woo-hoo. my first build succeeded!

[struggle4progress]

i had nightmares of smoke curling out of the case

[canetoad]

1. CONGRATS!!11!!

It's a sweet moment when you power a new system up for the first time - and no bloody smoke! Well done s4p.

:toast:

Edit to add: What part of the build did you find the trickiest? For me it's hooking the mobo up to the case. I need a microscope to read the board manual.

[struggle4progress]

3. A thousand near fatal mistakes. First, after diligently researching everything,

I still managed to buy a cpu with wrong socket, but fortunately I triple checked everything and discovered the error before even I opened the box, so the retailer thoughtfully accepted it with a full refund. Had devil of a time locating a chassis speaker so I could hear beep codes; not everybody puts then in cases anymore, and nobody in town carries them. Then in total stupidity, I nearly screwed the mobo onto the chassis without offsets, which probably would have been sparks aflyin to my ruin; also dropped a screw and lost it for a while under a plate on the mobo, which required some gentle determined work to recover. Then I had adventures in the land of thermal paste while trying to bolt on an oversized cpu cooler. Had a devil of a time securing the pcie gpu by screw. And cable management: aargh! I finally bought a bunch of velcro ties that I can easily remove and reposition to keep stuff together; still, closing one side panel was awkward. When hooking up the power to the mobo, themanual didn't quite match the mobo, so I had to figure that out. I've still got 2 of my 5 case fans unconnected: the 3-pin connector for one is barely accessible between the cpu cooler and the gpu; the other, built into the case, has a female molex rather than the male molex I expected; still need to figure those out before I can close it up and run it peacefully. Then the BIOS help screens are sometimes slightly inaccurate, so I scratched my head for an hour wtf?

But it recognizes all the memory, and I installed windows 7 easily. It'll get a linux distro too

[canetoad]

5. My two best friends

[struggle4progress]

6. thanks. i'll get to know em

:)

[hobbit709]

9. That and these

Can of air and flashlight

[lpbk2713]

10. I usually need a magnifying glass.

I have a condition caused by an accumulation of birthdays. :eyes:

[struggle4progress]

12. Eessa beach bein both myopic and presbyopic

[struggle4progress]

11. Used a flashlight; never thought of an air can, though I can see how it would have helped

[RoyGBiv]

2. Techno Porn!

We need pics.

And congrats!

[struggle4progress]

4. no pics for now. you'll have to content yourself with the literary thrill:

10 slot case, corsair psu, p6t7 mobo, i7 930 cpu, bigass cpu cooler, 6 gb 1600 ram, lowend gtx 200 series graphics

case came with several fans; I bought and installed few more

i built for expandability. the mobo and case would allow me to load the thing, but i'm not in a hurry to burn down my house. currently just have an optical drive, a hard drive, and a floppy drive with card reader

[ConsAreLiars]

7. The first time is the best! Well, for then, at least. Getting more proficient has added value.

My first try followed buying a used W95 machine when my A3000 went belly up. First look at some sort of 3D multi-part puzzle kit. . But it worked and I learned a fair bit in the 'how things work' department.

Linux (Mint) has been a similar experience. The basic system works beautifully, but building/transforming it into something that is more perfectly suited to one's needs, as one becomes more proficient, is sort of a natural part of the experience. And great fun.

[hobbit709]

8. No new build is complete until you sacrifice a little blood to the computer gods.

That's why it's called the smoke test.

[struggle4progress]

13. doh. figured out the side panel fan: it's got a pass-through molex

with male and female sides :dunce: :party:

[struggle4progress]

14. Installed Ubuntu 10.04 beside Windows 7. Tested several days

with low end graphics card. Ran fine: cpu 40-45C seemed reasonable with ambient temps 30-35C. Put in big graphics card. Tested some more. Not much temp change and graphics cards temp comparable to cpu temp. Moved to different room. Connected two more fans. Planned to update Ubuntu and install sensor monitoring to check temps under Linux since had only been checking temps under Windows. Cussed thing would run a few minutes and crash. Disconnected three fans and it restarted and ran fine for a while then crashed again. Would not reboot. Reasoned it could be heat damage to cpu or mobo, or maybe a power supply problem, or maybe a graphics card problem. Took the big graphics card back out and replaced with the small one. Booted fine. Updated Ubuntu and installed sensor stuff. cpu temps 45-50C in light (not idle) load. Reconnected one fan. cpu temps 40-45C over several hours of light load

