- Aug 10, 2015
- 8,137
- 6
- 45,615
Hello all,
First of all, I'd like to apologize for the lack of organization in this article. I only had three hours to do everything related because I have a client coming in later today to buy this system.
I guess first thing's first, components.
CPU: Intel Celeron 1037U (bundled with board) $0
MOBO: ECS NM70-I2 (includes CPU and cooler) $50
RAM: 8GB DDR3 1333MHz (brand unknown) $15
GPU: XFX Radeon HD 5450 (manual OC to 700MHz) $15
SSD: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120GB - connected to the only SATA III 6Gb/s connector on the motherboard $35 used
HDD: 1TB WD Caviar Blue - connected to one of the three SATA II 3Gb/s connectors on the motherboard $25 used
PSU: Rosewill 400W unit (unknown model, the PSU and box both just say Rosewill) $15
Case: I have no idea what it is. I can tell you that it costs $10 on eBay.
So why did I buy all this stuff? My friend wanted the cheapest machine possible to browse the web on Windows 10 and play old games using a MS-DOS emulator called DOSBOX. He told me to purposely buy seemingly low quality components because he wanted it to look like all the parts were ordered by someone who doesn't really know what they're looking for.
Now we're ready to begin putting the machine together. I know that I usually start with the CPU, but the CPU and cooler are already installed onto the board at the time of purchase. I moved onto installing the two 4GB sticks of DDR3 1333MHz, no immediate problems there. I then installed the graphics card onto the motherboard and noticed that it wobbled quite a bit in the PCIe slot. This is likely because of the low quality of the motherboard. I was nervous to power it up without securing the card in the case, but I went ahead and did what I always do. That is, put the power supply on its box and put the motherboard on its box and attempt to turn the system on. To do this, I used a screwdriver to short out the power switch pins on the front panel headers. It powered up and I managed to get into BIOS. At this point, I loaded optimized defaults and set the date and time. Also, with the low power draw from just being in BIOS, I was already seeing voltages that were all over the place. I mean, I know that software voltage readings are not entirely accurate and that I'm using a low quality power supply. However, I didn't expect to see the voltages actively changing in BIOS.
I then powered it back down and prepared to install the board into the case. As expected, problems arose immediately. First of all, there were many different sizes and threads of screws that came with the case, but none of them wanted to go into the motherboard standoffs without cross-threading before even one full turn. Finally, I gave up and used some standoffs from my NZXT Phantom 530 that I no longer use because I damaged the side panel a few months ago. Once again, none of the different sizes or threads of included screws fit into the standoffs. I resorted to using the Phantom 530's screws to secure the motherboard. Needless to say, I wasn't very happy with the case. If I hadn't had the old Phantom case, I wouldn't have had a way to secure the motherboard without a trip to the local Digital Concepts. After the motherboard was secured, I noticed that there was only a single header for a case fan. I put the only fan in the case into the only header on the motherboard. The fan was a 120mm blue LED fan mounted to the front of the case. I knew it wouldn't provide enough airflow for even this low power system because its blades were very narrow and far apart, and it was behind a rather fine mesh... I guess it's supposed to be a dust filter? Anyways, I moved on to the graphics card. I went to take the expansion covers off of the case, and found that they were actually welded to the case. If I pulled on them, I was bending the case before they felt like they were even close to coming off. I resorted to my dremel and cut them loose. I then put on a pair of thick leather gloves and got some course grit sand paper to take care of the extra metal. Once that was filed down, I moved to fine grit sand paper and smoothed it down. I was then able to put the graphics card into the motherboard, but I ran into another problem. Thanks to my pulling on the case, the expansion slots were no longer straight and the graphics card would not seat straight. I then took the card back out and bent the case back to a somewhat straight shape and managed to install the graphics card without any more problems.
I then moved on to installing the power supply into the case. This came with its own set of problems. You see, the power supply mounts to the top of the case, and there's this like shelf thing that's supposed to hold it up until you get the screws in. Basically, that was stopping me from fitting the power supply into the space where it has to be in order to line up with the cutout on the back of the case. Feeling defeated, I took the front off of the case and slid the power supply in from the front. I felt like that was simply too much work. I mean, how hard is it to make a case that actually allows you to mount a power supply without taking the front off?
