With my family's primary home PC having been built in 2008 and showing its age, it was time earlier this month to build my first general-use home PC in 8 years! Here's the parts list I put together and built, with a somewhat-flexible budget of around $1200: I had a spare case and existing mouse / keyboard / monitor / speakers to use with this build, so I didn't need to factor those in. The website pcpartpicker.com (the target of all of the links in the parts list above) was a particularly helpful tool in keeping track of the parts for this build as I was researching and selecting them! It was a nice upgrade over the text file and/or spreadsheet-based systems I’ve used for this in the past. Photos! In chronological order of how I executed the build! The goods, prior to the build. (Note: The LEGO blocks pictured were not actually included in the build.) 
The empty case – with its circa 2006 350W power supply with only IDE power cables, no SATA, removed – ready for components! 
Motherboard in place and screwed down! 
The Intel Core i7 CPU, still in packaging. That’s a lot of power packed into a small package! 
Close-up of CPU installed in motherboard. 
CPU locked into place (via the lock included as part of the motherboard). 
CPU with thermal paste applied and then fan installed on top. 
New power supply installed in case and wired up to motherboard. It isn’t very visible in this photo, but the CPU wires for the power switch, reset switch, and the front USB 2.0 ports are also wired to the motherboard in this photo, on the bottom edge. 
The solid state drive (SSD) and traditional hard disk drive (HDD) drive side-by-side. Even though this wasn’t my first SSD install, I was surprised anew just how small, thin and light that drive is compared to the traditional HDD. 
Drives installed in case. This older case didn’t have a spot designed to accommodate the SSD, but that drive was small and light enough that I was comfortable with just screwing one side of it into the 3.5” HDD bay (at an angle to get the screw holes to line up!). The optical (CD/DVD) drive is also installed in the top 5.25” slot. 
The G.Skill Ripjaws 2 x 8GB RAM installed (just to the right of the big CPU fan). Not sure how much faster the fancy red trim makes it, but it does look cool! 
The GeForce GTX 970 video card, just out of its packaging. This thing is a beast, size-wise! Clearly EVGA wants it to look nice out of the box, since it came with clear plastic wrap over the entire thing (a couple of pieces of which are still on and visible in this photo, such as the piece over the “GeForce GTX 970” logo on the bottom edge). 
Video card installed. It turned out to be juuust big enough in this case that I couldn’t quite install a full size hard drive directly across from it (even using a 90-degree SATA cable). 
Finally, everything assembled, with the cover on over the rear-facing motherboard ports. Both the motherboard and video card came with caps installed over their video ports (as shown here), which I appreciated. 
Mishaps and Mistakes DOA HDD So with everything assembled and monitor, keyboard, mouse, power, network, and speakers all plugged in, I hit the power button for the first time… and immediately noticed two obviously “unhappy” sounds: - A buzzing-type sound coming from the bottom portion of the case;
- A repetitive squealing / grinding sound coming from the front of the case.
The first sound turned out to be easily solvable; one of the case wires at the bottom of the case was contacting the spinning fan on the underside of the video card. Getting those wires out of the way solved that. Unfortunately, the second noise turned out to be the sound of a dead hard drive. The noise was coming from the 2TB HDD. It wouldn’t stop making the noise, and the drive wasn’t recognized by the BIOS (whereas the SSD and the optical drive were recognized with no issues). This was my first DOA (“dead on arrival”) part among the five PC builds I’ve done, so I suppose I was due. I got it returned and refunded with no issues… and ended up breaking my budget a bit by replacing it with both a fast 7200 RPM 1 TB drive for installing programs, and a 5600 RPM 4 TB drive for storing all the great photos my wife takes. Forgotten Thermal Paste Fortunately, I didn’t forget to apply thermal paste, which might have resulted in a cooked CPU. Rather, I forgot to order thermal paste. None came with the CPU I bought, and I only do PC builds infrequently (every few years) and so didn’t have any on hand. Also fortunately, my town has a little PC repair shop, and so one quick car trip and $1 later I was good to go with a single-use tube of thermal paste. Don’t Leave the Motherboard Backplate For Last With this build, I made the embarrassing mistake of leaving the install of the motherboard backplate (which ends up situated over all of the ports on the back of the PC) for last, thinking for whatever reason that I could pop it into place from the rear. However, I realized the hard way that the backplate does not install from the rear; rather, it needs to go on from the inside of the case, before the motherboard gets fastened into place. So, to my chagrin, I ended up unscrewing the motherboard from the case (leaving everything else connected), shifting it slightly to allow the backplate to be installed, and then positioning it back into place and screwing it back in. And so, oddly enough, this build came full circle, in that affixing the motherboard to the case was both the first and the last step! So How’s it Working? It’s working great! I haven’t measured it yet, but Windows 10 boots incredibly fast. The app where I’ve seen the most difference relative to my old PC is the game Cities: Skylines (the latest and greatest take on the city-builder genre pioneered by SimCity). On the old PC, saved games would take a very long time to load, and the game itself was quite playable but it would “chug” noticeably, particularly when trying to rapidly scroll around the map. On the new PC, by contrast, it’s super fast and smooth as silk! After doing “main home PC” replacements every 4 years (in 2000, 2004, and 2008), that 2008 model lasted for a solid 8 years. (It’s actually still running, although there are signs it might be on its last legs, which helped prompt this upgrade). I’m hoping this new PC has a nice long life as well! I’d like it to still be running in 8 years… at which point my 10-year-old will be headed off to college. Now there’s an interesting thought!
