ChanMan Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 For those who are geeky enough and may want to read about my recent PC rebuild..... (Just in case you're a geek, Homz... it's long, I know, but I broke into smaller paragraphs for you..... :)! ) Ok... so yes... I used to do all of my forum-ing on an Alienware ALX liquid cooled SLI rig. I say used to, because last week the chipset fan on my Asus A8N motherboard finally died. Not a shock that it went out... more that it lasted this long. Well... I couldn't find a replacement that would work on my board (the south bridge is located between the 2 video cards... space is kinda tight.) I was running a single core anyway- AMD FX 57- and was pretty overdue for an upgrade. So I hit Newegg... I find a nice dual core CPU (Core2Duo E8500 3.16GHz), a reasonable MB (GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P) and a new GPU (EVGA-GeForce GTX260). I was still under my randomly chosen and self imposed limit of $500, so I went ahead and got 4 Gigs of Ram (OCZ Reaper 2x2) If you've never done business with Newegg.... I ordered the parts at 8:00 on Wed. night, they arrived Friday. Did I mention shipping was free?? SO.... Friday afternoon I start gutting the old ALX... My goal is to get the pump/resevoir/radiator, MB/CPU/GPUs all out in one piece without draining the liquid..... which, with some very slight reforming of the upper drive cage, I was actually able to do. It now sits in the box all my Newegg stuff came in. VERY challenging! The rebuild is pretty easy stuff... the hardest part is getting the stock cooler on the CPU. Now... (those of you who build PCs are likely way ahead of me already) .... I go to hook up the PSU. I have a 510W Power&Cooling, which is supposed to power everything up just fine. Oh... but where did this extra 8 pin CPU power connection come from??? So, while I could get the board to light up... I couldn't get the system to post. Not enough juice to the "low voltage" CPU no matter how I tweaked and adaptored and plugged and unplugged. Crap. So It's Friday night and I need a PSU... off to Best Buy I go. They have 2 that are over 500W... a 650 "Green Earth" PSU and an 850W Black Widow. Right... so I take the 850W home and hook it all up. Fires up.. posts out... it's all good. I hit the sack, and figure I'll get the drives up in the morning. I had a RAID 0 in the ALX... so I figure I'll try to bring the RAID array back and see if I can just freak out XP with all the new hardware, but be right back to where I was. /chuckle ok... that was NOT happening. I've done it before on servers, but not on a PC. In theory it should be roughly the same... but the new BIOS wasn't doing anything but seeing them as unformatted drives. Not an issue, I whip out my original-launch-day XP CD, format one of the 80 Gig drives and run with it. Goes through the entire bluescreen install phase, gets to the "starting Windows" and bluescreens. pci.sys. Crap. But... I am a resourceful guy... and I recall that there is an upgrade path from W2K Pro to XP... so out comes my W2K CD... and sure enough, it goes right through, np. I decide to install the video and network drivers and such before the upgrade. For the record, the EVGA installer quit out saying only XP and Vista were supported, so I ran the 32-bit XP setup and they installed... and worked.... just fine in W2kPro. So, the box is pretty good right now, lets go ahead and upgrade.... put in the XP CD... all the way to starting Windows and BSODs. pci.sys again. Crap. So off to Best Buy I go, again, to get Vista Home Premium. And while I am there, I go ahead and get a TB drive. Screw the budget... screw the 80G drives... screw all that old stuff. Get the drive installed last night, Vista installed on it (in record time!), all the drivers updated and CoD5 installed. You know... to test it. So this is NOW being typed on my new 3.16GHz dual core, 4G, TB drive Vista box! (in an Alienware ALX case.) If you have read this far, bless you! Thanks so much for reading my little tale of "how I spent my weekend". I now return you to your regularly scheduled Forum.... I am off to continue re-installing all my stuff.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elantric Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 Fun Now go here to learn how to install OSX http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page gigabyte drivers http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.6#Gigabyte Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChanMan Posted May 24, 2009 Author Share Posted May 24, 2009 Fun Now go here to learn how to install OSX http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page No' date=' but thanks for the offer. Perhaps another time. Thanks for the link though! gigabyte drivers http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.6#Gigabyte Very Interesting site as well. Thanks again for the links! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slogold Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 I've been there,done that,moved on and bought a DELL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
callen3615 Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 Very nice. Ive always wanted to do that. Liquid cooled is awesome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Homz Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 Not short enough. Homz friendly posts are: * no more then 3 lines * no polysyllabic words * limited to one theme. I.E. "My dog has fleas." is this about the dog or the fleas. * posts should be more clever then informative. This thread for example has to much information to be clever. * poking fun of right wing nut jobs is always a homz pleaser. * bad grammar and bad spelling always makes me feel better so try not to overly police your typos. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky4 Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 I bet you can play a mean game of solitaire on it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChanMan Posted May 24, 2009 Author Share Posted May 24, 2009 So far Vista has been fine. Good, actually. I can handle the constant "did you click this" pop ups... And yes.... it plays Solitaire well. Among other things. Sorry Homz. I tryd, so I shud get uh "A" becuase I fell gud abowut how I did. /chuckle. It was a lot of fun. If you've never built your own system, ya oughta... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Homz Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 So far Vista has been fine. Good' date=' actually. I can handle the constant "did you click this"pop ups... And yes.... it plays Solitaire well. Among other things. Sorry Homz. I tryd, so I shud get uh "A" becuase I fell gud abowut how I did. /chuckle. It was a lot of fun. If you've never built your own system, ya oughta... [/quote'] Built several in the mid 90's. I was a co-owner of a technology company that delt with cell phones, computers, and that often forget forefather the pager. I realize that's a universe away at this point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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