Dave’s Rants

Last week, I wrote about our experiences with Medion and if you read the post I mentioned I was building a new PC for the family myself. Well that project is completed so I thought I’d write a little on it.

Getting Started:

Well I decided to go for an Athlon 64 processor and a MSI K8N Neo Platinum Mainboard and from there just looked up various pieces of kit that were compatible. My budget was €1100 so that was a bit restrictive but I still think I ended up with a good system.

• Antec SLK-3700BQE Solution Series inc. 350W PSU
• AMD Athlon64 3000 64bit 754Pin CPU
• MSI K8N Neo Platinum Athlon 64 nForce3 Motherboard
• 512MB Crucial CT6464Z40B RAM
• Leadtek WinFast A400TDH Geforce 6800 128MB
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy LS
• Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 160GB 1600JD SATA 8MB Cache
• Samsung SD-616 DVD-ROM
• NEC ND-2510A 8x Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
• Sony Floppy Drive
• Labtec Wireless Desktop Optical

We ordered most of the stuff from Overclock and about 4 days later recieved all this

Building It:

Well since I’m only home for two days a week due to working in Limerick, I had to get up early last Saturday morning and start building, which is the reason I look such a state in this picture.

I encountered no major problems when building it apart from putting in the CPU which I was a little dodgy on because I hadn’t done it before, but I successfully managed to do that, and was well on my way by the time I took this picture

Using It:

So today I finished copying over profiles, data etc, and have just started to use it for proper tasks. I like it, I’m not sure whether it’s the HDD or the new processor, or the more RAM but all the normal tasks are quicker and I loaded up Unreal Tournament 2003 and put it up to the highest detail setting and it looked gorgeous, so I’m happy. Can’t wait to try Doom III.

More:

So you can see the finished article above, I’d like to have got a more attractive case, but due to the budget constraints I didn’t. I’m going to run some benchmarks next weekend, and try out things like the DVD Burner. I know already that more RAM is going to be desirable, so if anyone wants to buy me another 512MB go ahead!