Hackjob

Even though I'm a PC guy, I have a strong appreciation for the Mac Pro, having cycled through many of them in the not so distant past. However, Apple recently discontinued the latest model of the tower, this time seemingly for good. I figured now was a fitting time to check one out for myself.

Here we go again.

Attempting to win the console war by building a better machine than either Sony or Microsoft.

Well I did say I was going to get another Mac Pro and lo and behold - here it is. I can also say with certainty that a fair number of you reading this are rolling your eyes at the mere sight of this thing. This of course, is the infamous Mac Pro 6,1 - widely regarded as one of the worst redesigns that Apple ever released - and I'm going to tear it apart.

Yep, it happened to me too. 

Once again, I'm tearing into my old Area 51 R2 to perform yet another round of completely impractical upgrades. This time, it's cramming arguably one of the most insane GPUs to ever grace the market into a tower that now has absolutely zero space for it... at least on the inside. Armed with my 3D printer, my rotary tool, and optimism about as questionable as this entire project, I set off to work.

  Well I've gone and done it. It hasn't been that long since I finished installing new fans in my Area 51 R2, and while they did resolve the cooling issues I was experiencing prior, it didn't help me reach my goal of a 4.0+ GHz overclock on my i7-5960X: a problem whose fault I've attributed to the factory motherboard. Rather than continue trying and failing to make it work, I decided it was time to get drastic, and completely rebuild the beast from the ground up. Time for a long one.

 It's been about five years since I've done any major upgrades to my good ol' Alienware Area 51 R2. Of course, when you're maintaining a PC of this age, the components are inevitably going to start showing it. Recently I noticed my CPU temps were abnormally high, even at idle. Regardless of how hard I ran my fans, they never dropped. I've wanted to deal with this tower's cooling setup for a while now - mostly in relation to replacing the noisy-ass stock fans, but now I no longer had an excuse to keep putting it off.