I decided a while back that it was time I invested in a new computer. I’ve had the same desktop machine for at least six years now, and it’s a real Frankenstein’s Monster of a box, I’m amazed it still runs. I used to be into building and upgrading quite heavily, partially due to it being my job, but mostly because I’m a geek and love it. So I’ve been saving up some pennies, and this month took the plunge and bought a whole heap of new boxes and boards, ready to replace my ancient calculator.
The problem with being out of the ‘scene’ so long is that I had no idea what to get, or what to spend. It was a lot easier in the old days when for example, a processor’s performance could be guessed at purely by looking at its clock speed in MHz. Nowadays though, clock speeds have stalled slightly, and sticking more cores on a die is de rigeur (more cores = effectively more processors on the same chip). I found my way to a friendly forum over at bit-tech and dipped my toes, asking advice about what to get for my budget. My initial ideas quickly changed and before too long I had a much better idea about what to get. Without boring the pants off of everyone (too late) here’s the basics of what went on the order:
- AMD Phenom II X4 965 CPU
- 1GB GTX 460 Graphics card
- 4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM
- 1TB Samsung Spinpoint HDD
So yesterday after some stock shortages and rapidly altered orders, I came home to a collection of boxes, a couple of small ones, and one MASSIVE one. In years gone by, wild horses couldn’t have kept me from tearing those boxes open and getting started, but I seemed to have calmed down with age (a bit…) and instead got to the more urgent matter at hand of getting Murph to dog agility. As soon as I got back however it was fair game :).
The parts all laid out (and murph's toy)
I laid everything out on the table, read the motherboard manual (told you I was getting old) and got started, slowly but surely. Luckily not too much has changed when it comes to physically installing the hardware in the case, and thankfully all AMD chipset motherboards now come with a standard cooler retention bracket already attached. Having bought a better-than-the-cheap-stuff-but-still-not-too-expensive case, it didn’t come with a PSU so I bought a reasonable Corsair one and was pleasantly surprised to find the cables nicely braided. Having to attach power to the graphics card was a new one on me, especially having to attach two cables. Power to the motherboard had me really confused as there are two connectors, but they can vary in size. Once I realised the 8-pin ATX connector split in half to give me the 4-pin one I actually needed, things went a bit more smoothly. I have to say I love using SATA, the cables are so much smaller than IDE.
So I got everything in, attached and tidied and plonked it on the worktop, and connected it to the (beautiful!) BenQ monitor I bought at the same time. Power on, great. No display, not so great…
A few panicked posts to the bit-tech forums, a bit of playing with things (it would start with the onboard graphics, not when the card was attached though for some reason), and I finally got it booting after replacing one of the PCI-E power cables to the card. One more annoying problem still remained though, the screen has red lines and fuzz all over it. I went through the mental annoyance of having to return the graphics card for a while, then gave the DVI cable driving the monitor a wiggle and Ta-Da! A working PC!
The 'red fuzz' annoyance
Windows installed from first boot to desktop in around twenty minutes, but only after some install errors (tip: if you ever get the error telling you windows can’t find files during the Unpacking stage, don’t reboot, immediately hit Ok and then install again. It might take a couple of tries but it will go through. I think it’s something to do with SATA drivers…). By this point it was already 11PM so I headed to bed. I get the feeling there’s going to be a lot of tinkering to get things running as smoothly as they could be (I’m a performance slut), but I can already tell how fast it’s going to be. I’m looking forward to playing some games on it and organising the daft amount of photos I’ve collected. It’ll be nice to be able to work with the ever-growing library of pictures and videos of our slowly growing family. More about that and our latest doggy addition in my next update 🙂