So next came the wiring from the power supply, which was uneventful. Everything fit like it was supposed to. But when it came to the front panel connectors, I ran into another set of challenges. There was no labeling on the board for which pins did what, and I had relied on the diagram in the manual to find the power switch pins to jump start it when it was outside the case. However, the diagram did not show which pins were positive and which were negative. I'm aware that switches don't care which way they're hooked up, but I was worried about the hard drive and power LED's. I didn't want to put them in backwards, so I turned the machine on without the LED's connected and got my multimeter, connecting the red and black wires to each set of pins in each order in an attempt to figure out which way they were. Finally I got it figured out. For the power LED, the negative was on the left. However, it was the other way around for the hard drive LED. WHY?
Anyways, I connected the LED's and powered the machine on to find that they were both working correctly. I felt so accomplished with myself, but also pissed at the horrible design of this case. I wish I knew what company made it, so I could call and complain.
So next came installing the operating system. I had a USB drive with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit on it. I put the drive into the USB port, set USB as the first boot priority, and it actually booted right to it. I was shocked that it only took about forty-five seconds to load. Once at the menu, I selected the appropriate options, entered my product key (I actually bought a legit copy of Windows 10 Pro for this) and ran into a problem. It saw three drives, two of which were approximately 120GB in size, one of which was approximately 800GB in size. I felt that I must be doing something wrong, so I shut the machine down, disconnected SATA data from the HDD and booted up into setup again. Now I saw two disks, each with a 120GB partition and one with 80GB of free space. This seemed really odd, seeing as I had wiped the SSD before putting it in this machine, and that it was the only drive connected and it only had 120GB of storage. I contacted ECS and they told me that a BIOS update was required to overcome this error. So I downloaded the BIOS update to a USB stick and updated BIOS from BIOS setup. I then had to set the date and time again for some reason, even though my other changes were untouched. I ignored that strange behavior, saved my changes and restarted back into Windows 10 setup. I got to the point where I select an install location, and what do you know, it sees a single unallocated 120GB drive. Finally! I then just pressed next to let it manage creating the partitions on its own and waited for it to finish. As expected, it copied Windows files in a matter of one or two seconds. However, what really surprised me was that it managed to finish this part of the installation within ten minutes and moved on to asking me who owned the computer, followed by choosing between Express Settings or custom settings. Of course, I disabled all settings except for using SmartScreen and sending full diagnostics information to Microsoft, then moved on. The installation finished without issue.
I opened the Start Menu and typed Device Manager, but Search wasn't ready yet. So I pressed Win+R to open Run and typed in devmgmt.msc and pressed Enter to get to Device Manager. Once in Device Manager, I downloaded drivers for all devices by right clicking on the devices and selecting Update Driver Software. After that was done, I went to Settings and pulled installed updates by the batch until it didn't find any more, then restarted and tried again until I was sure that I had all updates that were relevant to my machine. For once, I had no problems installing updates on a fresh install of Windows 10.
I don't think I mentioned this above, but the account I was using up to this point was a local account named Admin with no password.
I then had my friend come over to put his Microsoft Account on the machine and we installed Avast Antivirus Free, CCleaner Free, MalwareBytes Anti Malware Free, Revo Uninstaller and WPS Office Free.
Going back about half an hour. I did have a chance to run some stress tests on this machine before he arrived to set it up and take it home. I ran AIDA64 Extreme's System Stability Test on everything except for the disk for ten minutes. I noticed that voltages were all over the place, but I blamed this on the low quality motherboard having a crappy sensor on it. The CPU never went above 50C, even with the really anemic looking cooler on it. Here's the motherboard's product picture. The graphics card was running at 700MHz while never going above 70C even with the very limited airflow. Did I mention that the graphics card has no fans on it? It's just a black heatsink that wraps around the card.
So, after all of this work, I'm left giving my friend a computer that has very little power and that is made of terrible hardware. I can't say that I recommend that anyone reading this ever tries doing this. I ran into a lot more problems than what I put in the article.
One of those problems was that I ended up bending the fan grill on the power supply while attempting to force it into the space at the top of the case. I ended up having to take the grill off of the power supply and pounding it back to a flat shape so that it wasn't pushing on the fan, because that seemed like it would be a safety hazard if the fan couldn't spin freely. To those of you that are not familiar with power supplies, not draining the power could result in getting a lethal shock. However, with these lower quality units, I can't be sure that I was able to actually drain all the power stored inside. I was probably lucky that I didn't get shocked.
My recommendation: Please buy high quality components from reputable brands so that these sort of problems do not arise in your builds.
Thank you to everyone that actually took the time to read through all of this.
