It has been a while since I built a high performance desktop. In fact, the last two desktop I built was a small form-factor (SFF) that are pretty good in its own right (a Shuttle SB83G5 and an Asus S-Presso). But its been a long while since I built a big, honking powerhouse. Inspired by
Scott Hanselman's blog post on
Building the Ultimate Developer PC, I decided to trade in my portable workhorse (an HP dv9000t 17" laptop) for a monster. And that pretty much sums it up...
The shopping list
Assembly
Staging the parts
Prepping the case
Running power
Motherboard and drives, running cables
That heat-sink is huge! And so are the video cards!
The finished product
Build Notes
Everything went together more or less without issues. The case was wonderful to work with. All drives were mounted on rubber grommets, which has helped reduce the overall noise--- and each drive bay was removable which made assembly a breeze. Would have been nice to have a few more motherboard mounting screw backs but it wasn't a big deal. There were 3 aspects that were challenges I would have done differently.
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- Power cables. The cables that came with the PS were of the correct length but were a little hard to run through the case. I think aftermarket, rounded cables would have worked better.
- IDE cables. Pretty much the same, should have bought more rounded aftermarket cables, about 16" in length.
- Mounting the heat-sink. The pics don't do it justice, this thing is HUGE! I wish I had installed it before I mounted the motherboard in the case--- tightening the mounts was a challenge with it in in the case.
Operating System Install
I decided to bite the x64 bullet and install Vista Business x64 edition. Install had only one bump; the initial install went fine but after the first reboot it blue screened. And did so consistently. After a great deal of research, the answer turned out to be that I had all 4 sticks of 1GB ram installed. After removing two sticks the system reinstalled correctly and completed without issue. Probably the most frustrating issue was reinstalling the 2 sticks of RAM and seeing the box continue to crash. Turns out there is an issue with Vista out of the box that it doesn't handle more than 3GB of ram very well. There is a stand-alone patch (
KB929777) that fixes this. Installing motherboard updates went fine along with all other device drivers. I did experience a number of crashes that seem tied to both Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Again, after research and patience it turned out that I had two bad sticks of RAM. NewEgg took very good care of me and the replacements fixed the issues.
Bottom Line
Me likey! This box is FAST! Not as fast as I had expected, but very fast. I do not wait for much anymore, and its hard working on other computers as a result. Games rock. Virtual PC/VMWare runs blazing fast. Buying the two video cards was overkill, especially with two monitors. SLI technology means combining two video cards into one, and that one video card powering only a single monitor. I am considering long term of getting a third monitor and adding another video card; use the "main" for SLI and the 3rd to power the two "side" monitors. Again, overkill. Total cost was a little over $2000, which is before around $300 in rebates that continue to trickle in.