Even though I built my PC in late February and continued to receive parts into early March, my affordable dream machine is a power house. With the release of Crysis Warhead and Crysis Wars, everyone will use the title to benchmark rigs! I know because everyone in their right mind used the original crysis to benchmark other PCS. Any who, because of the right choice of hardware, your PC can last for years; Most people would still upgrade after a year or two. But I know I’ll be happy for a while.

I’ll post some screen shots of my rig and the game(s)!

Ok, I had 2 8800 gtx cards running on a liquid setup with the 3^rd card on the stock cooler. Last night, I removed everything and installed the 3^rd card on liquid and also installed an ad-don pci tv card. The PC turned on and froze at the login screen. I rebooted and it would not post anymore. So I took out the pci card and still the machine would not post. I removed all 3 sli cards and reinstalled them as 2 on liquid cooled and the 3^rd on the stock cooler (this was my initial configuration). No post; then I noticed the motherboard has a built in LCD that shows the post codes. Mine is a 1d, which could be the power supply, Ram or video card (most of the time, its a RAM problem). I called xfx tech support and they said to strip the machine down to the bare essentials.

1 video card, 1 stick of ram, unplug everything else and reset the CMOS. If it works, eventually plug in one item at a time until I find out what crashes the system. If it doesn’t work with the bare essentials, the motherboard could be fried.

I wish the video cards had this option to diagnose them. I would hate to have an RMA on my motherboard (780i) and 3 video cards (8800 gtx’s). Well, off to troubleshooting and we’ll see what happens.

A little upset about XFX’s product.

As we all know I’m building a decent, up to date PC. I’ve received about 90% of my parts and there are a few issues. One of them, that gets under my skin is based on the fact that I spent a great amount of money on a high end product and received a lesser quality than what I expected (from the manufacturer). The product in discussion is an XFX 780i mother board. It’s been on the market for a month or three and it’s currently one of the high end PC components of today. It’s even one of the top ten most expensive motherboards, as of this moment. The only others that are more expensive are it’s competitors or high end server boards. The distributor I used to purchase this product is Nowdirect.com. If you research their company, they have a low amount of feedback from the community and half of it is bad comments. I was very sketchy about utilizing them for my purchase; but I didnt want to pay Tigerdirect’s high prices and Newegg has stopped selling the product. I took the bait of a $250 price tag and free ups shipping. the product arrived and the exterior of the box was 100% OK! Upon opening the factory sealed XFX box, the manual folder, bubble wrap and CD is damaged! The bubble wrap I’m referring to protects the motherboard and is placed with the motherboard inside the XFX box. This box is then sealed with the factory’s quality assurance sticker and then re-boxed and shipped out!

I’m not happy! I can only hope that the motherboard is 100% OK when I try to use it! I will contact XFX with pictures and a complaint, then follow up here.

For now though, I’m quite happy about the products I chose to purchase.

    A little note regarding the importance of how you purchase your hardware. Let’s use myself as an example, I decided, since this is a budget build it’s important to create a strategy about the hardware I purchase. I can guaranty when you research the components you plan on using in your new rig, you have found out about the amount of people who have had problems with components. Sometimes they’re DOA (dead on arrival), after a week or 2, they burn out and some manufactures seem to have a cheaply made product. With this taken into consideration, I believe it’s important to purchase your hardware from reputable companies and within a certain time period.

My strategy was to save up some cash for the big items while I constantly purchase the little items that would not require an RMA. I started off with the liquid cooling components, case and case accessories. When I had enough to buy the main components, get them all within the same time period. If anything went wrong with them, I could utilize the 30 or 90 day instant warranty and by the manufacture warranty. This was a great idea and it worked find until I hit an awesome deal on the processor I wanted. The current going rate (at the time of my purchase) was $285.00 USD everywhere and the Microcenter had the Q6600 on sale for $199.00. MY LORD, I went nuts, broke my oath and bought the proc! Why? My high performance rig is based on a budget. Now that I have the CPU and nothing to test it out with, I have no idea if it’s dead or alive. I have 30 days from the time of purchase to instant swap the item within the store. After that, I’ll have to use Intel’s 3 year warranty!

Here’s the link on the Q6600 deal I COULD NOT pass up!

Q6600 Deal !!

