Nearly one full month from my last blog posting about building a new PC I can finally say the project is complete! It's not nearly the messy drooling mound of cuteness my son is but I still consider this a new "baby" to the family. :D For those who havn't trekked through the PC Project album here's some select pictures of the final result:
While the PC itself is complete there are a few additional items I plan to pick up soon. A new 19" widescreen LCD monitor is the first and foremost on my list. As soon as a great deal comes along and it arrives at the house I'll be sure to post it in the album as well. Finding a suitable black gaming mouse, preferably with a nice blue glowy LED, is a close second on the list but not a high priority. Some new speakers that sport optical S/PDIF connections for HD sound and match the black ensemble of the recently built parts will round out the external parts well but are not a high priority either. Long term planning has me doing research for a decent heatsink/fan to replace the stock Intel one. The stock fan is working fine with the stock CPU settings, but when overclocking desires start to surface it's just not going to cut it. Check out the picture of the heatsink/fan dilemma and feel free to leave me some suggestions if you have them. I might pick up a sound card well into the life of this PC if the onboard sound capabilities just don't seem to cut it anymore. Fortunately, I am very impressed with the onboard sound at this point as it even supports HD sound via an add-on S/PDIF bracket so no expensive sound card is needed right now. That's enough about what I don't have yet. For all you PC building lovers out there here's the current list of all hardware that went into this thing. Enjoy!
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz; it might not be quad core but combined with the motherboard I have it can overclock to some amazing speeds.
Motherboard: BIOSTAR TPower I45 LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX; Havn't heard of Biostar? Not many have until this board came out. Check out the following link to see proof of how this board can overclock an E8400 to a FSB of +600MHz! http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2295
RAM: OCZ Platinum 4GB DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500); What can I say? I'm a sucker for shiny stuff. Posts at listed speed and has every last byte functional in Vista 64-bit.
Powersupply: Thermaltake 700W; Plenty of overall power, great 12v rail specs, black mirror finish. No complaints from me so far.
Graphics Card: SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 3870 512MB 256-bit GDDR4; it might be considered "old" to some hardcore gamers, but it's a considerable upgrade to me and for under $150 it's hard to beat.
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive; I heard Barracuda drives were fast and it certainly is. The size may seem small to some but keep in mind I don't keep hundreds of gigs worth of music, pictures or movies on mine.
Media Drive: SAMSUNG SATA 22X DVD Burner; Nicely priced and fast too. Installed Vista in under half an hour!
Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic 64-bit; say what you want about Vista and I'll probably agree with you on it. But seeing 4GB of RAM post in the 64-bit environment is well worth all of the headaches.
Case: Antec Nine Hundred; The picture speaks loudly enough for this case: beautiful and moves air like nothing I've ever seen before.
Fans: 3 stock Antec Blue LED 120mm, 1 stock Antec 200mm, 2 Coolermaster Blue LED 120mm, 1 stock Biostar 80mm for a total of 7 fans.
Fan Controller: Sunbeam Rheobus-Extreme; it looks like something out of the original Star Trek series; anyone want to ask Scottie for some more power? :D
Printer: Canon PIXMA MX310 all-in-one; my wife likes it so I like it. ;)
Keyboard: Saitek Eclipse Blue backlit; gotta love that blue glowy stuff and is the first keyboard to not wobble on the "impossible to level" L- desk.
I'd love to say that with this building phase complete I am now enjoying hours of gaming. :lol: The truth is I still have loads of files to transfer, the old computer to clean up and prepare for the in-laws and barely an hour and a half each night to do all this. At least when I do get the free time to sit down and enjoy some dungeon delving in ES4: Oblivion or some satellite dropping in Sims 2 I know this new PC will be offering up some of the best performance I have ever seen. I better keep the babies' drool rags close by so as not to short out anything from uncontrollable slobbering. :shock:
Update 9/13/08: I added a comment about this but here it is in the blog too. Not more than 1 hour after I finished transferring all necessary files from the old HP did I encounter my very first PSU burn out. The 200w replacement PSU HP put into the old Pavilion, two years ago, went up in smoke. I'm having a professional check it out for any hidden damage as well; hopefully the motherboard and harddrive survived so my in-laws can still enjoy using this old PC for a few years. I swear my fingers are still tingling from that initial shock of being mere feet from a sparking smoking PSU!