Last September, my primary desktop PC at home (built 2008), running Windows 7 64-bit, started exhibiting a strange set of symptoms: The system would boot up normally, but after that, certain operations, particularly operations needing to read from the hard drive, would take far longer than normal. For example: - Pressing Ctrl+S (Save) from Notepad would take a full minute to display the Save dialog, but the file would save normally after that;
- Copying files between the two internal hard drives (C: and D:) worked, but took about 20x as long as normal;
- Applications would sometimes take a very long time (1-2 minutes) to initially start;
- The game “Torchlight 2” would start, but the “loading” screen would never go away, and the background music looped abnormally, playing the same segment of music over and over again every 5-6 seconds.
- These problems would all seemingly get worse over time, until I rebooted the PC.
Not having run across an issue like this before, I tried quite a few different troubleshooting steps: | Troubleshooting Step Tried | Outcome | | Warm boot (restart the PC) | No effect | | Cold boot (power off and then power on the PC) | No effect | | Windows System Restore | Failed, with a “Failure restoring registry” error | | chkdsk /f (“Check disk” utility from the command prompt, with the “fix” parameter) | Ran ok and reported no errors for either C: or D: | | Ran the Windows built-in RAM diagnostic | Ran ok and reported no issues | | Virus scan with Microsoft Security Essentials | Ran ok and reported no issues | | Reseated hard drive SATA cables for both drives | No effect | | Killed various processes via Task Manager (suspecting a virus?) | No effect | | Disconnected the D: drive (the non-boot data drive) | No effect | | Booted into Safe Mode | No effect – Slowness issue occurred even in Safe Mode | | Ran System Restore from Windows bootable CD | Failed, same as when running System Restore from Windows itself | Finally, with other options exhausted, and uncertain whether the root cause might be a software issue with Windows itself, I took the extreme step of “repaving” the PC: Formatting the C: (boot drive) and reinstalling Windows 7. Doing that actually did initially seem to solve the problem; Windows installed with no issues on the reformatted C: drive, and I was able to reinstall and use all of my applications – for a time. Unfortunately, in January, the exact same issue suddenly started manifesting again. The PC would boot ok, and run okay for a few minutes, but then suddenly certain operations like opening new applications or saving files would suddenly start taking far longer than normal. Further, the problem started getting worse across reboots (as I ran through various troubleshooting steps), eventually to the point where Windows would hang while starting up. This time, suspecting a hardware problem with the C: drive, I took a troubleshooting step that I hadn’t tried previously: I powered off the PC, disconnected the C: drive, and powered the PC back on. Although I wouldn’t normally recommend running a PC this way, I actually had an old bootable install of Windows Vista sitting on the D: drive. With the normal boot disk (C:) disconnected, D: became the boot disk, and the old Vista install booted right up. (I also physically disconnected the PC’s network card before doing this, not wanting to run afoul of any potential 2013 security issues that a circa-2009 instance of Vista might not be equipped to handle.) Playing with the Vista install running off the D: drive, I obviously couldn’t really test any non-trivial applications, but the Windows desktop itself was actually usable enough, and exhibited no signs of the slowness issue that the exact same PC configuration, except with the C: drive connected, had been showing. From this, I tentatively concluded that the issue was a physical problem with the C: hard drive – one that my earlier chkdsk and other diagnostic measures targeted at the hard drive hadn’t picked up for whatever reason. So I set aside the old, presumably bad, C: drive. Then – figuring I might as well get a system upgrade out of this whole ordeal! – I ordered a speedy new hard drive, a Crucial m4 128GB 2.5-Inch SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SSD) (model CT128M4SSD2 - $116 on Amazon.com as of 3/2013), to serve as the new C: boot disk. Once the drive arrived, I connected it, once again installed Windows 7, re-installed my applications, and the system is once again running great! It’s been about 2 months now since the second instance of the “slowness” issues happened, and not only have there been no signs of it returning, but the system now boots faster than ever with the new SSD serving as the boot disk. I’ll update this post should the slowness issue ever return – but if you don’t see any updates to this post, you can assume that things are still running smoothly -- or that this PC was retired without this issue ever re-occurring!
