New Computer Purchase!

[Photo-John]

I've been in denial. A month or so ago I came home and smelled a terrible, burnt electronics smell in my office. I have avoided dealing with it until yesterday, when someone asked me for some files that are on the drives in the dead machine.

So yesterday I opened up the case, and as expected, found some serious scorched circuitry in the power supply. Just so you know, a 250 watt power supply isn't enough for a machine with three hard drives. So I went to Frys and bought a new, 350 watt power supply. Unfortunately, after installation, the computer still wouldn't start up. That means that it's a pretty sure bet that the motherboard and who knows what else are cooked. And I need to buy a new computer.

What you see in the photo is what I bought today. I'll be building the machine myself - for the first time. I bought a nice, no-tools-required case, with lots of ventilation and front USB and FireWire ports. It's an Asus motherboard with 4 memory slots, a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor, a 512 ram stick, and a sweet, double-fanned, 430 watt power supply. I'm hoping this machine will be a solid platform for the next 2-3 years. I'll be moving over an old video card and two of my old hard drives.

I'll keep you guys posted as I build it. This is going to be an interesting and educational experience. I wouldn't have tried to build my own computer a couple of years ago. But I know a lot more now and everything is plu-and-play. So I don't think it's going to be a big deal. Cross your fingers for me.

[Trevor Ash]

"So I don't think it's going to be a big deal"

Oh, now you just went and jinxed yourself....way to go!

I'm sure you'll get it up and running soon enough

[Peter_AUS]

PJ,

Be careful mounting the processor onto the motherboard and putting the cooling fan/heat sink over the top of it. The processor is easily cracked. Take the motherboard and processor to the store you bought it from and get them to install the processor for you. They shouldn't charge you for anything concerning this. Just say you feel more comfortable with them mounting the processor. That way if something goes a miss, they can replace it without charge as well.

Even with my extensive building experience I get this done by the places I purchase from.

It really isn't that hard to put a machine together, certainly much better than it was a few years ago. Just make sure you get the wires in the right connections and you seat the cards correctly and firmly on the motherboard.

Don't forget to put the plastic feet stands on the motherboard to correspond with the most amount of locking slots on the case.

Ddon't forget that it usually requires 2 screws to hold the motherboard down and don't over tighten them. They usually need a couple of brass lug nuts under the motherboard between the motherboard and where it connects to the case.

Another good idea is to have drive fans that sit under the drives and cools them down as well.

A lot of people these days have up to three exhausting fans in their cases as well, especially when doing heavy processing such as video rendering etc.

It is fun building machines from scratch.

[Photo-John]

Thanks for the advice, Peter. I thought of you when I was posting this. I wouldn't have thought of having the dealer mount the processor for me. Is the Pentium 4 more complicated than a Pentium 3? I took the Pentium 3 processor apart on the broken machine and it didn't seem like a problem. And, uhhh, that was before the machine died ;)

[Peter_AUS]

Yes, they have huge fans, at least the ones I use do. The mounting of the retaining clip can be a bit hard to get it to lock correctly. They should do it for you without any problems, as I said, I get them to do it here, for safety reasons. Also you need to make sure you line up pin 1 of the chip with the correct pin 1 seat of the motherboard as well. The pins are quite fragile.

I don't have any income anymore, so getting anything in future will be non existant for me.

Damaging things aren't covered under warranty, hence why I get it done at the suppliers.

Looks like an interesting machine you will be setting up.

Be careful with the current drives as they might have been the cause of the frying, although I would hassard a guess to say you more than likely coped a power surge that took the machine out, maybe. Do you have contents insurance you might be able to make a claim for getting it replaced ????

A good thing to get is a good UPS as well for the computer, I have an APC Backups RS 800 that I got for the price of a 300, but that is another story, and has worked well, after returning 4 other different models. They kept upgarding mine to get it right, no charge.

[Trevor Ash]

John,

Don't trust Fry's with doing anything to your computer. I understand the reason behind Peter's advice, but he's obviously never gone to a Fry's electronics store in the states They'd beat the living crapola out of anything they touched and probably zap it with ESD when they set their styrofoam McDonalds cups next to the processor. I'm sure they'd bend half the pins while they tried to align the processer in the slot incorrectly.

