My Contribution to Web Junk: 2009

And so the day finally arrived when all the components of my new rig arrived and I could set it all up. Right from the very beginning though I ran into problems! My camera battery was flat so I couldn’t take photos during the build… I couldn’t wait, so I built it without taking pictures.

I proceeded to check that everything was in order and the right parts, and then got stuck in.

Opening up the case, I saw for the first time how attractive having a black interior in a chassis is. It really is aesthetically appealing and makes ones rig look more “professional”. It might not be for everyone, but I really like this Antec 900 Two chassis

So first up was the mobo. I unpacked the MSI 790GX board and screwed in all 9 spacer screws. I Popped the mobo in and screwed it in. I sat in awe for a few seconds staring at the chassis. This tower makes a full ATX mobo look small!

Dropping the AMD Phenom II X2 550 CPU in took less time than writing this sentence, but the CPU cooler would prove to be a whole different situation! Let’s just say that if a part is designed for both Intel and AMD sockets, it’s not going to fit either perfectly. Believe it or not I ended up taking a hammer to the clip in order to get it to fit… After attaching the relevant spacers, screws and thermal paste, I realized that the clip was not going to attach on both sides very easily. Using virtually my entire bodyweight and sacrificing some skin on my fingers I soldiered through the excruciating pain of pressing down on a 1mm thick steel plate in an attempt to secure the clip. Alas, it would not fit.

So after wiping the blood and tears away, I decided to have some revenge on the sanctimonious clip and beat it with a hammer to alter its shape a little. Finally I managed to get it to fit onto the AM3 socket. A word of advice for people reading this, if someone tells you that an AM2 or AM2+ socket is “virtually identical” to the AM3 socket and that a cooler designed for AM2 will fit…. Tell them to fuck off and die. The Gigabyte G-Power II Pro is clearly not designed to work on AM3 sockets, although it can be forced against its will.

Ok, so after this traumatic experience I was reeling in pain and needed a break. So I had some dinner. I swear on my life that glass of wine was the best glass I’ve ever had!

Right… back to the PC. Next up was the RAM. Wow, I had no idea that the Corsair Dominator heat sinks were that big. Once seated they are a mere 1.5mm away from the CPU cooler. So that’s the 4GB of DDR3 1600Mhz RAM installed. Nice!

Having hard drive cages that are removed through the front of the chassis are awesome. In previous chassis I’ve had close encounters with having to contort drives past graphics cards or onboard heat sinks on the mobo to remove the drives. Remove 8 little screws though, and the hard drive cage slides out effortlessly through the front of the chassis. I installed my two drives (a 1TB and a 400GB) in bays 4 and 6 to leave a nice gap in between them for airflow. My new 1.5TB will go into bay 2 or 3 when it arrives.

The PSU I bought is a Cooler Master eXtreme Power series, which conveniently is black too. This went in without problems too. I must say however, even with longer than usual cables, some of them are still a little shorter than I’d have liked, but that’s due to the size of the chassis, no fault of Cooler Master’s.

Lastly it was time to connect all the I/O cables and fan power. The Antec chassis has a neat way of hiding all your spare cabling by making a small gap between the back chassis wall and the mounting plate of the mobo. Feeding all your spare cabling through the holes provided, there are little harnesses to tie them down. This leaves the interior of your rig looking very neat.

As this rig is a still a work in progress, the graphics card and hard drive are still to come, but for now there are enough components for the rig to run.

After throwing away the thousands of boxes lying all over my lounge floor I plugged in all the cables and booted up into the BIOS. CPU core temp was 22deg and chassis temp was 25deg. Cool! Excuse the pun.

My next installment will be about installing and setting up of Windows 7 64 bit and all the drivers and applications.

After that will be updates as my new parts arrive such as new monitor, graphics card and BluRay drive.