I'm at the initial "sodding about" phase at the moment, and there's a lot of work to be done. Loads of applications, software, games etc to install, loads of drivers to be added, settings to be changed etc, and all of it is going to wait until my bro has salvaged what data he needs from the rather shiny and lovely primary SATA drive he has promised me.
At the moment, the machine is in a temporary case, using an IDE hard drive from one machine, an IDE CD drive from another, the tower case from a third and a spare cooling fan from a fourth. I suppose you could say I'm temporarily loaning a racehorse the legs from another animal, to see if it can run :-).
Once I get the SATA drive, I'll start from scratch and reinstall everything, and here's why:
The Motherboard I am using uses only one IDE channel, which is fair enough. I mean it's not the 80s anymore, right? The downside is that since I only have two SATA drives, one of which is too small to use as a primary, and the other of which has already been designated a secondary, I have to use two PATA devices on the same channel at the same time, which apparently causes bottlenecking on the PATA bus.
Not only that, but where sata cables are sleek, slim and curvy, IDE "ribbons" are bulky, crumply, ugly, and, let's just face it, they look really bad and attract dust like a magnet. They're difficult to fold around corners of the case, difficult to route round things, and they act like a great big long electronic tarpaulin strung from one side of your case to the other to obstruct air flow.
So the sooner the SATA drive (which uses sleek slim cables) is in there, the better.
Speaking of air flow, my new computer is happily "hooing" (that's the noise it makes, seriously, it's a quiet "Hooooooooo" sound (at 100% RPM and silent at anything less than about 60%) to itself, as I try to see how low I can get the core temp to go.
Considering that the side of the case is off, and the fact that aside from an 80mm fan I balanced on one of the aforementioned IDE cables to cool the chipset (and the PSU fan which has its own job to do), the solitary 120mm fan of my new and sparkly Coolit ECO ALC cooler is the only fan in the case, it is doing a damn good job of holding my CPU at a steady 32 degrees C. The Zalman air cooler in my other (this) computer can only manage 36c, and that's in a cool case surrounded by other fans, on a CPU that is slower by some 400Mhz. Okay, 4 degrees isn't a big difference, but both machines are effectively idling, and apparently it's under heavy load that the ECO struts its stuff.
Of course, my new rig isn't ready to strut its stuff yet. It doesn't have DirectX installed, and it is currently packing a lowly 256mb Geforce 7600GT in its digital pants. A card which would probably not suffice for hardcore gaming these days, even if it weren't damaged, which it is. Having suffered a hefty dose of heat damage a while back, any black screen is now liberally dotted with pretty red, green and blue pixels. I'll replace the 7600 with my GTX260 when I move the machine to its permanent home in the lovely new case I've bought.
Amusingly, the little 50mm (maybe?) fan of the gpu is making far, far noise than the ECO's 120. In fact, since I haven't installed any drivers other than the default, it was only four minutes after the computer booted to desktop for the first time that it lost its bluescreen virginity, with some kind of Nvidia driver error that is apparently popular among later versions of Windows. I don't expect this error to be a problem once the latest drivers are installed of course.
So yeah. I'm not doing anything hugely in depth, but it'd be nice to remember the very first time that my computer went online.
Ciao!
Excuse the dreadful mess, the case is my "It's the only spare case that will take 120mm fans" case.
The camera is my "I'm sorry I've lost my tripod mounting plate" camera.
When the day of the big build comes I will borrow a tripod if needs be and take some better pics :-).
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