So I built my first computer last week. Or really, my awesome coworkers did (and all for the low, low price of several boxes of Cadbury Creme Eggs and my leftover RAM.) And thus far, it’s been running brilliantly. I’ll have to take a picture of the inside of it when I get a chance, but for those of you who like know what’s inside, here’s a happy list of components:
1)ENERMAX Uber Chakra ECA5001B Black Aluminum / Steel Trim w/250mm Intake/Exhaust LED Monster Fan ATX Full Tower Case w/Front I/O 1 eSATA, 4 USB2.0, Audio I/O Pictured to the left there – although we had to yank that fan on the side and just go with a standard 90 mm, since the aftermarket heat sink and fan on the CPU were just too wide to fit it.
2) GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard – small and a bit of a tight fit, but easy to set up.
3) CORSAIR CMPSU-1000HX 1000W ATX12V 2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply Beefy. I originally specced this out with the 850 w Power Supply, but decided to go with the 1000 in case I want to be stupid with the SLI later.
4) Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Exactly what it sounds like. I’ve still managed to max it out with my last Poser Render – but the offshoot was that I was done in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours. 😉
5) OCZ Gold 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Voltage Desktop Memory Model OCZ3G1600LV6GK – I ended up putting 8 Gigs in total for now.
6) SAMSUNG Black 22X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD+R DL 22X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD Burner LightScribe Support – Pretty Standard…
8) Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive I installed the new OS on this one (Windows 7 64 bit) and then added my two drives from the other machine. No RAID or anything, but it gives me about 2.6 Tb of space. 😀
9) EVGA 896-P3-1255-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card I bought this back in November of last year when the 8800 in the XPS died for the THIRD time, but I didn’t end up using it. It does run a bit hot, (and it’s not overclocked), but I’ve been pretty anal about watching the temps. Good thing, too, because the drivers I installed ended up getting yanked from Nvidia’s website over the weekend due to random heat issues- i.e. I noticed coming out of sleep it was running at 65 Celsius, even when idle. After rolling back the drivers, it’s back down to the 40 Celsius level. Much happier. 🙂
10) XIGMATEK Intel Core i7 compatible Dark Knight-S1283V 120mm Long Life Bearing CPU Cooler
And that’s it. Of course, the refurb Dell monitor I had been using also decided to start dying last week (I’d boot up and get no signal until Windows actually loaded. Did this on *every* machine I tried it on.) I could have lived with it for a while, but it’s hard to troubleshoot when you can’t see the bios or safe mode or anything else, so I sucked it up and bought a new monitor too. — > Acer H233Hbmid Black 23″ 5ms HDMI Full HD 1080P Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 40000:1 (ACM) Built in Speakers
Dell called me last week, in fact. Apologized profusely. Swore up and down they are going to send me a brand new Alienware Aurora to make up for it – they’ll even email me the specs and work with me on what I feel would be a fair replacement.
I’ll believe it when I see it, and I haven’t seen shit.
