Building a Better PC

[mgonitzke]

Richard-

My case is a mid-tower, so I shouldn't. That and the PS has some REALLY long cables.

 

[rtunison]

Ahhhhhhh.... mid tower and long cables.... cool.
Please document you build with photos.

If I may............. I don't like your desk design.

1. Not enough leg room with puter' where located.
2. Don't like my puter's down low. Lint, dust bunnies and just gettin' to stuff. A cool build like yours and Ken's should be "shown off"!!! If ya' ever have a few to many, you can kick/assault your machine with your legs/feet and possibly hurt the hard drive/s.
3. If you are getting a 3 in one printer you will want to flip the lid to copy stuff and down in a shelf that would be difficult.
4. You have probably designed it perfectly for your use and I need another beer.

 

[mgonitzke]

Richard-

I'll address your concerns in order

1. Believe it or not, there's more leg room than my current desk, which has a shelf across the bottom. I am tall and thin, so there'll be plenty of room for me.

2. I run a clean operation over here

No, seriously, it'll be a few inches off the ground, and I vacuum the room frequently. I also have canned air to blow crap out of stuff on a regular basis. As for your last point, I'm out of college now...no more of that

3. That is actually more of a drawer than a shelf...I can slide it out far enough to lift the lid for the scanner, and it'll be out of the way when I don't need it.
4. Yup

 

[kweaver]

Richard - Matt's case will almost fit inside of mine. He'll have plenty of length on his PS wires.

I need to go get my camera ...

 

[kweaver]

Here's the APU cooler installed. It's 6.25" up from the board , any smaller case and it wouldn't have fit.

I'm worried about the cooling right now , I may have to pull it and check my little Bro's thermal paste. It idles @ 30°C and one review of the APU a guy said he overclocked his to 3.4GHz (base 2.9) and his temp is only 19°C under full load ... but he didn't say what cooler he is using. I'd prefer the same cooler that I have on the HTPC in the house as it's all copper but it's no longer made.
I need to get a pic of it as it's sharp looking !

 

[kweaver]

Matt - I found this and it even has a screen front to match my case !
I forgot about a card reader ... glad you mentioned that ! I've got a couple pennies left ...

 

[mgonitzke]

Ken-

That's cool, that'd match my case too

Are you using Arctic Silver? That's the only thermal paste anybody I know will use...

Edit: Your buddy must be exaggerating...if his CPU is running at 19*C under full load, it must be in a cold room...that's 66*F...It can't run cooler than the ambient temp.

 

[kweaver]

Matt - I don't remember now what the paste was since it's little Bro's but it's what he uses in his over clocking , it's ceramic.

As for that 19C that was a review on TigerDirect's page. Some serious OCers run liquid coolers plumbed into there refrigerator !

Here's the guts of the HTPC. To tight of case and to many PS wires ! That's what I like about my Cooler Master , it has "cable management" ... ie run the cables between the frame and outer side panel.

All the in wall components are on bearing slides.

 

[kweaver]

I HATE WINDERZ 7 !!

The Motorola modem drivers wouldn't load off the disc. So I put the modem on the XP machine and download the 64bit drivers and then find out I can't do anything with them when I bring them to the Winderz 7 machine ! I was wanting to connect with the USB like I do in XP but the PC wouldn't even flinch when I plugged it in. I had to give in and connect with the Ethernet cable , I was saving that plug in case I wanted to connect PC to PC since I have a crossover cable.

Looking at networking on here it says WINDERZ 7 ONLY ... so I guess that means my 2 XP desktops and the laptop are screwed ! What kind of BS is Microlimp doing to us ??? Buy the newest system everytime you want to network ???

They can kiss my rusty brown azz !!!

 

[rtunison]

My last box build was 64 bit Winders 7 Pro like yours. All components were 64 bit as well. I plugged in the RJ-45 ,,,, modem to new build and Winders went out and found all of the drivers for my stuff. Nary a caution sign in Device Manager. Just my experience with the OS.

Networking ......

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/share-files-and-printers-between-windows-7-and-xp/


You don't want to use the cross over cable when you are online anyways!!

 

[rtunison]

This was a quote off of a forum..............
I also had issues sharing DRIVES on my Windows 7 machine over the network. All shared drives resulted in access issues as many have mentioned here.

My solution: stop sharing the DRIVE and only share FOLDERS. Immediate success, I can now access my Windows 7 files over the network from my XP machine!

