The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Oman7,

If you ever need one as I often do, you'll know real quick what one is! ROFLMSOAO!!

Russ :>)

 

I personally am glad I havent lately seen a machine so old i needed floppy support. I like boot from USB support and formatting them for live disks. Does that make me weird?
My servers card reader has floppy and my spare is at my day job since the "real" IT dept. didnt have one to re-install machine code on an old vision system i maintain.

 

I don't know why servers still rely on floppies but some desktop boards still do too for BIOS updates, however most can now do some sort of firmware instant flash now.

Russ, do you know where I can get bulk 3.5" floppies I need roughly 700,000 to backup my new Terabyte drive coming. Could you imagine doing a backup with floppies these days it would take you a week just sitting at the machine 24/7 to do your backup. LOL

I got the new Gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H rev 2.2 board Friday and replaced my ASRock M3A790GXH-128M. I have the AMD 545 x2 with G.Skill Ripjaws 1066 (7-7-7-21) memory on it which the ASRock worked well at but didn’t like the memory OC’d much higher than the standard rate. I haven’t got my 1t SATA3 drive yet but decided to throw the new board in my system. When I was putting the GA-880GA-UD3H in the heat sink for the NB popped loose which I surprised about so I had to pull a Russ and remove the heat sink, clean off the overly hardened T-tape without scratching the aluminum, and re-grease it. So I got everything back together started to setup the BIOS I got to the memory configuration and unlike older boards I didn’t have to change the settings for the RAM, not only that it automatically OC’d the memory to 1333 (sweet!). I was worried about stability and after booting into Seven and updating all drivers I found it was very stable and much more snappy with the RAM OC’d. I can hardly wait for the new 1T SATAIII drive. I haven't played with the USB yet but I'm sure I'll be much more happy with it too, especially now that I have USB3 as well.

 

I know everyone says flashing from Windows is stupid but Gigabyte have made it so easy I just don't care anymore

 

Haven't done it myself, but I'd probably do it if it called for it

 

Don't you need a Floopy Drive to Update your BIOS

 

I flash from windows all the time and it is no problem unlike the past when you could easily corrupt the firmware.

@rick
NO, almost never now, there are very few boards that don't have a flash tool embedded.

 

Steve, I gave the promo another shot today, it worked, got the reader and the Verb's, saved myself 32 bucks, Thanks again.

 

Fantastic Fred, I'm so glad it worked out, what a great deal!
Stevo

 

Estuansis,

While the risk of flashing the bios in windows is not really that high, the consequences of failure are very bad, because it will render the motherboard useless if it fails! Of course you could say the same thing about having a power failure in the middle of a bios flash, which would also render the motherboard useless as well. I just wish they would make socketed bios chips standard on all motherboards, so you don't have to ship the entire motherboard!

I've never flashed the bios through Windows, so I don't know how it would affect the Dual bios in my motherboard. I have done it from my 1GB Memorex Travel drive, which is the only memory stick I own that's bootable.

Russ

 

Mr-Movies,

That would make a stack of floppies roughly about 8,500 feet, over 1.8 miles high! Big Closet Required! I can only imagine what it would take to keep that many floppies in numerical order! LOL!! That or asking you to re-insert disk #39,472 when you just finished disk #48,692! Worse yet, discovering one missing or defective! ROFLMSOAO!!

Russ :>)

 

I finally installed the Kaze-Master. I love it Fan #1 is the 1900 Scythe. Fan #2 is the 1800Rpm Coolit Fan. I keep #1 a higher pressure, that way #2 is free to blow outward. Completely logical. Basically, #1 needs to keep up with #2.

I didn't do the northbridge. With how the heat pipe/heat sink is mounted, I'm not interested in removing the entire board, to release the clips. Perhaps when I upgrade to 1090t, I won't need such a large NB voltage, thereby lowering the temperature

Yes, my wall needs a bath

 

I think you need another burner! Maybe you could get a removable as you might not fit one more in the tower.

I just sold my LG BD-HDDVD burner like yours if I would of known you needed one I would of held on to it. LOL

That's a fancy controller, very nice and the price was nice I may have to go that route too.

 

Four burners!! damn omeg lol, ever run all 4 at once?

