Building a PC

[Daniel]

I'm building a new PC tomorrow night and was wondering if anyone on here would be interested in a picture guide of how to build a PC as it really is simple if you know what to do and you can save a lot of money. If someone's interested I'll see if I can rope Caroline in to taking photos, if not then screw all of you

[CaptainRaiden]

*Raises hand* That would be very helpful Daniel, if it's not too much trouble. I can add cards on the motherboard, connect the USB ports etc. but it's the initial setup, power connections from the PSU to the motherboard, placing the processor chip etc. that I'm a noob at. Also, installing the heat sink, because I plan to run two Nvidia cards in SLI configuration in the future and possibly an i7 extreme processor. Things are bound to get hot in there.

I'm sure these are easy enough, because they are built to be easily installed, but a guide is always welcome, especially as I plan to assemble my next super PC myself.

[Daniel]

Well she's purring along nicely Took me about 2 hours or so. Hopefully I'll get to set up the windows home server tomorrow and do a writeup and upload some pictures.

[billiaml]

Well she's purring along nicely Took me about 2 hours or so. Hopefully I'll get to set up the windows home server tomorrow and do a writeup and upload some pictures.

Good job

[Daniel]

Another day gone by and I haven't posted pics

Here are some of the bits that went into making the PC



Going clockwise from the back, the big box is the case, the box that says thermalright on it is an aftermarket CPU cooler, the bubble wrap contains 2 x 2TB hard drives which have gone in my old PC tonight to turn it into a home server, the next box is RAM, the little light blue box contains the CPU and the CPU stock cooler and the box that says Gigabyte on it is the motherboard.

Set up my home server tonight and other than having an issue with a faulty hard drive which I'd thought was dodgy months ago it's going as expected. It's backing Caroline's PC up as we speak and I'm guessing by the time I wake up mine should be done, who knows! Windows Home Server is possibly one of the simplest things I've EVER set up. Connecting the PC's was even easier, you just burn off a CD and put it in the drive of the PC you wanted to connect to the server and ran the disk, put in the password for the server and it does everything for you automatically. There's even a console to access the server with from the client PC's so rather than having to connect in remotely and possibly screw your server up, you have a limited console which means that you can't do anything other than manage backups, user accounts and windows updates for the server.

If you've got a few PC's around the house I suspect this may be a VERY VERY useful thing because no one wants to lose photos, music and various bits of data.

[rah]

Nice, what CPU do you have? Are you going to run a graphics card as well?

I use a NAS for my backups and for playing stuff through my networked BR player.

[Daniel]

Nice, what CPU do you have? Are you going to run a graphics card as well?

I use a NAS for my backups and for playing stuff through my networked BR player.

The CPU is an Intel Core I5-2500K which was released only just this week. I could have gone for a more expensive one but it was £80 more for very little increase in performance.

The graphics card I've put in is out of my old PC. It's an ATI HD4870 512MB card which I've had since April 2009 so is getting on a little I'll probably replace later this year or early next year. Just don't quite feel the need to replace it just yet

I'm going to get an SSD around March time as some much quicker SSD drives are schedules to come out then. Currently the PC is held back by the hard drive I've got in there and also the fact that I've only got 2GB of RAM in at the moment. Must get around to ordering that RAM......

I was tempted to get a NAS but the idea of Windows Home Server always appealed to me as you always get left over with a spare PC when you upgrade and rather than selling it on cheaply or giving it away this seems a good use for it.

The server's just finished the backup on Caroline's PC and now it's doing mine. Only 3% finished, after about 10 minutes so it's going to take a while!!!!

[Valve Bounce]

Hi Daniel,

I had posted in somebody else thread about what computer to buy a few months ago. This is what I posted:

OK!! It's the ACER 5745G
it has 4 GB memory
i7 CPU
500 GB HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium
BluRay player

and the price is AUD$999.97 at Costco

You can check out the specs and reviews with Google.

http://apcmag.com/notebookhunter/dea...for-139600.htm

Sorry I missed out on this deal - it is not available at Costco anymore.
__________________

[GridGirl]

I use a NAS for my backups and for playing stuff through my networked BR player.

The other half used to have a server but we got a NAS drive not long after we bought our house and left the server where it was.

We also had a really boring conversation about possibly buying another NAS last Sunday when we were walking round the gardens of a National Trust property. I think I'll just leave this kind of thing to people who know what they are talking about. The conversation was ruining a good walk.

[billiaml]

Oh baby, talk nerdy to me.