Well I got two weeks left in the semester and on August 18th I will have built my first computer from scratch, now hopefully during the rest of the year I will have build up a series of topics on computer hardware and tutorials on building a computer from scratch that most of you will never have to buy a pre built system again . With that being said this is the final specs of the computer I will be building, after I had a fluke with my floppy drive (had the wrong one).

Keyboard & Mouse

Kensington 64365 Black USB Wired Slim Keyboard w/ Kensington Orbit Optical Trackball 64327 2-Tone 2 Buttons USB + PS/2 Wired TrackBall Orbit Optical Trackball

Although I wouldn't mind getting that sweet LED keyboard the $1500 price tag is a bit to much, although I don't even know what the hell I was thinking when I order that mouse EEEW, I be replacing that with my USB wireless mouse, but I guess I can give it a trial run but the mouse was ugly back then and still is ugly right now.

Tower

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-WW Black/Silver Aluminum Bezel, SECC Chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

As for the tower I was going to to stick with a budget and not spend the same amount of money I did on my Dell XPS notebook, and also I wanted to keep the design simple so if any problems came up over time I would need to spend hours taking it apart. Of course the question rises why I got the see through panel? Simple enough that I can keep an eye on the hardware a lot better, especially since I hand picked each piece myself.

Floppy Drive

Diablotek 1.44MB External USB Floppy Drive

Now this was the mistake that happen, when I first got my floppy drive I didn't read the whole headline and the picture was misleading as it didn't look like a Desktop floppy, instead it was a notebook floppy ($20 down the drain). So after my classmate caught this, I spend my wee hours in the morning looking for one. So I decided I would go with a external floppy for the convenience; however, the next problem was that newegg (where I got most of the hardware) was out and so I spent my time looking for a halfway decent online hardware store, then when I found it I didn't like the fact I had to spend $30 dollars on something that was 10 cheaper on newegg, so I decided to check amazon (yeah not a good choice in buying hardware), and found it for a lot cheaper, so hopefully when it comes sometime next week that it works and I won't have any problems with it.

Hard Drive #1
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3250620AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

When it came to the hard drive I really had to control myself or I would have found the biggest hard drive and got two of them, especially when it comes to Seagate hard drives. Easily enough I went with a combination of speed (7200 RPM), size (250 Gb), and price ($70). So its the best deal around especially since Seagate hard drives are getting cheaper by the months.


Hard Drive #2

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

I installed this hard drive today, and for the most part it was quick and easy to set up as the motherboard and vista recognize it. Just had to spend about a good hour in order for the hard to be initialized, and able to be install programs in it as I had to pike around and find the right file permissions and stuff. I am a bit upset though that this hard drive lost 35Gb of space, didn't look into why do that another time, and of course had to buy a SATA cable since it didn't come with one. Other then those little annoyances it works good, can't wait to start moving stuff over on to the other hard drive to free up some space on the primary one.

Processor & Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 Allendale 2.0GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E4400
BIOSTAR G965 Micro 775(Vista) Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Now the processor and the motherboard were the hardest to figure out since well I am a noob , I could have gone with AMD and saved myself some cash, and of course try something that wasn't Intel. Nonetheless, I like Intel's hardware its just my preference and the price is worth it. Although I considered this another mistake since I didn't really think about that much then, the motherboard could have ruin my building this computer, but again after spending weeks reading and asking questions my motherboard is going to do nicely for what I am building.

DVD/CD-ROM Drive

LITE-ON Black IDE DVD-ROM Drive Model LH-16D1P-185

Need to install software and all that good stuff, nothing really impressive, I don't burn either so the RW+ RW- wasn't really necessary, although I got a few bays to install one in the future.

RAM

A-DATA 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model ADQVE1A16K

With the RAM I knew right off the bat I was going for 2 gigs since I am going to be running vista on this system, however in order for RAM to work properly it has to be compatible with the motherboard and if you look at both you can tell that DD2 800 was what made them compatible. Plus the price was right too.

Monitor

Hanns·G JW-199DPB Black 19" 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor

I knew right off the bat monitors were going to be the most expensive hardware in this build, plus I wanted to try something a little bigger, especially since this computer is going to my parents to replace the Dell they have right and it's hard to read the small print sometime. However, the reason I picked this monitor was that it is vista compatible as well so 2 cool points for that.

Power Supply

APEVIA ATX-CW500WP4 ATX 500W Power Supply

Now the power supply this was a bit of a challange and I might have some compatibility issues with it, but I think it will be figured out when I put it together. The reason I say this is that it's a ATX power supply and my motherboard is micro-atx, although they are from the same line of form factor (ATX), getting the right amount of electricity without frying the motherboard and other hardware. Now usually depending on the build 500-600 watt power supply is usually normal for standard computers, but if you got a high end gaming system expect the power supplies to be in the 700-850 watt range. So with the build I got 500 should be plenty.

