Thursday, November 11, 2010

New Build Continued

The board has flashed up and is running well.  The only casualty has been the CPU heatsink fan.  Luckily I had an old Sythe Ninja heatsink with a dead fan.  I've jury-rigged that beast with an old case fan and it is now working well within normal parameters.  All is good.

A picture will be forthcoming when the last 4 GB of RAM arrives in the mail tomorrow.    It looks pretty rad. 

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The Build: The Main Desktop

So, i am struggling to put together the following build:
  • CPU:  AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban 6 Core Processor 2.8GH
  • Mother Board:  MSO 890FXA GD70
  • RAM: 8GB DDR3 
  • GPU:  Gigabyte ATI 5830 
The first attept to power-up the build resulted in sparks, smoke and general badness.  After closer inspection I (and the folks at the local shop) think the board was DOA.  I suspect it could also have been the tolerances in the case - creating a short.

I have since purchased a new case and installed all of the components will take the beast to the shop tomorrow and power it up after an inspection from the local expert.  I have built enough computers to know that I am doing things right, but the added insurance from an expert is reassuring and a mistake is, in this case, costly.


The nice thing about the build has been the new case.  The hard drive cage is 90 degrees to the old standard and is a completely tool-less install.  Cable management is a relatively simple affair as well.  The large size of the graphics card, is so far the greatest challenge.

C

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Back at it:

Started a new build Saturday.   Motherboard blew when power was applied for the first time.  Not good.  More to follow.

C