Supergeekblog

In case you missed it, please check out the other parts in this series.  Why to Build a PC and Part 1 (Intro).

Primary PC (Olorin)

A little note on naming convention, my primary PC has always gone by my online name of Olorin.  My oldest and personal blog, Olorinpc.com, is derived from this as well.  Naming a PC should be fun and something you want to see for a while, so be creative.

Specs:

MB: Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3 770 R (Onboard sound, LAN, USB 2.0/3.0, eSATA, SATA 3.0/6.0)

CPU: AMD PH II X4 955BE 3.2 AM3 Quad

The board and CPU came as a combo unit.  I looked for something lower cost, yet still had the newer revisions of USB and SATA, along with being Overclocking friendly.  The AMD Black Edition means it has unlocked multiplier, so easier to OC.  Warning: I did *not* order an aftermarket cooling system.  I will be using the OEM heatsink and fan in this build – I will not be doing much in the way of OC’ing till I get a better cooling setup.  It looks like with decent cooling, most people are getting the 3.2 overclocked to around a stable 3.8.

RAM: G.Skill 4gb (2x2gb) DDR3 1600

To keep the cost down slightly, I stuck with 4gb, but at a higher clock speed.  Reviews indicate that a lot of boards load this incorrectly at DDR3 1333, but correcting the timings will bump it up to the full DDR3 1600.  With 2 free slots on the board, it will be easy to bump this to 8gb later.

Case: Raidmax Smilodon ATX-612WBP ATX Mid Tower Foldout MB with 500w PC

Budget case with power supply that still looks good and has easy access to the components.  The 500w PSU should be sufficient for most things, though you might want to upgrade at a later date.  Warning:  didn’t discover this till the day after when I was triple checking my order, but the PSU has a 4-pin mainboard connector.  The newer i7 and AMD3 boards (like the one above) use an 8-pin connector.  I had to rush order an adapter so it would arrive with all the other components.  Also, there are only 2 SATA power connectors.  If you have more than that, you will need to get some splitters.

Vid*: Sparkle GeForce 8400 GS 256mb 64-bit DDR2 PCIe 2.0

The vidcard is where I cut back the most on this build.  It was the cheapest PCIe card I could find.  It will work just fine, but for gaming this will prevent this from being a “high-end” setup.

HDD0: OCZ Solid 2 Solid State Drive 60gb

Prices on this have continued to drop.  I saved a few bucks getting one from a friend, so it didn’t count against the budget.  So it would raise your price a bit, but certainly worth it for your primary OS drive. The difference is amazing.

HDD1: Seagate 750gb 7200rpm SATA

I had this drive on hand, pulled it from its external Accomodata enclosure and plugged it in as an internal storage drive.  I wanted the higher spin rate when compared to my other external drive.

HDD2: 500gb 5400rpm – USB2.0 External

Also had this drive on hand – will be attaching it for secondary storage and backups. This drive was pulled from my old desktop and placed into an external enclosure.

NIC: ASUS PCE-N13 802.11b/g/n PCIe Wireless Adapter

This wasn’t strictly needed, however I moved to a pure wireless network a couple of years ago.  So despite the mainboard having a build in nic, I added a wireless card so I didn’t have to redo my network setup.  (That and I didn’t want to rerun cables in my house, though I am still debating the merits of returning to a wired setup.)

DVD: LiteOn DVD drive

Old IDE DVD-RW burner.  Saved a few bucks here by not getting a newer one with SATA on it.

Monitor: LG 17” CRT

Old CRT VGA monitor.  Works great and has for years.  I plan on upgrading this to a 22” widescreen LCD later, but once again to keep the build cost down went with what I had.

Host OS: Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium

I also had to purchase Windows for this build.  For starters I was finally moving to a 64-bit setup, my existing versions of Windows wouldn’t run anyways.  Since there was that minor issue, it worked out well to upgrade to Windows 7 at the same time.  I also like to run Virtual Machines for testing, so will be running those inside of Windows.

So as you can see with my component selection, I did stick with some old hardware, but it is fairly minimal.  The burner will be sufficient, but the monitor will be a pain.  After being used to laptop screens and a 22” widescreen LCD at the office, an old 17” monitor that only has a 1024×768 resolution at 75hz will be a bit difficult to work and write on.  However, it will work and will shave at least a hundred off the cost of the build.

My home desktop is several years old.  I don’t game much, so keeping up with the latest and greatest isn’t really on my list of things to do.  If you’re a gamer, you want the latest and greatest because it gives you a richer experience.  And it gives you an edge over the competition; if you’re playing multiplayer. But, I don’t, so it makes little difference to me what my frame rate is.

But, all of that is really not what were here for.  Which is a tale of an upgrade gone wrong.

About a month ago, I got one of those nasty bugs that it seems a computer will get occasionally.  I thought I got it cleaned off.  Maybe I did and what was left was something else, or maybe it was just a tougher bug than I thought.  Either way, my system was compromised.  I spent about 7 hours (over several days) trying to clean the thing off.  I even pulled the hard drive and brought it to work to scan it as a secondary drive (this is useful because most viruses load into memory on start up, but only if they are on the primary/boot drive), but to no avail.  So, rather than waste even more time trying to clean the thing up, I made sure everything was backed up and started fresh with a format and reinstall.

Once I got the reinstall of Windows Vista done, I went straight to Windows 7 using the upgrade that I had bought for it late last year.  The install/upgrade went incredibly smooth.  In previous versions of Windows, it was always preferable to install the full version of the new OS.  Something about the upgrade process just didn’t work well and you would get some nasty errors.  Windows 7s upgrade process is a bit different.  When you do the upgrade, it gives you the option of doing a format and full install.  Pretty awesome.  Except for the part where I reinstalled Vista first…  oops.

One full install later, and I had a brand new install of Windows 7.  My first impressions were very good.  A lot of the feel of Vista that I had gotten used to, but minus some of the clunky-ness.  Alas, it wasn’t to last.  About a week later, I awoke to a login prompt.  That was weird because I don’t normally log out my home pc.  So, it only gets a login when it restarts.  My first thought, of course, was to think that it was Windows Update that had caused the restart.  Until I came home at lunch and found it at a login prompt again.  [Cut through a couple days worth of technical tinkering]

The machine was set to restart on error.  So, everytime it got a system error, it would reboot.  And, after watching the machine for a while, I discovered that it would get a BSOD after about 20 minutes of idle time.  To shorten the story again, I did diagnostics on everything I could think of to figure out what the BSOD was being caused by.  I gave up after about a week and a half of that.  My assumption is that a update from either Windows or from a hardware related driver replaced a system file of some sort or was causing the problem.  A repair install was no help and I couldn’t do a system restore because it would cause a BSOD if you went into the system restore console.  Once again, I was faced with a format and reinstall.

Luckily, Jake was around to talk some sense into me.  I did the reinstall/restore, but I only went as far as Vista this time.  Perhaps at a later date, I’ll try the upgrade again, but until then, I’m sticking with Vista.  After all, it was pretty stable up until I got whatever I got and had to restore it the first time.  And, maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will fix it with the first Windows 7 service pack.

Either way, I think I’ll likely stick with Vista until the machine needs replacing.  Some of the machines hardware wasn’t just barely good enough for Windows 7, so it might be better to just wait until I need a new machine and get Windows 7 on that.

Authors note: Jake suggested that I should write a post here (somewhat jokingly, I believe) as I’ve largely moved on to other things and Jake has taken full control of this site.  So, I thought I’d call him on his joke and surprise him with a post!  Surprise!  Also, if you like, my blog is over at Thatedeguy.