So that is my build and I will post pics of it when it is complete for you all to drool over

Graphics Card

XFX PVT84JUDD3 GeForce 8600GT XXX 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card

Installed easily, boosted up my Vista rating from 3.8 to 4.8. Interestingly enough I didn't have to mess with my bios to get this card to work, even though they recommend I turn off my onboard graphics, which I don't have an I was in VGA mode, or I didn't have onboard graphics. I even got a free game out of it, haven't installed it but might later. However, I did have a few problems though the fan is pretty loud, and even when I put my case back together the fan was loud. Wasn't to keen on the fact I had to hook my monitor through an adapter to get this going. So everything works like it should, and so I have to wait to see if it was worth the price tag.

 

 

 

Reply

I don't think an integrated video card is worth drooling over

Reply

Well neither is the price tag for one of them either . since the pc isn't built for gaming I didn't really see the need to have one or a sound card either. As for everything else it is still to drool over, although if I really wanted to and if I had the cash I would most likely have gone all out on it ; quad core, 2-3 TB of hard drive space, 8 gigs of ram and even triple monitor the thing.

Reply

i don't think they'd find Vista easy to use. I recommend you just install XP cuz it's less confusing.

Reply

Well thats the best part about this hardware is that most of it can accept vista, or rather the CPU, motherboard compatible. Since that is the hardware you will really need to be able to accept Vista, and also vista drivers won't be hard to find either if it does come down to needing to update the drivers to all the hardware.

Reply

Windows vista automatically updates all the drivers in your computer hardware. All you need to do is to click on the Windows Update icon in your start menu and every other thing will be fine from there or you can go through the device manager and have windows search for each driver in windows online driver database.

Drivers are never a problem with Windows Vista. I have been using Windows Vista Ultimate for about 3 months now. You might not believe that I rarely use my windows XP Professional even though they are both installed on the same computer.

Reply

Yeah like dre pointed out, the integrated video card is not good at all. I know you are not building the system for gaming or anything like that but if you work in photoshop, etc. a video card is a must. they really are not that expensive since you can get a NVIDIA 8000 series card for like $100. Since you are not gaming, you dont need all the special stuff but you should get a DX10 card if you are going to run Vista. It will increase your performance by a ton since Vista uses pixel shaders for operating systems stuff. Therefore, did you even check to see if vista works with an integrated video card? I really do not know but if it does you will not be able to run the Aero interface which is half the reason you would want to run vista.

Besides the video card, everything else looks good. Seems like it will run fine for what you do and what most people would do too. I probably would have to go with a larger HD and a DVD burner since i do a good amount of video editing. Have fun building it since it is kinda fun even though it will only take you a few minutes (maybe an hour at most).

 

 

 

Reply

Well to give a small update and quite a few people know about this, I was able to get my computer running, but somehow I burn the Ram slots the modules go into. So I sent my motherboard out on Monday hopefully will see a new one on Monday and get it installed. I did get vista installed and by the time I had to reboot my computer the second or third time to make sure sure vista was completely installed thats when I smelled the magic smoke. When I installed vista it took forever to install, of course I never had a chance to see what Aero look liked so I have to wait.

As for installing adobe and all that stuff I won't do it since I do most of my work on a laptop, so right now all this computer is a vista run machine, and as for the video compatibility I can't give you a straight answer until after I install the new motherboard, so you have to wait on that.

Reply

pretty cool comp it will be flying hihg with the stuff your putting in it lol

Reply

I thought I give everyone an update to my built computer, I installed a new hard drive, and a sweet gfx card, and I zip tied all the wires so it looks a bit neater as well.

Hard Drive #2

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

I installed this hard drive today, and for the most part it was quick and easy to set up as the motherboard and vista recognize it. Just had to spend about a good hour in order for the hard to be initialized, and able to be install programs in it as I had to pike around and find the right file permissions and stuff. I am a bit upset though that this hard drive lost 35Gb of space, didn't look into why do that another time, and of course had to buy a SATA cable since it didn't come with one. Other then those little annoyances it works good, can't wait to start moving stuff over on to the other hard drive to free up some space on the primary one.

Graphics Card

XFX PVT84JUDD3 GeForce 8600GT XXX 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card

Installed easily, boosted up my Vista rating from 3.8 to 4.8. Interestingly enough I didn't have to mess with my bios to get this card to work, even though they recommend I turn off my onboard graphics, which I don't have an I was in VGA mode, or I didn't have onboard graphics. I even got a free game out of it, haven't installed it but might later. However, I did have a few problems though the fan is pretty loud, and even when I put my case back together the fan was loud. Wasn't to keen on the fact I had to hook my monitor through an adapter to get this going. So everything works like it should, and so I have to wait to see if it was worth the price tag.

Reply