In part one below I talked about my reasons for upgrade and gave you a nice list of parts so you could order to build your own, well in this part I'll talk briefly about the construction and show you some photos of it.
Firstly let me tell you I have been running the new
reasonably priced PC in place of my 2006 iMac for about a week now, so far I am very pleased with it, it's performance is in excess of what I thought but thats fine, you can never have too much of a good thing right?
As an example, one of the games I play is called
World of Warcraft. In a particularly busy area of the game called Shattarath I used to get about 15 video frames per second on my iMac, now on the new PC I get about 61! Opening windows and navigating applications in Vista is very snappy. Opening a new document in Word 2007, it's up and ready in about 1 second.
Anyway on to the construction. As always I take precautions. I treat all the components with care and always handle the motherboard, processor and memory modules whilst wearing an anti-static wrist band.
Static from your body can damage sensitive electronics and whilst the damage may not always be apparent straight away, 6 months down the line you may be wondering why your PC is not booting up one morning!
Above. Here are the components prior to assembly. Compared to 6 or 7 years ago there are far less components used in todays PC's. No separate sound card, network card, floppy drive etc. Less parts to fail and comparatively cheaper.
Above. Here is one of the 3.5 inch hard drive bays which slide out. I installed two 500gb SATA drives and configured them in a raid 1 mirror configuration. Should one hard drive fail the system should continue running until I replace the faulty disk. Notice the soft 'rubber' mounting grommets and long screws. This isolates the vibration from the disk and stops it passing to the rest of the PC case.
Above. The disk is mounted in to the case using its quick release slide rails. The disks are mounted side ways so the connectors face you as you take off the side of the case. You'll see this better in another photo.
Above. The Antec case comes with a fairly decent power supply installed. Here is the blurb from the side of the PSU. A decent PSU is important but I think a lot of people go overboard on the required total wattage of the PSU. I checked before I purchased the case/PSU by inputting all my components in to this
website which checks what wattage PSU you should need. Mine came out about 250w.
Above. A huge bundle of connectors comes attatched to the PSU!
Above. The case comes with a large 120cm fan installed. This is driven from an inline power connector and has a 3 position switch for speed. I'm currently running mine on the low setting. Its quiet.
Above. Here is the specification of the processor. 3.0Ghz, dual core and 64 bit. These are figures you would only have dreamt about 5 years ago.
Above. I've fitted the motherboard in to the case here. Make sure you install the correct amount of brass stand-off pillars to the side of the case so that they line up with the holes in your motherboard. I use a magnetic screwdriver (Make your own from a standard screwdriver and a strong magnet; run it in one direction only along the shaft several times) to put the screws in, only do them up partially at first until you are sure it all alligns nicely. Cables are only 'roughed' in at this stage. This is where I made my first mistake, see below!
Above. In theory, once the CPU is carefully aligned and installed in the CPU socket, the fan and heatsink assembly simply clips in to the holes in the motherboard with four nice 'clicks'. Hmmm, not in my case, and doing a quick search on the internet, not for many others.
I had to remove the motherboard and use a fair amount of force to ensure the heatsink would 'fix' to the motherboard with the 4 snap-through mountings. As you can see above the motherboard is actually bent by the amount of force pushing down on the CPU to make a good thermal contact. I reassured myself that this was alright by reading some blurb off the Intel website that this kind of bend is fine! /gulp.
Above. Here I have started to fasten the cabling in place. I used a round style IDE cable for the DVD drive. The idea here is to allow as much air flow through the case, it also looks nicer.
Above. I made a slight mistake when I bought the motherboard. If I'd got the deluxe version it would have come with a BIOS which supported 2
internal disks to be setup in a raid 0 or raid 1 array.
As it happens the model I have does support raid but only from one of the internal SATA connections
and the eSATA connector on the rear of the case, kind of odd.
Anyway, I made a trip to PC World and picked up this 2 port Belkin raid card. It works fine and added about £30 to the total cost. If I could have waited I would have probably ordered a Adaptec card from Misco but I just had to get this rig finished!
Above. Keeping the cabling tidy and out of the way aids air flow inside the case.
Above. Here is the rear of the case. 6 x SATA connections, firewire, gigabit ethernet,
eSATA connector and a plethora of audio connections. The dual output of the Nvidia Geforce 8800GT can be seen to the right.
Above. The finished PC. Probably an hour and half of work without rushing it.
In Part 3 I'll talk about the operating system and speed etc. Watch this space.
