As you might have gathered from my last entry, I built my very first computer as a present for the boyfriend. He needed an upgrade for his gaming machine and we found that his 2006 model just couldn't be upgraded any further and the latest games wouldn't run... So, we would refit it. New motherboard, new processor, new graphics card.
He wanted a top-of-the-range machine so that it wouldn't need upgrading for a while yet, so we selected the almost-best-but-not-quite (not made of money here :P ) parts.
We went with the following:
- Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard
- Intel Core i7-920 @ 2.66GHz processor
- ASUS EN9600GT (with Nvidia Geforce 9600GT GPU/1GB VRAM) graphics card
- 6GB Corsair DDR3 RAM
When it arrived, we found that ah - previous computer case was a Micro ATX form and the motherboard we purchased was ATX. The graphics card required at least 400W of power and the current PSU would only supply 115W. Hmmm. Oh well, blame my n00biness. :P Out we went again, and picked out the following extra parts:
- Jeantech Arctic 600W PSU
- Jeantech Luna case with fiddly light-up bits
- Sony BD-ROM Blu-ray/DVD/CD-ROM
So! Now we build (pictures described by text underneath them)...

Almost there... Most of the bits in now!
Aaaand... Then I forgot to take more pictures, so here's the finished product:
The front bit opens up to reveal the optical drive etc. Yes, it lights up (not my idea...), but it worked first time, the drivers and everything installed without a problem, and everything is great :D We took the 200GB hard drive and 8-in-1 card reader out of the old computer as they were still pretty good, then reformatted the lot and put Windows 7 RC 64-bit edition on there (it previously had XP Media Center which would only see 2GB of RAM :\ ) and lo and behold... Latest games run fine, not found a single problem with it yet. We'll definitely be getting the full version of Windows 7 when it comes out as the boyfriend hates Vista and needs DirectX 10 for his games (which is only available in Vista and 7)... So, there we have it. He can pay for that though :P
I was surprised to find that it worked, to be honest... I'd never built a computer from scratch and while I did have some guidance at first, I was apparently doing so well I didn't need it XD
More pics can be seen on my Flickr account :)




