Doctor Frankstein would be so proud, but let’s start this story from the top. In the beginning, there was darkness. Then, a whole lot happened (insert your favourite religious or scientific belief about how Life, the Universe and Everything eventually happened to exist, here) and by the end of the year 2007 A.D., I found myself half-wanting, half-coerced to buy a new PC. The fact that my most recent system, named ‘Citadel Station’ after the space station on which pretty much all of the System Shock 1 game’s story was set, was over five years old (check the date on these gallery pictures), and that it broke down completely, might have influenced my decision making process a little. The end result is that one Sunday afternoon I sat down and ‘clicked together’ a new machine.
This in itself is a little unusual for me, as all my previous systems were only assembled after very careful consideration of each and every component with regard to performance and price, which usually lead to myself spending multiple months reading reviews and browsing online stores until I eventually would up finding THE perfect system. In this case however, I just couldn’t sum up the motivation to go through all that, hence the ‘go to one of the online stores you like, fill the shopping cart with stuff that looks OK, cross-reference it all (Chloe O’Brian has NOTHING on me ;) ) with online reviews, to make sure none of the selected components is a big pile of donkey dung, and then JUST ORDER IT ALREADY’ approach.
So, with my new PC ordered, everything was done and everybody lived happily ever after. Wrong of course! It all started small with the display that I wanted to order along with my PC making my entire order exceed the maximum allowable shipping weight. No biggie, I just created a second order for the display, and some other stuff I wanted anyway. The bigger problem was the CPU. In my drive-by computer-shopping run I had selected an Intel E8400 Dual-Core CPU which, unlike practically all of the other components, was displayed as ‘out-of-stock, expected in a week’. Turns out Intel has some trouble manufacturing the ‘Wolfdale’ CPUs and really can’t satisfy the demand right now which made my order get postponed three times!
I was originally planning to have the system by the end of March where incidentally I wanted to visit a LAN party. I ended up visiting the LAN party with only my display which, thanks to the separate order I had to do for it, had of course arrived days before. A friend kindly loaned me his old box so that I could at least enjoy a few games of Rocket Arena 3. Anyway, back to ‘el PC’: As mentioned before the CPU kept getting delayed over and over again, and when supplier pushed back the delivery date the third time, I simply cancelled the CPU with them, freeing up the rest of the order, and ran out to eBay to order it. I had previously seen the CPU go in and out of stock at other shops so I figured I would eventually find it somewhere. I think ended up paying 20 EUR more than I would otherwise have due to shipping & charges but that wasn’t too bad given the alternatives I had at the original shop (buy one of the E6xxx series CPUs which are slower, consume more power AND are more expensive, or upgrade to the Quad Core version of my CPU for a measly 650 bucks more). The final nuisance I had to live through was that both PC and CPU were sent to me via those parcel delivery services (two different ones actually) that I dread so much because they only deliver when I’m not home and their depot isn’t anywhere close to where I could easily fetch the stuff. Ironically enough, the CPU arrived a day before the rest of my PC, but I wasn’t home to take the delivery the first time around that so I got everything the same day. Here’s a pic of my personal ‘Christmas in April’:
Now this is the moment where my Frankensteinian work of making this beast come to life began. First I needed a flat, well lit working surface. I chose the kitchen table which fits that description quite well. Of course that meant that ‘pizza box mountain’ had to move, but when it comes to unpacking a new toy, I’m willing to make some sacrifices. With the table cleared, here’s the empty tower:
It’s a pretty neat box, especially given the fact that I chose it without prior in depth review, solely based on two criteria, namely 1. it doesn’t have one of those annoying ‘doors’ at the front and 2. a quick search on Google (after I had put it in my cart) mentioned it was rather silent. In addition to that, I found that it has a ginormous 250mm fan embedded in its side panel, and offers a nice rail system for mounting all the drives (snap rails onto drive, shove drive into bay, done). I put the motherboard spacers in and mounted the board with ease.
Next up, the power supply:
Not much to say there except that this thing must be filled with lead or something, it is insanely heavy. It was quickly mounted into the case, unlike our next candidate: The CPU heatsink!
This thing was a real pain to mount. Assembly is easy: Remove sticker, use 4 included screws to attach 775 mounting bracket. The problem is getting this thing onto your CPU and making it hold. If you’ve ever installed a socket 775 fan/heatsink, you know the four retention pins that you push down and then simply hold everything in place. Well not in my case. I needed 4 tries and way too much force for my taste to get this thing to stay, worsened by the fact that due to the size of the heatsink, you have to reach around and under it to get to the pins making it difficult to push them downward. And once I got the heatsink in place, I had to get the fan attached to it too which isn’t much fun either using that finicky retention ‘wire’.
Anyway, with the CPU and heatsink mounted, I put in the RAM, featuring yet another whacky fan contraption making me start to long for the days where the CPUs were still passively cooled, and the two graphics cards. Much like the power supply, the weight and size of these things caught me off guard. I mean, I was expecting them to take up two slots due to the plastic exhaust enclosure mounted on them, but the length of these cards is astounding. Had I bought a 3-way SLI system, the lower half of my motherboard would have been completely covered up by graphics cards! But enough talk, here’s the system with the RAM and video cards installed:
Next, I put the optical drive in, followed by the harddrives, and then I went about cabling the front panel, only to realize that I had to remove the lower graphics card again to be able to reach the respective ports. Eventually I managed to get everything in, connected power to all the drives and chassis fans and closed the box. Now for the first test: I was quite nervous before turning on the system especially knowing that my last assembly was years back and all of the technology of that time was different (socket 478 instead of 775, AGP instead of PCI-E, P-ATA instead of S-ATA, …) but I guess I would’ve had to try it sooner or later. First I had to move the box from the kitchen to my office though, which is when I realized that this system weighs about one metric fuckton! It is without question the heaviest PC I have ever owned, heck I’m practically sure I have two systems that will not equal its weight even when combined! Ah well, heave the beast over to the other room and turn it on it was and to my big astonishment, the system booted right away! Everything just worked, and when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING. Even the harddrive-LED, which I was practically doomed to connect in reverse, at least I cannot remember a single system where I got it right the first time, was working! OK, so maybe Dr Frankenstein’s achievement of creating life was a bit bigger then mine but at least mine’s not fictional! Hah!
In conclusion, here’s my brand new PC:
…OK, now this is the point where I realize that, despite all the pictures I took, I didn’t take one of the complete system! Whoops. Well I’ll add one later, I promise! In the meantime, just imagine a big black tower sitting here.
Update: As promised, here it is in all its glory:
After realizing that my network had become crowded with plenty of machines named after the System Shock Universe (there’s SHODAN, Xerxes and of course Citadel) I figured it was time to name one after the Wing Commander Universe again and thus it shall henceforth be known under the, very unspellable, name ‘Ghorah Khar’. Oh, and this is what my kitchen table looked like after I was done assembling:
I guess I’ll have clean that up some day. ;)