Fry's has fair prices on many items, good local selection, and nothing else.

[Photo-John]

Trevor, I didn't buy the stuff at Fry's. I only bought the power supply in my original salvage attempt at Fry's. It was returned when I discovered that the board was cooked. Then I visited Central Computer, in San Jose, and bought everything from them. They are very helpful and they've been around for 20 years or something. They do a lot of corporate builds and really know what they're doing. And I did take Peter's advice. I took the board and processor in this morning and had their tech mount it for me. They didn't charge me anything and he let me watch. It looked like actually mounting the processor was easy. It was attaching the fan that was tricky. Anyway, it's done now and I can go home tonight and geek out

[another view]

I'll be interested to see how it goes. I used to be afraid to open the case but when my hard drive crashed a few months ago I was able to replace it and re-install all software without much trouble (thanks again to some help from Lara ). This might be the route I go next time but hopefully I'm set for a little while...

Seems like a lot of towers (at least Dell's) have fairly small power supplies - and then you start looking at other stuff and it starts to make a lot of sense. Good luck!

[Peter_AUS]

John,

Now you know why I suggested taking it there for them to mount it for you. Although it looks easy, if you get it wrong, by that I mean not get pin 1 to seat in pin 1 slot, you can bend something. If you got a chance to see the pin placement, you should have noticed there is a notch alignment for the processor. It was the actual attaching of the fan that is the most difficult to get done without causing a headache, which was my main concern. Point being, these are delicate things and doesn't take much to crack them if not done correctly. I usually use a small socket type screwdriver to sit over the attachment to help lever it into place properly.

Still you have seen it now, and glad you took my advice about it. Would have hated you spending the time to get it all setup and discover it didn't work properly or at all.

Hope it is up and running soon so you can report how it all went.

PS, did you see the posting I made in the moderators forum by any chance ?

[Peter_AUS]

John,

Don't trust Fry's with doing anything to your computer. I understand the reason behind Peter's advice, but he's obviously never gone to a Fry's electronics store in the states They'd beat the living crapola out of anything they touched and probably zap it with ESD when they set their styrofoam McDonalds cups next to the processor. I'm sure they'd bend half the pins while they tried to align the processer in the slot incorrectly.

Fry's has fair prices on many items, good local selection, and nothing else.

Trevor,

As I don't live in the USA, and have never been there, then it is obvious that I would never have visited there.

[DownByFive]

I remember when I was a computer tech at a 1000 seat call center, we used to swap out processors all the time, leave 'em laying around, throw them in drawers. Same with hard drives and motherboards. All that stuff is actually surprisingly resilient. Of course, I wouldn't handle my personal equipment like that. But when you've got a pile of machines waiting to be fixed, you don't really have time to handle stuff with kid gloves...I actually think we had more problems with mice crapping out than with components going haywire, even after being tossed in drawers.

[Photo-John]

Are you saying you had mice crapping all over in the drawers where you tossed the processors? That doesn't sound good ;)

[Lara]

Are you saying you had mice crapping all over in the drawers where you tossed the processors? That doesn't sound good ;)

Heh, John. You such a comedian.

[Trevor Ash]

Trevor,

As I don't live in the USA, and have never been there, then it is obvious that I would never have visited there.

That wasn't supposed to be personal peter.

[Photo-John]

I followed Peter's advice and had the dealer (Central Computer) mount the processor and fan for me. I'm glad I did. A mistake might have cost me a couple hundred doll hairs. That wouldn't have made me happy.

This morning a put the RAM and the floppy and drive cables on the board and put the board in the case. It was a little tricky getting the board positioned correctly, but no big deal, really. I'm just being extra careful, since I've never done this before. Tonight I'll see about getting the drives and power supply installed.

This is a good experience. It's like learning to work on your own car. It's empowering.

[Peter_AUS]

Nice case John, that has a heap of drive bays there.

Next step is getting the connectors on the right pins. If you look at the motherboard book and follow the directions, the grean and white connectors are usually the power connectors.

I like the fan connectors above the CPU, sometimes you just get tie down clips and they are the ones that can be difficult to connect up.

Not seeing what you had, out of box, was a bit complicated to guess.

Are you putting SATA drives in your machine.