Now I find myself rushing to buy all difference parts at different prices to get my rig together ASAP! To top it off, I’m moving across the country at the beginning of April and I have to finish this rig by that time (I want to finish by that time). So the only strategy I have and the last thing I will buy is probably the video cards. Why? The Nvidia 9000 series has just been released and everyday that goes by means another higher end GPU setup could be released. The cards I plan on getting will be the 8800 GTX or Ultra’s and currently the GTX’s range from $400.00 to $600.00 USD. Maybe by the end of march, they will be in between $300.00 to $500.00 and I will save a little money.

The moral of my story is, develop a build plan strategy, stick to it and try not to venture too far off course. Now I’ll start to post about the hardware I bought and my experience with these companies.

    I need a new rig because my current desktop machine is very old! I built it in the year 2000 and it has served it’s purpose. I know you are thing, WOW, you lasted 7 years on that old thing? That question has a yes and no answer. Yes I have because the machine is sufficient for what I need it for. No because one of my oldest needs (gaming) and newest needs (college) requires a top of the line machine. I’ll be taking up a AI-Game programming degree in a very good AI-Game school pretty soon! I’ve survived through the years without a new desktop rig because of the number of laptops I have owned throughout this time. I will build this rig and probably have it for years to come. Most likely it will sustain my hardcore gaming needs for another 2 years and when I feel the need for an updated rig (in the year 2009 or 2010), I’ll get a high end laptop like I always do.

OK, in a nut shell, here’s a brief-off-the-top-of-my-head-list-of-components I will NEED! These are in no particular order. I just briefly wrote them down. There is an importance in how you buy these components and when you buy them. This topic will be covered in the next post.

By the way, I’ve search the net and haven’t found a lot of people that wrote up a good list. Yes, a mobo, cpu, ram and the basics are a good start, but what about everything else huh?

Checklist of what I need to buy:

• Case
• Case Fans
• Fan controllers
• Lights
• DVD burner(s)
• Hard drives
• Power supplies
• CPU
• Memory
• Video Cards
• MISC. Cables
• Water pump
• Water Reservoir
• Water Tubes
• Proper Cooling Liquid
• Memory cooler
• CPU cooler
• GPU Cooler
• North Bridge Cooler
• South Bridge Cooler
• MOSFET Cooler
• MISC. Heatsinks
• Operating System, Games and Various Software
• Zip Ties
• Electrical Tape
• Solder and Soldering iron
• Molex connectors
• LCD Screens
• Temp Monitors
• MISC. Case and personal accessories
• Memory card reader
• Wireless adapter
• Cable Sleeve kit and parts
• MISC. Screws and Bolts.
• TECT Peltier
• Thermal paste and pads.

That should be it for now and even though this seems like a huge list, have a nearby computer store that you like to visit often for last minute supplies in mind.

    As of late February, I made the decision to build myself a new-hardcore-budget-gaming-pc! I know, most of you will say, some of these words don’t belong with each other. For those of you who are rich, this is true, while for the rest of the normal world, you’re wrong. Let’s see how good of a rig I can put together for a cheap-O price!

I will admit, I started buying parts before I properly made a layout for my build. This is a big NO-NO! But, I had a general layout in my mind and I started to follow it.

Here are a lot of questions to think about before we proceed. This is the first step!

• Let’s start off with, think about what you want out of your computer and why?
• How long do you want to have this machine?
• Do you care about upgrading it?
• What purpose are you building this machine for?
• How much do you have to spend?
• When do you need this rig by?
• Is it a good idea or a bad idea to start building it right now?
• Should you/I wait for the newest components to be released?
• What software am I going to need?

Ask your friends, family and relatives about what they think (regarding your new decision). Take into consideration, of the people who will be using this machine or have to live with it (within the same environment). Building a new computer can be compared to buying a new car or house/apartment! Be open minded about what you are about to do and don’t ever get discouraged. There are millions of people out their who are willing to help you out for free. If you can take a 1000 piece puzzle and put together 40 pieces, you can build a PC (considering you don’t mind working with electronics).

MOST importantly, research what you want and why! Most normal people don’t have to build a PC because an OEM rig will do what they want. But for myself and all the others like me out there, I build all of my machines (except my laptop, I mod that, until custom laptop building becomes main stream)! This little log of mine will be do-able by anyone, even the No0Bz should be able to follow, understand and even mimic my actions to building a PC!

Enjoy!