The new rig

Well I built a new PC this week. My friend at work Erik built one a few weeks ago and I went with a very similar system.

• Gigabyte 965P Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo (CONROE) e6400
• ATI X1900XTX Video Card
• 2 GB RAM
• 320GB Seagate Barracuda Harddrive

It went mostly smooth. Had a few hiccups. The first one was after I had everything put in the case I came into the ofice to plug it into the monitor and make sure it booted... it did! While I was talking to Erik online using Google Talk (tangent... all my friends/family should get a gMail account and use gTalk to chat online with me. You'll need an invite from me so let me know) I noticed the pc just shutoff. I booted it up again and it did it again. Erik said it sounded like a overheating problem... and indeed it was. The CPU was getting up into the 100 C temps. I shut everything down and proceeded to get the heatsink/fan correctly installed on the motherboard. I found this to be a big pain. I worked on it for a bit and then gaveup and went to bed. I woke up at 2:50 in the morning and it was driving me nuts.... so about 4:00am I had the fan installed correctly and everything looked good! The next night it was time for loading on the software. Formatting a 350gb harddrive took over an hour. Then I had a little problem with one of the front USB ports... turned out a connector had wiggled out or was never put in correctly by the case manufacturer. No big deal. I put everything in closed it up and it's under the desk now!

I probably saved 500.00 or so doing it myself... but that doesn't mean it's the right choice for everyone. You have to be comfortable doing that kind of stuff and realize that I don't have a company I can call if my pc doesn't work (like Dell support). Those are issues to consider for sure.. . there's a lot of piece-of-mind knowing you can pick up the phone and have Dell fix your computer.

I took a few pictures along the way (you can click the image and then at the top of the image click "All Sizes" to see bigger versions if you're intersted in seeing the details)

I just realized this is probably not interesting to anyone but me... oh well, it's my blog!