Saturday, April 11

Some assembly required


Like the title says, some assembly is required. The DVD R/W thing not in packaging is one that I'm transferring from my old PC.
Actually, it comes from the pc I had before my current old one. It's burned 10 DVD's and 6 CD's in 6 years time. *shrug* I don't burn much. Previously I'd cleared this old table in my library so I could use it for assembly. As it happens a very groundy wall-mounted heater was right next to me as well, so that too was covered.


Now don't go all huffy about me thinking my home rates an actual library, it's not all that posh.
But since this row of bookcases is the most prominent feature of the room (there's another half-height set of bookcases against the other wall) and me not liking the word bookroom....
Note the heater in the back.


Some assembly done. Note the top-mounted full-width fan. That's gonna keep my baby cool.
Bigger fans == less noise. I'm not succumbing to all the male testosterone that the imagery on the packaging is trying to incur.
Also note the placement of the PSU, the Power Supply Unit which is at the bottom, and for my geek cred the row of O'Reilly books in the back. I also see my fav psychology book from University (I dropped out) on the lower shelf.


Now that is just plain handy!


Motherboard partially assembled, I added three rows of memory to a grand total of 6GB.
For extra cred see if you can recognize some of the old games the boxes of which I kept and are on that shelf in the back.
Also note that's an entire shelf with just O'Reilly books. I'm a nerd :-)
(I also cheat, there's two editions on Javascript & DHTML each there. Couldn't bear throwing them out though)


Motherboard complete with CPU and Big Ass Fan and some cabling attached so I won't have to cut and bruise my fingers trying to attach them after mounting.



Nearly done now. THe big black horizontal bar is the videocard.
I'm NOT a case modder, hence I don't give a fart about neat cabling. Airflow is barely impeached by cables so screw that.
Beyond the 3 fans you see here and the two you can deduce being there, there's an additional 2 fans mounted to the front. One of those will be on and blowing cool air over my barely lukewarm harddisks straight over my videocard. Ok, so maybe I should clean up that cabling just a bit. Maybe some day replace that DVD-R/W which is the noisiest part now.




And now the case is closed.
Once again, not a case modder. I don't care about how it looks.
Well I do a bit, which is why you don't get to see how it looks 'lit up' with blue leds from the case, slightly different blue along with green and amber from the motherboard, and to nauseatingly top of the light-show the CPU fan has a salmon pink glow.
The net result is not pretty. Who cares? Not this blogger who knows this case is ending up beneath a desk anyway.

6 comments:

  1. I think I have PC envy.

    Seriously though, I should upgrade mine soon too. I'm still running an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton...lol. My AGP video card has half as much ram as my system (1GB as opposed to 512 on the vid card).

    MSI mainboard...good stuff. Been running mine for almost 7 years now.

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  2. Ha ha, well I feel PC envy towards my pc as well if that's any consolation:-)
    Mostly I begrudge myself the nigh to $1500,- it cost me. :-(
    That machine does sound a bit dated. You don't have to spend the same amount of money as I did on a new system though.
    I went for the biggest baddest CPU (well, the affordable on of that family anyway) I could find and bought the mobo and case required for it. Even without that you'd get substantial gains going from IDE to SATA-3 disks, even better if you go stripe raid which is real easy now. PCI-Express is also in its third generation now e.t.c. Not to mention that more Memory really is the biggest speed saver. 80 times faster than your hard drive and al that.
    I would recommend holding out till Windows 7 Ships, which may sound a bit odd coming from someone who didn't :-)

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  3. Lani said...
    "I would recommend holding out till Windows 7 Ships, which may sound a bit odd coming from someone who didn't :-)"

    No, it makes sense. If it's any consolation to you, I've actually got windows 7 beta running on my current system and it seems to run just fine, even on the dated hardware.

    The funny thing is, it almost runs better than Vista does on my wifes 1 year old laptop that has 3GB of RAM in it. lol

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  4. That's odd. Most test results on Windows 7 show it not running almost faster than Vista but definately, noticably faster. Nearly as well as XP on the same hardware. I wonder what makes W7 perform so poorly (i.e. comparable to Vista) on that laptop.

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  5. No, you're right. My wife's 1 year old laptop has only Vista installed. My 7 year old PC has both Windows 7 and XP. Windows 7 runs as well as XP does on my PC.

    I haven't tried putting Windows 7 on her laptop. Though now you've got me thinkin'...

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  6. Well, I'm waiting for the Release Candidate, which should be out soon. :-)

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