What was meant to be a job lasting an hour and a half, maybe two hours ended up consuming my entire day. I spent roughly seven hours building my new machine today (well, my old machine but with new quiet parts). Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong:

• Numerous problems fitting CD drive to case
• No manual in with the case meant a bit of head scratching as to how to get things like the temperature sensors working
• The new CPU heatsink (fanless) has the WORST installation possible for Pentium 4’s. It’s horrendous
• Thought I’d killed the motherboard BIOS because of a stupid error message, ended up being a ram problem
• Motherboard won’t work with my stacking it full with 2GB of ram

Talk about time consuming. The end of the story is that my new case et al. is downright awesome. Fantastic blue leds (and a purple glow from the powersupply), a great looking case with temperature sensors and everything is working. I had to accept that for some reason my stupid motherboard wouldn’t take 2GB of ram (in 4 x 512MB sticks) so I’m stuck with 1GB like I had before. At some point in the future I’ll upgrade to a nice AMD64 at which point I’ll throw the extra gig in there, but for the time being, the powermac has claimed ownership of it (and now has 3GB total after I threw in the spare gig I had yesterday).

The new case is WHISPER quiet. It’s really quite amazing because the temperature of the CPU is much cooler than it was before with this fanless heatsink doing a better job than the noisy fan laden one.

All in all I am very pleased (but for the problem with the ram and the sheer amount of time this thing took to get sorted). All that is left now is to think of a name for it! (the old name doesn’t really fit it any more)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 2:56 am and is filed under nerdling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.