My first "enthusiast" build

[Ritz]

So, back in late August I decided that it was time to give my mom my old computer. The one she was running worked fine... but it needed just a little bit of patience (20 minutes to boot). So, when I gave her my old P4 rig, it was time to seriously upgrade.

I have been interested in hardware for a while but this was the first time I really got the "enthusiast" bug. I did some basic research and decided I wanted a Core i7 920. However, I had no idea what to buy in terms of the rest of the computer and so I left it up to Memory Express.

It was a modest computer, overall, to start with. Well, I'd still brag about it, but you know. It was technically a budget machine. What they gave me was an Antec 900 case, Corsair 850 watt PSU, 6 GB of some sort performance RAM, the i7 of course, a 500 GB Seagate HD and a Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard. All for something like $1200. I had an HD 3850 of my own I took from the old computer.

Time has past and I have since installed a wireless NIC card, an HD 5850, a Zalman CNPS9900 heatsink and an Auzentech 7.1 X-Plosion Cinema sound card. I stopped really paying attention to the cost of the individual parts post the initial purchase. It's a bit, I'm sure. Those extra installations have got me crazed about building and playing around with machines. Pics of my build are below...






I'm happy with it. Although, it's true... cable management in this case is a pain in the rear. Oh, and limited to no chance of going X-Fire on this particular motherboard. But, meh: my primary resolution is 1360x768 :P

[Jack Rabbit]

Everyone has to start somewhere. Now that you have got your feet wet you can make the next one even better.

[stoanee]

Looks good to me, and hey, thanks for folding for HWC!

[AmuseMe]

Seems good! Any troble fitting that all into a 900?

[Ritz]

Originally Posted by stoanee

Looks good to me, and hey, thanks for folding for HWC!

My pleasure! I was running BOINC and World Community Grid for team Canada... but there wasn't any real support for using the fancy GPU I have in there now. And HWC remains Canadian (with a community to boot!)

Originally Posted by AmuseMe

Seems good! Any troble fitting that all into a 900?

Well, clearance away from the side panel isn't much of a problem. I could probably still put a 120mm side fan without issues. But the PSU cables are wrapped in and out behind the right hand side of the case. And the sata cables were annoying to plug in. I would say the difficulty is that black fan chassis to the right of the GPU. If I got rid of that, I would probably be happier with it.

However, airflow is still great. The case itself is always "cold", the air blowing out of the case is barely warmer than the air going in (excluding air coming from the 5850 when gaming or folding). My CPU idles at 35 and at 100% never gets warmer than 61. The 5850 idles at 32 and I'm folding right now at 100% usage and the temp is sitting around 63.

[bojangles]

The Dremel tool is the 900s best friend :D.

[Kayen]

as with some black paint as well .

[dinder]

Looks nice bro, good work.