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April 16, 2007
Building your own PC ... painfully
Thinking of building your own PC? You might like to learn from the experience of Jim Louderback, editorial director of PC Magazine, who had the bright idea, since he needed a new Windows Vista PC, of assembling it himself. Seeemed like a good idea at the time, because Jim felt he needed to catch up, first hand, with some of the new technologies - SATA, DDR2, PCI Express, Dual Core CPUs etc - that have popped up since he last built a box, two years ago. (Well, there was that Shuttle PC, but that was "a bundle of compromises" which doesn't count.)
Louderback wasn't sparing his bank account. His list of components included Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor, an Asus Commando motherboard, Kingston 2 GB DDR2 memory, two unnamed SATA hard drives, ATI Radeon X1900XT video card, and a Creative X-Fi Fatality audio card, packed into an Antec P180B case with a Seasonic S12 650-watt power supply.
Unfortunately, despite having all those nerds reporting to him, Louderback quickly found that while the new technology had fewer pins to bend out of shape, it had a completely new set of frustrations. First Jim couldn't decode the fool-proof colour-coded memory slots on the motherboard, and had to seek help from the nerds who report to him. Then, when he finally got it all assembled, nothing happened. The motherboard's OLED display flashed the message "DET DRAM" at him, but he couldn't find out how to decode that, either.
After burning heaps of time, Jim turfed the Asus Commando, and settled for an MSI 975X Platinum motherboard that, while lacking some of the Asus features, did at least, finally, work. Mind you, the RAM colour-coding was completely different ... just one of the little traps you can fall into in these days of foolproof technology, and Jim got his arithmetic wrong (Bleeding Edge knows all about that), thinking that he was installing two sticks of 2GB RAM, rather than two sticks of 1GB RAM
Here's some of the things Jim discovered:
- DDR2 Memory works in pairs
- Don't be worried when SATA drives don't show up in your BIOS
- Graphics cards have new, specialised six-pin power plugs
- Beware the fragile Core 2 Duo stock CPU cooler
- Flash your BIOS with a USB thumb drive
- Beware high-end, expensive, hyper-tweakable motherboards
- Install the motherboard before the power supply
Posted by cw at April 16, 2007 12:27 PM
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Comments
I've been running PATA on my main desktop all this while. Just upgraded to SATAII today. First surprise was that my ASUS nForce equipped AMD X2 mobo would not recognise the new HD. Tried the first SATA socket, then the second. Tried wiggling the power connectors to the HD. Nope. BIOS did not detect it. Flashed BIOS. Nope. Ran the floppy disk based SEATOOLs and that was sure the HD was not there. Finally tried the third SATA socket and replugged the power connector and voila, instant recognition. BIOS recognises it, SEATOOLS (DOS) recognises it, even Windows XP recognises it. Ghost 8 failed to clone the HD, Image for Windows doesn't clone, it creates an image file. I had Acronis old version (courtesy of Paul's alert on that freebie). Took a few deep breaths, followed the wizard and Acronis cloned the HD successfully.
Computers and Parts Land were out of the NCQ SATAII variety of Seagate HD but for a few bucks over AUD 100, the new HD is running well and faster than my older Seagate PATA.
Posted by: anandasim ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 18, 2007 01:53 AM
I'm not necessarily referring to ol' Jim here, but sadly, and all too often, people simply refuse to adhere to the old computer geek's adage: RTFM. Many a problem could have been avoided, if only users would stick to this one simple rule. :)
Posted by: Luke at April 19, 2007 05:51 PM