Token Female Gamer

New Years Eve at our house has evolved into an almost forgotten holiday and thus tends to be a quite affair. Having done the whole crazy, drunk, excessive, crowded party plenty of times, I find myself quite happy to leave it all behind for some snuggling and champagne. (Really! The idea of being sandwiched in amongst thousands of drunk, sweaty bodies is singularly unappealing.)

This year I took advantage of the guaranteed quiet evening at home and built myself a new computer.

For anyone who hasn’t kept up with my sporadic posting, my husband built himself a new computer as an anniversary present. And though I claimed that I would wait for a new computer until our next anniversary (I tried to wait, I really did!), I only made it as far as the New Year.

Thus on December 31st we spent the day at Fry’s shopping for parts, which turned out the be a perfect day for shopping as traffic was light and the store was quite pleasantly empty.

The plan was to purchase only computer guts, as I wanted to keep my old case. Its cute and swirly and I really wanted to spend the money on better internals. This turned out to be quite a bad idea, but I will get to that later.

Shopping was immanently pleasant, which is an odd thing for me to admit, as I am notorious for despising the endeavor that is shopping. Computer parts being almost the only exception, I do so love to shop for hardware.

This is the list of items we ended up with:
ASUS Motherboard P8Z77-V Thunderbird
Intel Core i7 3770 Processor
Zalman CNPS9900A LED CPU Fan
DDR3 16BG 2133MHz
SSD 250GB
2TB Hard Drive
Silent Pro 800 Power supply
BD-Rom/DVD Rewriter
ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660Ti
Windows 7

After returning home, I spent the afternoon saving all my personal files off my old computer. Pictures take forever to transfer! Then around 9pm the building saga began.

The first step was to empty my computer case of all its old, used up innards and of course clean up all the dust bunnies that have accumulated over the years. Turns out, cleaning an old case, especially one with quite a few built in fans is not easy. (Clue #1 that keeping the case was a bad idea.)

All the new internals squashed into the old case.

Then came the fun part, installing the motherboard, power supply, DVD drive, hard drive, and oops the case is so old that it didn’t have an SSD slot. (Clue #2 that keeping the case was a bad idea.)

Only bummer about building the computer so late on the 31st was that everything was closed at that point, so running out to find an SSD mounting bracket was out of the question. But I wanted to be able to check to make sure everything was working, so I just propped the SSD drive in there. Plugging it in did keep it quite immobilized.

After mounting the processor on the motherboard, it was time to install the oversized fan we had purchased. It not only upped the cooling capacity for the processor, but also glowed red. Yes, I’m a total sucker for extra glowy bits.

The instructions for the fan were quite possibly the most unhelpful, disorganized, waste of paper I have had the misfortune to read. After upwards of five attempts at deciphering the instructions, I finally figured out that there was a bracket that went underneath the motherboard. Yup, the motherboard that I had already screwed in. Old computer case equals no handy cut away underneath the motherboard for just such an emergency, thus I had to unscrew the entire motherboard. (Clue #3 that keeping the old case was a bad idea.)

Thanks to those horrible fan instructions I had to unscrew the motherboard twice more! To say I was frustrated is a slight understatement. This was by far the hardest step in the entire process. But lesson learned. Next time I figure out the instructions for the fan first!

Finally it was time for the graphics card and since by this point nothing seemed to go right, I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that the card was too long to fit well into the case (Clue #4 that keeping the old case was a bad idea.) I managed to wedge it in, but barely.

New case with everything installed.

The final straw for the case came when I tried to put the side panels on, tried being the operative word here. It turns out that the huge CPU fan was positioned perfectly to prevent the fan, attached to the side panel, from fitting. (Clue #5 that keeping the old case was a bad idea.)

Not being able to close my computer case finally convinced me that a new case was necessary. Thus after booting up the new computer to make sure all the parts were working, the build computer saga was put on hold until the following day.

The mission of the next day was of course to get a new case and frankly I was done being picky. All I wanted was a case that would mount a SSD drive and be large enough to fit the monster graphics card.

Thankfully we found one that fit all these specifications quite easily, plus it ended up having awesome blue LED lights.

War Wounds

Day two of the saga ended up being quite similar to the first, remove all the parts from the old case and install them into the new one. This ended up being surprisingly painless and didn’t end up taking that long, thanks to all my previous failures (aka experience).

Even though it was a challenge, I really enjoyed the process and found it highly satisfying to have done it all myself. Plus I really laid claim to the thing as I bled all over the inside of that machine. My hands got so cut up, mostly from the fan; war wounds!

Thanks to my husband for all the back up. My new computer is totally awesome, silent, fast, highly dependable, and anointed with blood. Can’t wait to build the next one! <3

Tags: achievements, adventure, build, fail, geeky, husband, loot, pc, recycle, win

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Articles, Hardware, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.