Machines

Computers

EurosatREDUX

EurosatREDUX (2007) Design & Construction: Peter Asaro

I rebuilt my Eurosat computer after it was destroyed in shipping from Sweden to the US. I had paid an extra 100 euros in insurance to the Swedish Post, but they refused to pay for the damage because there was no information about who delivered it in the US. I was most upset. But to be fair, the Austrian Post lost two entire boxes of irreplaceable research papers when shipping them back to the US, so I guess I should be glad to have gotten anything at all. In both cases the foreign post claim the US Post is responsible, and the US Post has absolutely no records of anything. Bsically, theydropped it from a very great height, causing the DVD drive to smash the RAM, dislodge the RAM ports from the motherboard, and tear the heatsink off the CPU.

Link to more photos of the damage.

Anyway, I rebuilt it. Happily, the LG DVD and CD drives still worked just fine, and I had carried the harddrives with me by hand. After replacing the obviously damaged bits, including the memory and motherboard (and CPU and heatsink for good measure), I tried to power it on. Nothing. Turns out the powersupply coils had also been completely unseated and shorted in the fall. By this time, I was building a Multimedia PC for my mother, and managed to reuse the CPU, heatsink (after carefully reshaping the mangled copper), and GPU. So, I added a large new PSU and GPU, neither of which fit or looked as nice as the originals. The PSU was so large, I had to remove the top-mounted USB/Firewire ports from the case. The GPU was so large, I had to remove one of the harddrives to accomodate it. So while it ended up being much faster and more powerful, it is also less aesthetic and functional than the first Eurosat.

Main Components:
Motherboard: ASUS P5WDG2-WS PRO Workstation
CPU: Intel Q6600 2.4GHz Core2 Quad
CPU Heatsink: ZALMAN 9700 Copper 110mm fan w/ blue LED
GPU: EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 320MB
RAM: (2x) 2GB GEIL DDR2 6400 800MHz 5-4-4-12 matched pair
Harddrives: (3x) 500GB Western Digital SATA2, (1x) 750GB Western Digital SATA2
Optical Drive: LG GSA-4163B 16x Super-multi IDE DVD-RW, LG W8526B-R 52x IDE CD-RW
Power Supply Unit: Enermax Galaxy 850W
Case: Tsunami Dream brushed aluminum

Here are the build shots: