After some initial confusion, things are going a lot smoother building my new rig. This is the first computer I’ve built from the ground up in probably like 5 years. I’ve just been upgrading my trusty Pentium all this time, but its starting to show its age. So I really want to take my time and do this right. I’ve been reading all the manuals from cover to cover and planning out how everything is going to connect. Now that I know what I’m working with I just need to snap it all together. Read on for some more photos…

The main reason I’m taking things so slow is due to the water-cooling. I’ve built tons of computers before, but I always used the included heatsink. This time I wanted to go for water-cooling, but since its my first time I went with an all-in-one solution. I got the Coolermaster Aquagate S1. It was a reasonable price and looks great. Not a high-end cooler by any means, but it should do the trick. Right now I’m about done running the leak-test. The S1s been on straight for over 24 hours and its as dry as the jokes on SNL ;). Call me paranoid, but the last thing I need is water all over my brand new machine.

Next up, I installed two Scythe S-Flex 120mm fans onto the bottom of the case. These are top-of-the-line quality with fluid dynamic bearings manufactured by Sony.

Luckily the case I got has a mesh opening and mounts for the fans. I just needed to remove the mesh so I could screw the fans in to the bottom and still loop the cords through the case.

This should add a lot of airflow to the case (blowing right up on the motherboard) which will help keeping this baby cool. I also removed the back exhaust fan in preparation for the water-cooling radiator.

I’ve got 2 Lightscribe DVD burners, a Scythe Kamameter, and some no-name card reader all mounted in the front drive bays. I also got in the hard-drives too.

The Western Digital 150GB RaptorX is installed in a special HDD rack mounted on the top of the case. This is a very unique drive in that it actually has a plexiglass window so you can see the drive-platters spinning. The rack also has some LEDs on it which should make this a little more apparent than you can see in the picture. This hard-disk is one of, if not the fastest SATA drive available spinning at 10,000RPM. However it clocks in at a meager 150GB, so I also installed a WD RE2 750GB drive, a highly reliable enterprise-class HDD. Initially I wanted to go for 1TB just to have it, but I looked at the benchmarks and the smaller drives were much faster. This should be good for a while though.

All thats left now is to toss in the heavy equipment: the motherboard, CPU, RAM and the video card. Then just connect the crazy mess of wires and cables and hope everything went smooth. Man I can’t wait. Crysis, here I come!

Tags: Hardware, Ramblings //