 

[kweaver]

Richard - Thanks fer that info.
Can you do anything with this new prob ?

Well more Winderz 7 trouble.

My 1T HD isn't showing up in my computer but it does show in device manager ...

I can't format it if it doesn't show ....

This little 60gig SSD is taking the full load right now and it's half full !

 

[aschumacher]

<font size="-2">OK, from someone who is dumb, you have your SSD /HD strapped as primary/slave, or what 'err its 'pose to be?</font>

 

[kweaver]

Alien er I mean Allen - The HD doesn't have a jumper like other HDs do.

I've put several HDs in XP and they pop right up in my computer , no format necessary either.

I might have to take it back out and format it in XP32 just to see if Winderz7 will see it ...

 

[kweaver]

The WINTV card went in and found the drivers for it , finally one thing worked first time !

 

[kide]

Kentuck:
Are there any MoBo jumpers or anything in the BIOS settings for your SATA drives? I've had problems before........

 

[kweaver]

Gerry - I got it figured out by accident , as usual LOL.
I got to snoopin around and found Disk Management ... but now I've got a 100mb partition on the SSD that I didn't want ! Gotta watch what ya click !!

I OC'd it from 2.9 up to 3.206 and was having hangup problems ... wore out the reset button until I decided to un-clock it.

It's been a pain from the get-go. I wish I'd never bought Win7. If I could have got an XP Pro 64 I'd been a lot better off. I've got an extra XP Pro 32 still sealed but I needed 64bit so I could get more than 2.75gig ram.

My little Bro sent me a link for an online Stress Test for a PC and I'm <u>NOT</u> going to run it even though I downloaded the .exe file. I know if I posted the link here somebody would try it ... <u>NOT</u> gonna do that either! The page showed mother boards that had popped IC's and burnt from the test.

I have one mother of a head ache !!!
I may re-install and start over ..........

P.S.
and find a new LED mouse 'cause I had this one out in the garage on an old machine and a real mouse ate the mouse scroll wheel so I took it out

 

[kide]

Ken:
Don't stress test until you get the heat issue figured out (don't even ask...it cost me way more than the last hair off the top of my head...)BTW -all of the heat sink compound I've seen is silver based (reminds me of anti-seize, you cannot get it off your hands)

I just looked up the WIKI article on heat sink grease here.. If the stuff you used is actually the old ceramic based, you might want to read what they say (me, I'll go for the Gallium based stuff, none of that crummy ol silver, carbon or diamond stuff for me - no sir!)

 

[kweaver]

Gerry - I think if he'd took my "hint" I wouldn't have to worry about it. When he first put the cooler on he had it turned to where the cooler fab was over 2 of the RAM sockets

and he asked if I was going to use those two. Well DUH! He had socket 1a & 2a covered so then the RAM wouldn't have been in the correct socket #s. I told him yea I was going to later put in another 8gig so take off the cooler and turn it around so the fan would be on the other side !

When he pulled it back off I seen that he only had about a 70% contact on the thermal paste. I told him (hint!) that when I use to build power supplies I'd put a little paste on then lap the two together to get it to spread out then pull it and look to see if it covered good then stick it back together and lap it again and mount it. He didn't take the hint ... 96*F is the highest yet with the AC showing 76* in here.

I gotta hit the sheets , gotta go to town in the morn IF I can get some sleep.
The neighbor is doing some sneaky stuff outside and about an hour ago I seen on the security camera some headlights at the end of my drive leaving real slow. I don't know if it was just turning or what. Some years ago a car use to come and "park" in my drive until one night I was out in the garage with the big door open and seen them pull in , and they could see me too but they shut off anyway. I got a pump out of the tool box and walked down the middle of the drive and about half way to them they left , never seen them since.
My dogs keep making a little bark next door so I may not get any sleep.

** To everyone reading this , there is a Meth lab next door with big money ties as a Lexus comes in once a month then a Harley comes and loads up for deliveries almost on a daily bases plus the dozen or so cars that come in for a couple of days each month.
Yes I made a personal trip to the sheriff's office earlier this year.

I guess some of you might remember when a guy next door to me got shot ... well this is the same guy and I'd say it was just a little reminder as to keep him honest.
When it crosses my fence ...

 

[dtanner]

KENtuckyKEN

I had some issues with heat causing my confuser to shut down!So I put in a new cpu cooler and now don`t have a problem.I run a 3 gig dual core 250 gig drive 72 spin and 4 gig ram. seems to handle what I need now.