Building a New PC – Part II
- June 12th, 2010
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The next step in putting together my new desktop PC was to install the HDD in the drive-bay, which was made easier than normal due to the removable HDD cage.
Ready To Install
HDDCage
Once the HDD was installed, I un-boxed the motherboard and processor. I chose the ASUS P6T as the MoBo due to it’s general tweakability once it was up and running. And I am fitting it with the new-ish Intel Core i7-930 (Bloomfield). This processor sports 8 threads through 4 cores at a clock speed of 2.8 GHz. This was about as fast I could go without spending another few hundred dollars.
Seating the processor in the socket was the most nerve-racking experience of the whole build. I was handling such an important (and expensive) component to the PC that I did NOT want to mess it up. I had watched some videos on-line of other people demonstrating how to seat this specific processor in the motherboard and so I had a good idea of what to expect. I learned that while seating a processor, it takes a fair amount of pressure to close the lever that locks the processor into place. What I did NOT learn, was that while pressing on the lever, the pins in the socket make all sorts of bad noises while the processor is pressing them down into their final resting position.
Mobo
Processor
I used a little rubbing alcohol on the heat-sink to remove the stock thermal paste and replaced it with Arctic Silver in an attempt to get the lowest CPU temps I could with stock parts. Snapping the heat-sink into place was rather straight forward. No problems there.
Now came the time to slip in the DVD burner. I saved quite a few bucks by not going with a Blu-Ray drive (which still run around $150-$200) and instead stuck with a $25 DVD burner. If I need to watch Blu-Ray movies, I’ll do so on the PS3!
The memory I chose to shove into this MoBo was 6GB (3 x 2GB) of G.Skill DDR3 1600. This RAM received decent reviews on Newegg.com and performs relatively stable under slight over-clocks.
The last component to go in was The video card – a middle of the road ATI Radeon HD 5770. Nothing amazing here but more than enough power to smoothly play any of my games, and cheap enough that in a year from now I won’t feel bad about buying another card.
ATI Radeon HD 5770
Once the video card had been installed in the MoBo, I mounted the MoBo back into the case, plugged everything in (and there were a TON of wires floating around) and fired her up. The fan LED’s lit up, the fans were spinning and everything seemed to be alright. I guess I did everything correctly! Whew… Installing windows 7 was real simple. I didn’t bother to partition my HDD so I didn’t need to format it or anything. Once windows was finished installing, it was time to install many GB’s of games and favorite software. 
Complete!
