I spoke about my PC building experience recently in both Episode 1: A new rig, and Episode 2: The postman strikes back. Today though I’d like to welcome you to the final instalment on what has so far been a smooth (ish) experience.
If you can imagine an ordinary living room then factor in multiple boxes of PC parts scattered across the floor, organised in a minor OCD way down to part placement and order in which it’ll be put in the machine.
Everything would be going into the case so I began to fight with the most tightly packed bits of polystyrene I’ve ever seen and then proceeded to be attacked by a plastic bag that seemed to have a static charge addiction.
Case on its side, holding back urges to make robot noises, the motherboard soon gets lowered into its new home, a couple of screws later and it’s fixed in place. Other parts soon follow, the CPU, RAM, graphics card and they all slot in nicely – so far so good.
Of course the proverbial brown stuff then hits the fan… due to the size and type of the fan that sits directly on top of the processor, it required me to fix a series of brackets on the underside of the motherboard – which is great if I hadn’t just fitted more than three quarters of the machines onto it.
Bit by bit the parts come back out of the machine until I’m back to square one, a few bits of metal, some sticky cushion stuff and four screws later and the fan’s mounting bracket is fitted. All the parts get fitted again and twenty minutes later and everything is all ship shape and correct, yarrr!
A few small wiring jobs, power and reset buttons and the top interface panel… and yes… it’s complete!
For my operating system I choose the Windows 7 RC version over my standard XP Pro, so I was in unfamiliar territory with everything. But first the initial turn on.
Usually at this point I find out I’ve wired the power and reset buttons the wrong way round, thankfully this time it was all fine, the earlier fan experience probably making me slow down and take my time a touch.
Turning on for the first time it purrs like a kitten, the quiet hum of the system fans like an swarm of angry African Bees, it lived!
Fast forward an hour to when Windows 7 was installed it was time to test it on some games – which of course was the important bit.
Running it through its paces over the weekend, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Portal, World of Warcraft, Dawn of War II, Fuel and recently the Batman Arkham Asylum demo all got put through their paces at full graphical settings and all played superb, with a solid 60 FPS in most cases.
Of course performance was the main thing, and thankfully Louis handled it relatively well, especially as I’m on beta drivers and beta software. With a bit of over clocking (the CPU certainly has a lot more to give) too I think it’ll go even further, but for something straight out of the box, you won’t get something more satisfying than booting up a game on your freshly self-built machine.
*goes back to stroking Louis gently in a fashion one would associate with a Bond film*
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