-Darren
First of all, I'd like to apologize for the lack of organization in this article. I only had three hours to do everything related because I have a client coming in later today to buy this system.
I guess first thing's first, components.
CPU: Intel Celeron 1037U (bundled with board) $0
MOBO: ECS NM70-I2 (includes CPU and cooler) $50
RAM: 8GB DDR3 1333MHz (brand unknown) $15
GPU: XFX Radeon HD 5450 (manual OC to 700MHz) $15
SSD: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120GB - connected to the only SATA III 6Gb/s connector on the motherboard $35 used
HDD: 1TB WD Caviar Blue - connected to one of the three SATA II 3Gb/s connectors on the motherboard $25 used
PSU: Rosewill 400W unit (unknown model, the PSU and box both just say Rosewill) $15
Case: I have no idea what it is. I can tell you that it costs $10 on eBay.
So why did I buy all this stuff? My friend wanted the cheapest machine possible to browse the web on Windows 10 and play old games using a MS-DOS emulator called DOSBOX. He told me to purposely buy seemingly low quality components because he wanted it to look like all the parts were ordered by someone who doesn't really know what they're looking for.
Now we're ready to begin putting the machine together. I know that I usually start with the CPU, but the CPU and cooler are already installed onto the board at the time of purchase. I moved onto installing the two 4GB sticks of DDR3 1333MHz, no immediate problems there. I then installed the graphics card onto the motherboard and noticed that it wobbled quite a bit in the PCIe slot. This is likely because of the low quality of the motherboard. I was nervous to power it up without securing the card in the case, but I went ahead and did what I always do. That is, put the power supply on its box and put the motherboard on its box and attempt to turn the system on. To do this, I used a screwdriver to short out the power switch pins on the front panel headers. It powered up and I managed to get into BIOS. At this point, I loaded optimized defaults and set the date and time. Also, with the low power draw from just being in BIOS, I was already seeing voltages that were all over the place. I mean, I know that software voltage readings are not entirely accurate and that I'm using a low quality power supply. However, I didn't expect to see the voltages actively changing in BIOS.
I then powered it back down and prepared to install the board into the case. As expected, problems arose immediately. First of all, there were many different sizes and threads of screws that came with the case, but none of them wanted to go into the motherboard standoffs without cross-threading before even one full turn. Finally, I gave up and used some standoffs from my NZXT Phantom 530 that I no longer use because I damaged the side panel a few months ago. Once again, none of the different sizes or threads of included screws fit into the standoffs. I resorted to using the Phantom 530's screws to secure the motherboard. Needless to say, I wasn't very happy with the case. If I hadn't had the old Phantom case, I wouldn't have had a way to secure the motherboard without a trip to the local Digital Concepts. After the motherboard was secured, I noticed that there was only a single header for a case fan. I put the only fan in the case into the only header on the motherboard. The fan was a 120mm blue LED fan mounted to the front of the case. I knew it wouldn't provide enough airflow for even this low power system because its blades were very narrow and far apart, and it was behind a rather fine mesh... I guess it's supposed to be a dust filter? Anyways, I moved on to the graphics card. I went to take the expansion covers off of the case, and found that they were actually welded to the case. If I pulled on them, I was bending the case before they felt like they were even close to coming off. I resorted to my dremel and cut them loose. I then put on a pair of thick leather gloves and got some course grit sand paper to take care of the extra metal. Once that was filed down, I moved to fine grit sand paper and smoothed it down. I was then able to put the graphics card into the motherboard, but I ran into another problem. Thanks to my pulling on the case, the expansion slots were no longer straight and the graphics card would not seat straight. I then took the card back out and bent the case back to a somewhat straight shape and managed to install the graphics card without any more problems.
I then moved on to installing the power supply into the case. This came with its own set of problems. You see, the power supply mounts to the top of the case, and there's this like shelf thing that's supposed to hold it up until you get the screws in. Basically, that was stopping me from fitting the power supply into the space where it has to be in order to line up with the cutout on the back of the case. Feeling defeated, I took the front off of the case and slid the power supply in from the front. I felt like that was simply too much work. I mean, how hard is it to make a case that actually allows you to mount a power supply without taking the front off?