What's fugged? psu? graphics card? cpu? mobo? Need to check whether a different set of psu rails will run the big graphics card; also if a different distribution of power to the two unconnected fans is stable? Don't know whether to trust the onboard sensors: the Windows program only reports a single number, whereas the Ubuntu program reports 9: a gross cpu temp plus apparently a temp from eight (?) cores in a four core cpu (!)-- maybe each of two threads in each of four cores is sampling-- reported core temps are all within a few degrees of each other, but the reported gross temp is about 5-10C hotter; perhaps I've mucked the thermal paste; can't tell easily without removing the cooler. mobo comes with a diagnostic post card, but NONE of the codes displayed EVER correspond to anything in the mobo manual, and nobody online knows anything about it

thought I might just get another copy of the big graphics card -- but the manufacturer informs me today they've just discontinued it

this is exciting :grr:

[hobbit709]

15. Sounds like it could be a power problem.

What size is the PS?

My current main system has an AMD Phenom II X4 965(3.2GHz) Black Edition that I'm running at 4GHz, MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard with onboard ATI Radeon HD 4290 graphics( I have a NVidia GT220 card that I haven't installed yet. Running a Corsair liquid cooling system(which took idle temps at rated clock from 50°C to 35, at the 4 gig OC it runs about 40-42°), 4Gb DDR3 1600 RAM, 550W PS, 2 DVD-RW, Front panel card reader with eSATA and Firewire ports, in an Antec 200 case. The case has a built-in removable SATA drive slot so I can swap out the OS easily. I have an internal 750Gb hard drive with all my data on it which any of my OS drives can read. I use 3 different 500 Gb drives-Windows XP X64, Ubuntu 10.04, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64. since Microshaft refuses to recognize Linux file systems, the 750 is formatted in NTFS.

The Ubuntu boots up in 12 seconds, the XP boots in 18 seconds, and 7 is the slowest-it takes about 30 seconds.

Of course all this may change if I decide to upgrade. Been looking at an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition.

[struggle4progress]

16. 1000w, so power capability alone shouldn't be the issue

It's possible there's more than one thing going wrong. So here's my list is reverse order of what I'll try to investigate

The video card is very popular, but the manufacturer nevertheless just discontinued it. It seems possible some undisclosed problems led to this decision.

It's hard to be certain how well I'm doing with cooling because it's rather warm here -- and because Intel batch-manufacturers chips and then sorts them for market according to test results: I might just have a cpu that doesn't run as cool as the coolest in its class. My aircooling isn't producing core temps way different than I see on my mac, so overheating issues wouldn't be my first guess. But this being my first build, I think it possible I FUed with the thermal paste. Uneven paste application might also account for gross cpu temp somewhat higher than core temps, but of course it could also just be a cheap sensor. I tried very hard not to overdo it, but the cooler bolts on very tight, so I had some difficulty with it and it's possible some paste squeezed out and is causing some disruption: that might also explain why I didn't have problems until I moved the machine.

Ubuntu in recent years has had problems playing nice with the nVidia cards: lots of folk see plymouth process KILL messages and indeed I see that message sometimes; I need to check logs to determine if I'm regularly getting it, even if I'm not always noticing it on the monitor. I do now have the proprietary driver installed. There might be other various unresolved Ubuntu configuration issues: for example, although I have 6gb DDR3 ram installed in 3 slots (seen by both Windows and the Ubuntu-boot-chooser-memtest), Ubuntu 10.04 oddly thinks I only have 3gb installed

The psu is the easiest thing to double-check. I'll try re-adding the two unconnected fans on a different rails, since that could bring temps down further. If that works, I'll try re-inserting the big video card and powering it from modular (rather than the hardwired) cords

Adventures in liquid-cooling didn't seem to be appropriate for a first build. But I built this system to be upgradable, so somewhere down the line I might try some liquid-cooling in it, since the case can support it; so I'll certainly be interested from time-to-time to here what you've learned about it. I chose the current memory and cpu to enable some over-clocking experiments -- but I won't try moving mobo jumpers to enable that until I sort out the current issues