tjgraf
03-29-2010, 08:30 PM
Greetings all,
I told Wise Monkey and Ricky Tick that I was going to do this way back before Thanksgiving. Well, I built my first one just after Thanksgiving for my son's wife:
Location: West Virgina
Completed late 11/2009
OS: Windows 7 Home 64 bit
Motherboard brand: Gigabyte GA P55 UD3R
Processor: i5-750
Video card: EVGA GTX 260
System memory: 4 gig GSkill
Hard drive: WD Black 640GB SATA
CD drive: Sony Optiarc
Ikonik Zaria brushed aluminum case.
Power Supply: Corsair TX750
Very pleased with how this turned out. Have bought everything from Newegg and couldn't be more pleased with fantastic service from them. Ikonik case looks super. You will never go back to Dell after building one of these beauties.
But I started reading about fan noise and cooling airflow efficiency. So the next 4 cases I used, I switched to Antec Solo cases. The next 4 got 1000W Rosewill Power supplies purchased on black friday for $100 each. . I put two CD drives in my wifes computer (12/2009) for a backup. She had a glitchy one in her old Dell, so this put that issue to bed. My techie son got a dual 640 GB raid 1 mirror on his which I built in January of this year. My brother got a basic version of the above setup, which he is happy with, also built in January. For my box that I just finished yesterday 3/28/2010, I gave myself a 1 TB WD Black raid 1 mirror. I used a Zalman CNPS 10X extreme on mine. Overkill? Sure. But I had to try an alternate CPU cooler. This one was huge, and barely fit my case, but it did fit and it is super quiet.
Of all that equipment, I had only one failure. For my box, one of the 1 TB drives was DOA, and Newegg replaced it quickly without incident.
When setting up your machine BIOS, be sure to select AHCI as the drive type if you are loading win 7 64 bit. It just works.
I'm buying parts for a 6th machine now, for another son up in PA. He will get the GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3 I've seen written up recently with the faster SATA and USB. I've read that this one will work well with an SSD. The Gigabyte boards all have the dual BIOS that allows you to flash upgrade your BIoS safely. The way Gigabyte has you do it, via a download from their website using a flash drive is really pretty easy, and worked well on all 5 machines. Very impressed, that a newbie like me could figure this out.
Be sure to read the commentary in Newegg closely to really find out what equipment is worth buying. What a terrific service these people have. No wonder they get so much business. They just know how to take care of people.
Thanks again to all who commented and helped.
I told Wise Monkey and Ricky Tick that I was going to do this way back before Thanksgiving. Well, I built my first one just after Thanksgiving for my son's wife:
Location: West Virgina
Completed late 11/2009
OS: Windows 7 Home 64 bit
Motherboard brand: Gigabyte GA P55 UD3R
Processor: i5-750
Video card: EVGA GTX 260
System memory: 4 gig GSkill
Hard drive: WD Black 640GB SATA
CD drive: Sony Optiarc
Ikonik Zaria brushed aluminum case.
Power Supply: Corsair TX750
Very pleased with how this turned out. Have bought everything from Newegg and couldn't be more pleased with fantastic service from them. Ikonik case looks super. You will never go back to Dell after building one of these beauties.
But I started reading about fan noise and cooling airflow efficiency. So the next 4 cases I used, I switched to Antec Solo cases. The next 4 got 1000W Rosewill Power supplies purchased on black friday for $100 each. . I put two CD drives in my wifes computer (12/2009) for a backup. She had a glitchy one in her old Dell, so this put that issue to bed. My techie son got a dual 640 GB raid 1 mirror on his which I built in January of this year. My brother got a basic version of the above setup, which he is happy with, also built in January. For my box that I just finished yesterday 3/28/2010, I gave myself a 1 TB WD Black raid 1 mirror. I used a Zalman CNPS 10X extreme on mine. Overkill? Sure. But I had to try an alternate CPU cooler. This one was huge, and barely fit my case, but it did fit and it is super quiet.
Of all that equipment, I had only one failure. For my box, one of the 1 TB drives was DOA, and Newegg replaced it quickly without incident.
When setting up your machine BIOS, be sure to select AHCI as the drive type if you are loading win 7 64 bit. It just works.
I'm buying parts for a 6th machine now, for another son up in PA. He will get the GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3 I've seen written up recently with the faster SATA and USB. I've read that this one will work well with an SSD. The Gigabyte boards all have the dual BIOS that allows you to flash upgrade your BIoS safely. The way Gigabyte has you do it, via a download from their website using a flash drive is really pretty easy, and worked well on all 5 machines. Very impressed, that a newbie like me could figure this out.
Be sure to read the commentary in Newegg closely to really find out what equipment is worth buying. What a terrific service these people have. No wonder they get so much business. They just know how to take care of people.
Thanks again to all who commented and helped.