[Photo-John]

Ummm, what's an SATA drive? I bought one new 80 gig drive, so I can start fresh. Then, after I get it up and running, I'm going to put two of my old drives in.

[Peter_AUS]

SATA are the newest drives, with smaller cable connections, not the normal ribbon cable connections work a lot faster with data transfers.

I think looking at the cables of the box, there might be a black cable there towards the middle bottom of the box, it is hard to tell.

The Drive should say SATA on it, but I would have thought you would have gotten a much bigger drive than that, 80G is so 3 years ago now, 200G drives are pretty much the big boys toys of today.

But then you have move info to loose don't you with bigger drives.

[Photo-John]

Last night I decided to buy a new CD-RW drive, since they're cheap. I visited Central Computer this morning and found that they had a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive on sale for $79.95. So now my new machine will be able to burn DVDs and CDs. Sweet!

[Peter_AUS]

Good decision John.

[Lionheart]

Hi PJ:
That looks like a Prescott P4 you've got there. (P4 3.0e right?). Those puppies run really hot, and the fan that Intel ships with the retail chips is barely adequate, and noisy to boot. I'd invest in an aftermarket cpu heatsink and cooler. Gigabyte, Thermaltake, etc., all make fan/heatsink combos that work markedly better than the stock Intel fan/heatsink, and are noticeably quieter as well. Just for fun here's my rig. I just recently overhauled my entire system.
P4 3.2e on an ASUS mobo (OC'd to 3.6 GHz, but still runs a cool 41 degrees Celsius idling, 48-50 Celsius under heavy load)(for comparison, 48 Celsius at 3.2 GHz, 53 Celsius OverClocked when idling with stock fan/heatsink, 65-70 Celsius under heavy load)
video card-Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT w/256 MB DDR ram
4 gigabytes memory in dual channel mode (Corsair XMS pc3200 matched pairs-the ones with the LED's-these are the main limiting factors for my OC'd rig, I'd get faster RAM but I wanted the twinxpro series with the LED's and pc3200 is the fastest corsair has in matched 2x1GB pairs)
2x 250 GB hard drives
2x NEC 16xDVD-R/+R,4x DVD-RW/+RW,4x DVD-DL, 48x CD-R optical drives ($62 at newegg.com)
500 watt PS with 2 LED fans
Aspire case with 5 LED fans, Gigabyte LED cpu fan/heatsink
here's a pic
most parts except RAM and video card purchased at Newegg.com

[dollop]

Finally you have decided to upgrade from your Atari 2600.

I want to suggest that you not put in your old hard drives. Use the 80 gig drive you purchased as your main system drive and invest in a couple of identical big boy hard drives. Your new mother board has built in RAID and you can mirror the two big boys. Your data will be much more secure this way and you will be able to sleep better knowing that your data is mirrored.

Congrats on the new system. Its going to SCREAM...

One question...why a floppy drive? ;-P

Also, the only problem I had with my build using this mother board was with sound. There was a jumber that needed to be set that took some time to find but other then that it was very simple.
- Burns

[Photo-John]

You got the same board? I've alwasy bought Asus, when I was choosing my own parts. I have a lot of confidence in them. What's the deal with the sound jumper? The case has built-in sound on the front and I plugged those cables in, last night. I'm not aware of any sound-related jumpers. Can you tell me more?

Part of the reason I went with this board and not a sweet kit I found on Tiger Direct, was I thought I could use the old AGP card you gave me. Not so, I discovered this morning. That card is a different AGP than the board. Doesn't make sense to me. But I bought a new, ATI 128 MB 8x AGP card this morning, for $61. This machine is getting scary for me. This is wayyyyyy more power than I'm used to.

Your suggestion about the drive is a good one. I know the system supports RAID and I was thinking about it. It's easy enough to copy the data from the old drives. And the 80 Gig was cheap.

Think I'm gonna have to pass on LED fans, though

[Peter_AUS]

John, the Video Card, might have been a 4x AGP card hence why it won't work on the new motherboard.

Have a look in the manual about the sound, it should have a diagram in there showing the jumper settings.

[Lionheart]

You got the same board?. This machine is getting scary for me. This is wayyyyyy more power than I'm used to.

Speed/power you'll get used to real quick. A week from now you'll be thinking your PC seems too slow.