🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Not many can claim 25 years on the Internet! Join us in celebrating this milestone. Learn more about our history, and thank you for being a part of our community!

Zomg new PC!

posted in DruinkJournal
Published October 05, 2005
Advertisement
Hurrah! New PC! It's taken me about 24 hours to build it, install everything, and copy my data from my old drives. I spent about 14 hours yesterday building it and installing XP and drivers, and around 10 hours installing apps, games and transferring data.
Thanks to everyone in #gamedev who helped. My previous mobo's POSTed with just the PSU connected (probably because they all had built in graphics chips). So when I didn't POST just after screwing the mobo in, I thought "Oh teh noes". But it's all fine now.
I also got horribly confused with the case; it's a screwless design, and the drives go on runners which go in the drive bays, instead of being mounted directly onto the drive bays with screws.

On that topic, this case is awesome. I can highly recommend the "Arctic Cooling Silentium T1". It's pretty much silent (as the name says), even the hard drive is mounted in a little box which is suspended fromthe case by rubber bands. So no vibration against the case.
The PSU is at the front-bottom of the case, and has two fans drawing air in over it, then through the case and out through two fans at the back-top of the case. And it looks damn sexy [smile]

My specs are now:
  • Case: Arctic Cooling Silentium T1
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9
  • CPU: AMD 64 3500+
  • RAM: 2x Kingston 512Mb DDR400
  • Graphics: ATI Radeon RX800 GTO 256MB PCI-X
  • DVD RW: NEC ND3540A 16X DVD+-R/RW 4x Dual Layer
  • HDD1: 250GB ATA100/133 7200RPM 8MB Buffer SATA
  • HDD2: My old 200GB IDE drive
  • Sound card: Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2
    It runs Guild Wars like an absolute beast now. 1280x1024, maxiumum settings, 4x antialiasing and it runs perfectly smoothly.

    I rebuilt my old PC too, changing the fans so I have 2 intake, 1 outtake for better circulation / less dust intake, and fitting a wireless LAN card.
    I was surprised to discover that it was getting up to 88'C in the BIOS, after only 10 minutes of being switched on. Turns out that a big splat of heat conductive gel fixed that, and it's back to a more sane 60'C. But it was always pretty hot, I think the heatsink is insufficient (The CPU is a AMD Athlon 2600, and the heatsink is rated up to a Athlon 3200 however).

    I also have a new mobo to install in my sisters PC, which will take time, since that means a windows reinstall too. Hooray...
    To celebrate, I'm having a LAN party on Friday, and then people round again on Saturday before the mission. Yay.
  • Previous Entry Hmm...
    Next Entry Updaet
    0 likes 5 comments

    Comments

    jollyjeffers
    Sounds good... but we all know the best journal entries must have pictures [wink]

    Jack
    October 06, 2005 03:41 AM
    ukdeveloper
    How much did that lot set you back? And where did you get the parts?

    Just curious, because I might want a custom build before too long.
    October 06, 2005 05:10 AM
    sanguineraven
    Looks like I will have a long train ride with my PC on Saturday then.
    October 06, 2005 07:07 AM
    Evil Steve
    The whole thing came to £712, everything from Silicon Group in Edinburgh. And that includes my bluetooth dongle for £12.

    I'll get a couple of pictures up in my next entry, by camera is a bit shite though.
    Another nice thing about this case is that it comes with about 20 cable tidies (the ones that "zip up" and you can't undo without cutting them). So I've got all my cables nice and neat [smile]
    October 06, 2005 10:18 AM
    jollyjeffers
    Quote: I've got all my cables nice and neat

    I so need to do that for my machine. I got a decent case, has a window in it despite not really needing/wanting one... so you can see the absolute mess of cables in it [headshake]

    Pictures or Shite Pictures - still required. One of your mates must have a nice DigiCam you can borrow [wink]

    Jack
    October 06, 2005 03:23 PM
    You must log in to join the conversation.
    Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
    Advertisement
    Advertisement