a thing of beauty. We took the case from one of HP’s ambitious-but-doomed Blackbird 002s, slathered it in chrome (because we could), and built a water-cooled monster, with two Core 2 Quad QX9775 CPUs, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 GPUs, and a whopping 8GB of DDR2. To power it all we had PC Power & Cooling whip us up a custom 1,200W PSU. It was quite a machine in its day.
That was four years ago, though, and the parts we used are not only out of date, but out of sight. The only remnants of our once-great Dream Machine that we could excavate from the Lab were the case and the PSU. Not wanting such a beautiful case to go to waste, I decided to rehabilitate it as a companion piece to this year’s Dream Machine. Aside from the chassis and PSU, I’m using all-new components, but they’re much more modest in price and performance than the ones in this year’s Dream Machine. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that the case (and chroming) once cost us a cool $6,000, this refurb would be just a hair above our a Basline build we would have today.
The case was only available in one of HP’s prebuilt Blackbird rigs, but the company did end up selling a few bare cases to anyone who could pony up $1,000. Unless you’re one of the few who bought one, the case-centric parts of this build might not be directly relevant to you, so this is more of a build log than a how-to. The Blackbird wasn’t an easy-to-use case when it came out, and users (like me) who are spoiled by modernity will have quite the ride trying to bring it up to date.
Choosing the Hardware
Spec’ing out this rig was harder than I thought it would be. Not only did I have to make a rig worthy of the over-the-top chassis (which I’ve dubbed the Chromebird), but I had to do so in a way that would complement, not distract from our current Dream Machine. Not easy to do in a chromed-out monster of a case.
Instead of building yet another Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge-E machine, I’m going with AMD’s top chip, the FX-8150 Bulldozer. With eight cores, it’s roughly comparable to an Intel Core i5-2500K on most highly threaded apps. Not the fastest chip out there, but perfectly capable of running a gaming and productivity workhorse. I’ll run the Bulldozer CPU on an Asus Crossfire V Formula board, for both its brawn and its red-and-black color scheme. Prolimatech’s Goliath cooler and two 14cm Vortex fans (red, of course) keep both the CPU and the motherboard cool, and the downward
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The Mission Our 2008 Dream Machine was a thing of beauty. We took the case from one of HP’s ambitious-but-doomed Blackbird 002s, slathered it in chrome (because we could), and built a water-cooled monster, with two Core 2 Quad QX9775 CPUs, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 GPUs, and a whopping 8GB of DDR2. To power it all we had PC Power & Cooling whip us up a custom 1,200W PSU. It was quite a machine in its day.
The case was only available in one of HP’s prebuilt Blackbird rigs, but the company did end up selling a few bare cases to anyone who could pony up $1,000. Unless you’re one of the few who bought one, the case-centric parts of this build might not be directly relevant to you, so this is more of a build log than a how-to. The Blackbird wasn’t an easy-to-use case when it came out, and users (like me) who are spoiled by modernity will have quite the ride trying to bring it up to date.
Choosing the Hardware
Spec’ing out this rig was harder than I thought it would be. Not only did I have to make a rig worthy of the over-the-top chassis (which I’ve dubbed the Chromebird), but I had to do so in a way that would complement, not distract from our current Dream Machine. Not easy to do in a chromed-out monster of a case.
Instead of building yet another Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge-E machine, I’m going with AMD’s top chip, the FX-8150 Bulldozer. With eight cores, it’s roughly comparable to an Intel Core i5-2500K on most highly threaded apps. Not the fastest chip out there, but perfectly capable of running a gaming and productivity workhorse. I’ll run the Bulldozer CPU on an Asus Crossfire V Formula board, for both its brawn and its red-and-black color scheme. Prolimatech’s Goliath cooler and two 14cm Vortex fans (red, of course) keep both the CPU and the motherboard cool, and the downward
More...