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!

Now comes the fun part! I have decided to build a PC from the ground up. And I will be documenting its creation! Granted this may only be exciting to me, but nevertheless, I will continue.

To start, I bought an Antec Nine Hundred from Newegg.com. This case is awesome. It sports a 120-mm fan in the rear, two 120-mm fans in the front (located behind the HDD bays to help cool them) and one 200-mm fan on the top of the case. There is also a mount for an optional side-panel fan and a mount for one more optional fan behind the HDD cage, so if desired, I can add TWO extra fans, but I think for now four fans is plenty. All fans have a 3-speed switch to allow for different levels of cooling and are LED lighted. The case also has front-facing placement of two USB ports, one firewire port, mic-in and speaker-out.

Click to enlarge:

Antec Nine Hundred Outside

Antec Nine Hundred Inside

The downside to this case is that it doesn’t come with it’s own power supply as most high end cases do. I made a trip to my local Fry’s Electronics and bought an Antec TP-650. This PS is 650 watts (duh) with ATX 12v version 2.3 using 4 +12v rails. It’s also semi-modular so I don’t have all those extra unused cables lying around the inside of the case. I wanted to stay with Antec for the PS because the case is designed for a bottom mounting power supply and so an Antec model would ensure the highest level of compatibility.  The cooling is helped by a 120-mm fan.  The PS was the first component of this build – one down, many to go!

Right from the get-go, Sony had built the Playstation 3 with support for third-party operating systems. So after a little research, I decided to install Yellow Dog Linux on my console. From what I gather, certain versions of YD have been created specifically for use on the Sony console.

The install process was not without problems. After installation of the bootloader, the Linux installation process would freeze on me every time. I re-downloaded the ISO file(s), re-burned the images to DVD’s and rebooted the console at least a dozen times and nothing was helping. Finally, after much time spent researching my issues online, I found out my only problem was that the USB keyboard I was using (Logitech G15) was causing I/O errors during installation. I switched it out with an old USB keyboard and retried the installation process and everything worked like a charm!

I haven’t had much time to spend with the OS yet, mostly because it is a pain in the rear to unplug the mouse from the PC and put it into the console, move my keyboard out of the way to make room for the old one – and finally, the PS3 only has 256MB of RAM and so Linux isn’t quite the fastest OS I have ever used!

Much more stuff to go over in the coming days though! A little patience is all I need.

I have just began to read the book and am still within the first 100 pages but already I am starting to remember commands I haven’t used in several years! I cannot wait to get further through this book.