The Beast

As some of you may know, I (Kevin) took on a little project after Christmas. Our old Dell desktop has served us well but is getting up there in age a little bit (going on 6 years now). We decided we wanted a new computer, and I decided I wanted to put it together myself. It's something I've always been curious about doing, and now seemed like as good a time as any. It actually was pretty easy and I would definitely do it this way again. For those who have been asking about the components I used, here you go. I thought about putting some nerdy comments about each component and any problems/solutions, but decided against it. I don't want to bore you too much!

This first group of stuff all came in the barebones kit I bought. Sometimes you can get stuck with stuff you don't like in a kit, but this had stuff I was already looking at and it saved me like $120 by buying it together (It was $499 with the $30 rebate for the RAM):

• Intel DP45SG Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700
• Ultra X-Blaster ATX Mid-Tower Case
• OCZ Dual Channel DDR3 RAM 2GB (2 x 1GB)
• Hitachi Deskstar 500GB Hard Drive
• Ultra 550 Watt Power Supply

These are the other things I bought to finish it up:

• Samsung DVD Burner
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4830
• Asus V72 CPU Fan
• Saitek Eclipse Keyboard
  
• Ultra 120mm Case Fan x 2
• Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
  
• OCZ Freeze

We had already owned a Logitech MX1000 mouse and Logitech z-2300 speakers for a few years and a Samsung 24" widescreen monitor, so I didn't have to worry about those things. In the end, everything works fabulously and I only had a few minor hiccups along the way (had to manually install the ethernet driver and I had to take it all apart once in order to reseat the cpu fan when the cpu temp shot up to 60 degrees celsius while messing with the BIOS).

Here are a few pictures:

Just getting started...
Motherboard is in, but no video card, hard drive, or cables yet.

All done!

Side by side with the old Dell:


And now a little bonus for indulging me this long. Noah's favorite hiding place: the ottoman!



~Kevin