So next came the wiring from the power supply, which was uneventful. Everything fit like it was supposed to. But when it came to the front panel connectors, I ran into another set of challenges. There was no labeling on the board for which pins did what, and I had relied on the diagram in the manual to find the power switch pins to jump start it when it was outside the case. However, the diagram did not show which pins were positive and which were negative. I'm aware that switches don't care which way they're hooked up, but I was worried about the hard drive and power LED's. I didn't want to put them in backwards, so I turned the machine on without the LED's connected and got my multimeter, connecting the red and black wires to each set of pins in each order in an attempt to figure out which way they were. Finally I got it figured out. For the power LED, the negative was on the left. However, it was the other way around for the hard drive LED. WHY?
Anyways, I connected the LED's and powered the machine on to find that they were both working correctly. I felt so accomplished with myself, but also pissed at the horrible design of this case. I wish I knew what company made it, so I could call and complain.
So next came installing the operating system. I had a USB drive with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit on it. I put the drive into the USB port, set USB as the first boot priority, and it actually booted right to it. I was shocked that it only took about forty-five seconds to load. Once at the menu, I selected the appropriate options, entered my product key (I actually bought a legit copy of Windows 10 Pro for this) and ran into a problem. It saw three drives, two of which were approximately 120GB in size, one of which was approximately 800GB in size. I felt that I must be doing something wrong, so I shut the machine down, disconnected SATA data from the HDD and booted up into setup again. Now I saw two disks, each with a 120GB partition and one with 80GB of free space. This seemed really odd, seeing as I had wiped the SSD before putting it in this machine, and that it was the only drive connected and it only had 120GB of storage. I contacted ECS and they told me that a BIOS update was required to overcome this error. So I downloaded the BIOS update to a USB stick and updated BIOS from BIOS setup. I then had to set the date and time again for some reason, even though my other changes were untouched. I ignored that strange behavior, saved my changes and restarted back into Windows 10 setup. I got to the point where I select an install location, and what do you know, it sees a single unallocated 120GB drive. Finally! I then just pressed next to let it manage creating the partitions on its own and waited for it to finish. As expected, it copied Windows files in a matter of one or two seconds. However, what really surprised me was that it managed to finish this part of the installation within ten minutes and moved on to asking me who owned the computer, followed by choosing between Express Settings or custom settings. Of course, I disabled all settings except for using SmartScreen and sending full diagnostics information to Microsoft, then moved on. The installation finished without issue.
I opened the Start Menu and typed Device Manager, but Search wasn't ready yet. So I pressed Win+R to open Run and typed in devmgmt.msc and pressed Enter to get to Device Manager. Once in Device Manager, I downloaded drivers for all devices by right clicking on the devices and selecting Update Driver Software. After that was done, I went to Settings and pulled installed updates by the batch until it didn't find any more, then restarted and tried again until I was sure that I had all updates that were relevant to my machine. For once, I had no problems installing updates on a fresh install of Windows 10.
I don't think I mentioned this above, but the account I was using up to this point was a local account named Admin with no password.
I then had my friend come over to put his Microsoft Account on the machine and we installed Avast Antivirus Free, CCleaner Free, MalwareBytes Anti Malware Free, Revo Uninstaller and WPS Office Free.
Going back about half an hour. I did have a chance to run some stress tests on this machine before he arrived to set it up and take it home. I ran AIDA64 Extreme's System Stability Test on everything except for the disk for ten minutes. I noticed that voltages were all over the place, but I blamed this on the low quality motherboard having a crappy sensor on it. The CPU never went above 50C, even with the really anemic looking cooler on it. Here's the motherboard's product picture. The graphics card was running at 700MHz while never going above 70C even with the very limited airflow. Did I mention that the graphics card has no fans on it? It's just a black heatsink that wraps around the card.
So, after all of this work, I'm left giving my friend a computer that has very little power and that is made of terrible hardware. I can't say that I recommend that anyone reading this ever tries doing this. I ran into a lot more problems than what I put in the article.
One of those problems was that I ended up bending the fan grill on the power supply while attempting to force it into the space at the top of the case. I ended up having to take the grill off of the power supply and pounding it back to a flat shape so that it wasn't pushing on the fan, because that seemed like it would be a safety hazard if the fan couldn't spin freely. To those of you that are not familiar with power supplies, not draining the power could result in getting a lethal shock. However, with these lower quality units, I can't be sure that I was able to actually drain all the power stored inside. I was probably lucky that I didn't get shocked.
My recommendation: Please buy high quality components from reputable brands so that these sort of problems do not arise in your builds.
Thank you to everyone that actually took the time to read through all of this.
-Darren
WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S A BAD BUILD??? IT LOOKS SO COOL THOUGH - I'M GONNA BUY IT ANYWAY! 
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