How hard could it be? (building a computer)

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Postby ProHandyman on Tue May 15, 2007 10:54 pm

I would HIGHLY suggest a rear case exhaust fan! largest that will fit... low to mid CFM. ;-)

A little tidy up on the wires, and good to go!

BTW, will be poting some more pics to my build gallery in the next few days.
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Postby witchy on Wed May 16, 2007 8:21 am

this ones from a while ago now but befor i gave it to my brother i put 2 good fans in and sorted the wires a bit. it runs great. i took those 2 pics befor it was complete for some reason. lol probly so i wouldnt forget.
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Postby ProHandyman on Wed May 16, 2007 11:23 am

:P :lol:
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Postby witchy on Wed May 30, 2007 1:17 pm

so now that my first comouter is almost 2 months old im thinking im going to upgrade to a raid array not exactly sure whcih right now think ill start with 0 and work my way up to 0 +1. And aslo add a second 8800gts grafix card to try out the sli feature of the Mother board. And sence all this new stuff will most likley be to hot im going with a full tower case instead of the mid tower i have now. this is the case ill most likley get.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16811124123
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Postby ProHandyman on Thu May 31, 2007 12:00 pm

I can help you with your RAID choices. Depends on what you are looking for: speed, security, speed and security (though nothing replaces a good back-up).

I run RAID 0 on my machine. My hard drives have good warranties, case is properly cooled, and I take regular (well, I try!) backups, including images for bare iron recovery. SPEED in loading and saving is the game here.

RAID 1 gives you the SECURITY of having an hard drive crash, but won't save your butt if your nailed by a virus or you do something stupid! It is also SLOWER then just having a single drive.

I've only had a HDD crash once, and had a "bare iron image" that was just 2 weeks old available, so no great loss. I also keep all my documents, etc on a seperate drive which has regular back-ups taken also. Any really important documents you could be burning to DVD-RW, etc.

Unless your an AVID gamer playing at resolutions beyond 1600x1200 with all the eye candy on, the need for 2 8800gts in SLI is a waste of your precious money! The other would be using a 30" or bigger wide screen display that requires dual DVI hookups, but even then the cards would be running seperately, not in SLI (I may be wrong about the SLI thing)

Remember that adding a few more fans, hard drives, and a power hungry video card is going to neccesitate a power supply upgrade too! 650-800 watts would not be out of the realm!

As far as a case.... what is your budget? There are some great full size cases that lend themselves to constant hardware upgrades, and cool very well! I love my CM Stacker, and of course Lian-li, SilverStone, Apevia, and a number of other well built cases. Looks can be deceiving... just because it looks cool, and has a zillion fans doesn't mean it will cool properly! You also want 120mm fans over all other sizes. I've started to switch to aluminium or aluminium combination cases for my main, constantly changing rig. My existing Antec now weighs almost as much as I do, and that is NOT a good thing!
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Postby witchy on Thu May 31, 2007 4:41 pm

ya i read all that about raid so i know what they all do just making up my mind is the tricky part. and scene im only doing it for the experiace of having done it ill go cheep and fast. and the softwear that comes with asus mb will let me change arrays without loosing anything. And as far as the card. ya i know but, i do game alot and that will also be for experiance. The case i have linked has 2 big fans in it and room for a big one in the back so it seams it will cool well. this is the case i want but the price is insane. http://www.xoxide.com/zalman-fatal1ty-fc-ze1.html
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Postby ProHandyman on Thu May 31, 2007 8:00 pm

Well, I've found it for $319! but I agree... the Lian-li's and silverstone tenjmin are cheaper.
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Postby witchy on Fri Jun 01, 2007 7:58 am

Yay back to windows xp. vista was just not any fun and it kept getting more and more annoying. So with having to re install windows anyways setting up the raid array ( which went really easy) I put xp back on. It seams nice to be home.
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Postby ProHandyman on Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:40 pm

Sorry to hear you had problems, but like XP in it's infancy, Vista has some serious issues. XP is well polished now, and there are mods you can install to give you many of the 3d oos and ahhhs of Vista!
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Postby witchy on Fri Jun 01, 2007 10:46 pm

no im pretty happy without the oos and ahhs. I figured id go back but i just wanted to see what it was like. they only let ya play so long at the comouter store befor ya start gettin looks so i had to install it to really get a feel for it. and unles they make some huge changes in organizing it, I cant see changing to it. Just moving a file is a huge pain in the butt. And forget resizing lots of images at once easily. unless of course you are planning to email them.
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Postby witchy on Tue Jul 17, 2007 8:31 am

so its been almost 3 months for the new puter and it runs great. But of course its time to upgrade. So Iv added a second 8800gts video card. and setting up sli was very easy with this asus mother board. pretty much i downloaded the latest video drivers for my video card, uninstalled the old driver, shut down and installed new card ( very tight fit in this case) then restarted it and installed the latest driver. and it saw the second card and took me right to the enable for sli. crazy easy for a noobie even. I know the wires are still ugly but it rocks!! and if you happen to drool a bit to much and break your key board im test driving the dinovo edge keyboard from logitech.http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices/192&cl=us,en the metal under the wrists seams nice its always cool. dont know why but it feels good lol. and its sooooo pretty :wink:
and the beast :D

Image

Newegg.com for both of these keyboard was much less there than any place else. But i guess there isnt really any place else to shop for computer stuff. silly me :oops:
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Postby ProHandyman on Tue Jul 17, 2007 9:25 am

Wow! From total newbie to sli monster builder! :P Have to have you over to my place for a "wire looming" and routing class! :lol:

I find that ZipZoomFly and a few others depending on what you need are all good resources. One will carry what the other doesn't, or stock may be available at one and not the other. I have a list of about 10 fav e-tailers (course the Egg $2k preferred customer/wholesaler account doesn't hurt either)!
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Postby witchy on Tue Jul 17, 2007 10:01 am

lol as much as i buy from them i bet i could easily get one of those accounts. humm i should really check on that.
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Postby witchy on Sun Oct 28, 2007 12:23 pm

I never did end up upgrading the case even with the 2 8800gfx cards this one stays around 32-35 `C system and 42 - 50`C cpu. but then again i have 5 fans in it that helps.
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Re: How hard could it be? (building a computer)

Postby witchy on Tue Feb 12, 2008 12:30 am

ok so its been a year and im sick of the lawn mower in the bed room so i finally bought a new case to move the computer into. and OMG its a monster! its a full tower instead of a mid tower but i think if i move my desk over 2 inches i can put it next to it instead of under it. here are a few pics of befor. im looking forward to the move this has a built in wireing system so it will look nice and there is a ton of room for my 2 very large grafix cards :twisted:

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