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Blog Date: Monday, January 23, 2006

GeekNews: Hardware Upgrade

Although many of you will find this an unutterably boring post, some of the geekier elements amongst you may be interested to know that I have just completed the build of my new PC.

It's been almost 6 years since I last bought a PC and, although my old P3 based Dell is still going strong, it was time to move on. I decided that this time I should build it myself, as I reckoned I could save a few quid and get a machine with all the components that I actually wanted, rather than the compromise that you usually have to make when purchasing a pre-built system from vendor.

So with a month of painstaking research behind me I plumped for the following components (all from Overclockers):

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ (Socket 939)
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLi Premium nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express
RAM: GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Ultra Platinum CAS2
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 250GB 2500KS SATA-II 16MB Cache
Graphics Card: XFX GeForce 7800GT Extreme LED Edition 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express
Monitor: Viewsonic VP930 19" LCD
Power Supply: Tagan TG530-U15 530W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU
Case: Thermaltake VB1000BNS Soprano SuperMidi Tower (Black)
DVD-RW: Pioneer DVR-110DBK 16 x 16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)
Keyboard/Mouse: Logitech Cordless Desktop S 510 - Black/Silver

This is a pretty high spec system, but not the highest, and I have been careful to allow for a decent upgrade path. This, I hope, will me a decent price/performance/futureproofing ratio.

I'm no stranger to the inside of a PC case and,althoughh I haven't built a PC from scratch before, I wasn't expecting too much trouble. However, it was more complicated and took longer than I had imagined (5 hours for the hardware, 1 for the OS install). In my defence this was mostly down to poor documentation on the part of the motherboard and PSU manufacturers.

For example; My motherboard has a 24-pin molex power, though the power supply (supposedly designed to have enough connectors to make it a 'universal' PSU, catering for all motherboard formats) comes with a 20pin molex plus a million other connectors and adapters. Judicious scouring of various forums showed that it's possible to use only 20 pins of a 24pin molex, but neither the motherboard or PSU manual stated this. The PSU manual did (briefly) mention being able to combine two of the connectors together and this would 'make' a 24pin one, but various other parts of the manual kept stating how this should only be done in certain circumstances and gave dire warnings about getting it wrong. Back to the forums it seemed that the extra 4 pins are for supplying additional power to SLI configured PCI-Express interfaces. But to confuse matters even more, there was another 4pin (EZ Plug) molex elsewhere on the mobo which is also for providing more power in an SLI rig. Confused? You betcha.

Anyway, to cut an already long story short... I plugged everything in that fitted (a 24pin (created by combining the 20+4pin) and the 4pin CPU connector, left out the EZ Plug thing). Which worked just dandy-o.

Other problems were to do with which of my 8(!) SATA HDD connectors I should be using and additionally which SATA drivers (NForce or Silicon Image). Still not sure on that front, but it appears to be working OK. Might become a problem if I want to move to a RAID configuration.

Finally my version of WinXP initially only recognised 131Gb of my 250Gb Hard Drive. This was down to a limitation in the way the original XP (pre-SP1) addresses ATAPI disk drives. I do have SP1 and 2 but the main install disk is pre-SP1. Found the fix online involving adding a new registry setting - EnableBigLba. So I partionied off 60GB of the drive using the XP install disk, installed windows there, added SP2, then enabled the registry setting and re-partitioned the un-partioned portion of my drive to the full capacity of the disk. Job done.

Either way. It all works nicely and is incredibly fast. Only one problem remains with my monitor, which seems to be suffering some backlight bleeding issues.... Not sure what I'll do about that one yet. Might have to have a word with Viewsonic/Overclockers.

posted by smifterbifter at 1/23/2006 01:32:00 PM