Anyway, some of you guys might remember my first build a couple of years ago, I had help doing it cause of course I never attempted it before, doing it by myself I would have crapped my pants, I had a friend help me at home and Russ helped with the finishing touches by phone. This PC build was for my kids, it turned out to be a great PC as all the kids use it, it's quiet and stays cool and is twice as fast as my crappy old timer HP I have been using for like 5 years now, and I bought it used, and of course after that first build the biggest thing I learned I would never ever buy another store bought PC.

Well I'm finally financially ready to build one for myself, I have been saving for more than a year now, and the wife gave me permission to go ahead lol, you married guys know what I mean, it works good for us, as she once said if I gave you a hundred grand you would blow it in a month, I said wrong Hon, I would blow it in a week.

Russ helped me pick out all the parts as he did before, mostly because I really would not know what the hell I'm ordering, and am glad he did, some of the parts I picked that looked interesting to me were either overboard or uncompatible, plus he saved me close to 300 bucks, I'm no where near tech savvy like you guys and never will be, but picking up little things from this thread over the years I have learned more than I would ever have dreamed of.

I placed the order in yesterday, I would love to say here it is boys and girls, eat your hearts out lol, this build is nothing like most of you guys have but I think it will last me for the rest of my years hopefully, bieng over 60 it's not forever. I'm not a gamer and never will be, this build seems like it will be fast enough for my needs, I do love my audio and video and it looks capable for those needs, I'll post the parts in my next post if anybody is interested, I'm excited.

And last, to Russ, thanks big time, as he's always there no matter what my needs or questions, no matter how stupid my questions he always comes thru, both of us bieng raised in the same New York & Philly area of course we have a lot in common.

 

Here's the Build


Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119106

Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128444

CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103849

PSU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171052

Ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231303

Cooler
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103065

HDD, primary
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

HDD, secondary
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

Video Card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102855

DVD Writers, 2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106335

Fans, 2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811999346

Paste
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=thermal_compound-_-35-186-020-_-Product

Cables
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ..._cables_for_hard_drive-_-12-816-061-_-Product

Reader
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...MC-040811-Index-_-CardReaders-_-20223113-L09D

 

Very nice, I hate to say it but Russ actually did a great job! :O

That baby should smoke you'll be very happy with it and it won't be your last system either in ten years you'll still be around and be buying a new 24 core system.

That MB is the same one I just bought and is very sweet. You'll want to put the ram in the back channel slots as they will perform better there, the manual suggests that if you read it. That would be slots 2 & 4 on this MB. It saw my Ripjaws memory and OC'd by 6.6x right off and was blazing stable too so I didn't have to play with the memory settings as I've had to do so many times on previous boards.

I really like the case he picked out for you and may have to consider one myself even though I don't need it at the moment. The PS his picked has plenty of amps for the 12v & 5v rails I prefer dual 12v rails or more but at 52a on 12v you should be fine.

Your letting Oman7 down though only two ROM's shame on you.... LOL

 

I have my reasons for multiple burners. And yes, I've ran 7 at a time I pulled the iHES108 BD-Rom to accommodate the Kaze-master. It began introducing artifacting into the video stream. Wouldn't be the first lite-on drive to do that to me either! I plan on making it a real time reader eventually. It can play movies, but it can no longer be trusted for copying with a flaw like that one.

 

Not much I disagree with in that build. The PSU's maybe not ideal as I see a few reviewers cite it as being noisy, and lacking a fan controller (which is fairly typical of CM units), for a lightweight system like this I would probably have said a 430W Earthwatts or Nexus unit would do better. I'm not too keen on sapphire's non-ref graphics cards now I realise they're bottom of the food chain for build quality, but the 4670's reviews don't seem quite as bad as the others. Other than that though it's a pretty solid build.

 

I've had good luck with Sapphire cards even though they aren't top end, in fact have had more problems with ASUS video cards which are supposed to be high end. I had one of their top of the line NVIDIA cards that if it flexed even a little bit installing the card if would crap out so I ended up going through a couple before just saying enough. Then another top of the line ASUS the heat sinks kept falling off and I had to drill & tap the heat sink so that I could screw it down.

 

Double post sorry. The site crapped on me I then brought the link back up and the post wasn't there so I posted again and they both showed up. Who would figure?