new machine

Before the new year, I built a new PC to handle some of the bigger projects I was getting. The laptop that I bought last summer for development had been working fine until I started doing a bunch of Flash animation -- with working files that exceeded 380Mb in some cases. The disk speed, monitor space, memory, etc were simply insufficient for what I was doing.

Looking at buying an adequate system was bewildering as machines were running into the thousands of dollars.

I opted to build a system from scratch to save money -- and spend the money I had on parts that I needed.

This is just a quick start-to-finish photo journal of what I built.

Starting with my nearly empty office.


all the parts (minus the RAM, thanks guys -- not going to get it live without the RAM!)


Nice hole in the monitor box, hope it still works.


Motherboard sans processor sitting on empty case (Power supply came with the case -- it was a great deal)


Processor and heat sync installed


DVD-RW and 160Gb HDD installed in case


All the main components in place, ready to wire it


All wired up


The next day the RAM showed up


Here's the case all together


Here's the machine running -- pretty lights! If you look under the table, you'll see that the support is not locked in place. I found this out a few days after I took this when I finally uploaded these photos and was looking through them. Had the support given way, I'd have 2 19" FLat Screen Samsung Monitors laying on a crushed PC.


I added a wireless PCI LAN card a few days later (see the antenna near the bottom)


It turned out that the video card I bought had trouble when I plugged the second monitor in, so I pulled another card I had out of a box and fixed it.

This is an nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4400 that had a bad fan on the heatsync


This is the same card with a new fan and heatsync


I also added a 120mm exhaust fan to the back to help keep everything cool. So here's the finished system, with a good look at the unlocked table support.


In the end, here's what I have:

Gigabyte Motherboard with nVidia nForce3 chipset
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor
160Gb Seagate 7200RPM HDD (soon adding a second Maxtor 250Gb 7200RPM HDD I got on sale)
2Gb OCZ PC3200 RAM
nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4400 with 128Mb on-board RAM
NEC DVD-R/DVD-RW optical drive
400Watt Rosewill Power Supply
Windows XP Pro
2x80mm blue LED case fans (came with the Rosewill Case)
1x120mm exhaust fan
Logitech Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
2x19" Samsung SyncMaster 997 Flat CRT Monitors

Stable, quiet, and lightning-freaking fast.