Getting it Together

I ordered most of the parts from various retail outlets online. I figured the 3870 Radeon cards would be the hardest to get, but I was wrong. The Corsair Ram I had to order from 3 different outlets before I could ever get it shipped. One of them ANTONLINE was the most annoying vendor to deal with. After a week and 1/2 of "Sir we have possibly shipped your item" I received an email saying the order was cancelled.... I mean in this day and age you can't tell me for a week if an order went out...

I wound up getting almost everything from Tigerdirect and Newegg. Let me say Tigerdirect RULES! Fast shipping and always in stock. NewEgg did great as well.

Installation of the hardware was pretty easy from the start. The hardest portion of the Asus Maximus Extreme board is probably figuring out how to attach the back Standard ATX faceplate. I just wound up bending most of the prongs off and slapping it on there. One the board was all strapped into the case, I added the CPU and the rest of the components within several minutes, twas a breeze.

Finally I booted the system up without a fan or the waterblock on the CPU unit and was quite amazed at how hot the chip got almost immediately. This baby turned HOT! A few minutes of fooling with the BIOS got me to the temp of the core, running at 100`C at this point. I hadn't added the "coolant" to the case yet ( the coolant reservoir is ontop and requires you to poor the blue coolant into it to start circulating the system). I wanted to make sure I had the system setup before adding the water. Given this is my first water cooled system and having water running around any components has always made me squeamish. Days of old, sitting in my "shack" with my amateur radios had only 1 rule, leave the beverage outside...

The Rig

Lets see the specs!

Asus Maximus Extreme MOBO

2 Diamond Radeon 3870 (to be used in Crossfire mode)

4 - 1gb Corsair Twin3x2048-1800c7dfin G DDR3

Intel Core 2 Extreme x9659 (base clock at 3ghz)

2 Seagate Barracude 500gb SATA drives



2 NEC 24 HD panels. These are incredible, but after seeing these
I wonder if I shouldn't have waited.



And of course 1 lonely Panasonic DVD R/RW drive

The case is a 3d Mercury Gigatbyte Chassis with a Watercooling system in it. A great video for it is here:

The joy of building a PC

What could be more enjoyable to a geek than the fresh smell of plastic bubble wrap or that first opened motherboard smell. 2 pm (right after the UPS man arrives) sitting in your office putting together your newly gotten booty rules! And before we go further, let us praise this UPS man, for all that he does. For without him, we would have to drive to the store 10 times before we got all that we needed...

So I embarked on building a PC for myself, no dells, no hp's. And not just any PC, but the ultimate gaming rig as of Dec 07. Something that I could sink my hard earned time into playing COD4 or Crysis or Unreal, whatever... This is the story of one man, Vista 64 (and 32), a dream, and 6k