This past Saturday, I was having lunch with the family in the kitchen when I heard from the office the sound effect that my new PC plays after booting. I thought that was odd (since no one was in there using the PC), but shrugged and figured that maybe the PC had rebooted itself due to some automatic update? When I heard the same sound again a few minutes later, though – indicating a second reboot in the span of a few minutes, with no one sitting at the machine – I investigated. As I worked on the PC, I found that it was rebooting itself every few minutes, at irregular intervals. The PC had never done this before; aside from some heat-related bluescreen issues after I first put the PC together, the PC had been quite stable for the 6 months or so since it was built. I had the reboot problem reproduce once while I was in the boot-time BIOS configuration utility, which proved the problem wasn’t a Windows issue. Due to the intermittent nature of the problem, I initially suspected it might be caused by another overheating issue. However, the BIOS configuration utility showed that the CPU was operating at a nice and cool (relatively speaking!) 40 degrees C or so. I also suspected a possible RAM issue – perhaps one of the four RAM modules had gone bad and was causing the reboots. However, I tried removing two of the RAM modules at a time (with the machine powered off, of course); the spontaneous reboot reproduced with only modules #1 and 2 in the machine, and also with only modules 3 and 4 in the machine, which appeared to rule out a memory module issue. Finally, though, I got “lucky” in my investigation. After the machine rebooted itself twice in rapid succession, I manually toggled off the power switch at the back of the PC’s power supply unit (PSU) to keep the machine off while I (once again) manually inspected the machine’s hardware. When I toggled the power supply unit switch back on, I got a surprise – a bright spark and a loud “POP” sound from within the power supply unit! I immediately pulled the power cord out of the PC to prevent anything further from occurring with the PSU. This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence. If the PSU had indeed gone bad somehow, I could see that the behavior of the system rebooting (with no error message, except Windows complaining that it hadn’t been shut down properly at restart time) would be consistent with the system losing power momentarily, and then getting it back immediately afterwards. I was fairly confident that the incoming power supply to the machine was OK, as I had the machine hooked up to power via a UPS (an uninterruptable power supply -- designed to ensure a consistent flow of power, even in the event of a power failure). I replaced the apparently faulty power supply unit with a spare that my father-in-law Doug had on hand (thanks Dad K.!) – and that resolved the issue! The machine has been running since Saturday afternoon with no problems. So the intermittent spontaneous reboot problem had been caused by a faulty power supply unit. I wrote “BAD” on the faulty PSU and threw it away. I also ordered a modern 500W PSU with integrated PCI-Express and 8-pin CPU connectors to replace the one I’m borrowing from my father-in-law. The lesson learned here for me is not to cheap out on buying a PSU when building a new PC! When selecting a case and power supply for this machine, I’d mostly paid attention to cases, and had just accepted the included power supply that came with the case – for the PSU, I had only really looked at the raw wattage on the PSU (450W). The PSU had turned out to be an older/cheaper model with no PCIe connection, and only one SCSI drive connection. For this PC, with reasonably demanding power requirements (including a GeForce 9800 PCIe video card), the lower-end power supply that came with the case apparently just wasn’t sufficient over the long term. In the future when building PCs, I’ll most likely opt for purchasing the case and power supply unit separately, and will certainly pay more attention to the detailed specs of the PSU to ensure that it is likely to be sufficient for the needs of the system I’m building!
When I first got my custom-built new PC running 64-bit Vista put together a few weeks ago, everything seemed to be running great: It was very fast and responsive, all of the hardware components appeared to be working, and I could play 3D games on the system with no errors. However, after a few days of using the system, it became clear that there was a problem: On four occasions, after I left the machine running overnight, I woke up in the morning to find that the machine had bluescreened while it was unattended overnight. Each time, I found that all of my open programs/windows had closed, and a error dialog was open with a message saying that the machine had bluescreened (using that term, "bluescreened"!). (However, on two occasions, the machine ran ok overnight, without bluescreening.) Also, on one occasion, the machine bluescreened while I was actively using it, while I was playing a game of Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which was especially aggravating. I really dislike system instability. I've always placed a premium on stability on systems I build; while troubleshooting and tracking down problems can sometimes be interesting, I'd much rather be spending my time on my computer to work on a project, or to play a game. So, I set out to track down and fix the cause of the bluescreens. (Note: This is the time that having a custom-built machine can be "interesting" -- if I couldn't figure out the cause of the issue, I wouldn't have the fallback option of dialing up a vendor's 1-800 number to get help dealing with the problem!) Bad RAM? My first thought was that one of the sticks of RAM in the system might be bad, or maybe that the two sets of two RAM sticks that I had put into the machine -- a set of 2 2GB sticks from Corsair, and a set of 2 2GB sticks from Crucial (8 GB total) -- were incompatible with one another. I wasn't terribly happy about this prospect, since it would involve additional troubleshooting which stick(s) of RAM were responsible for the problem, and then having to ship the parts back to the store for a replacement or a refund -- something I've never needed to do before. I decided to use a memory test utility to try and determine whether there really was a RAM issue. I found a nice blog post by Shivaranjan Bhoopathy detailing Vista's built-in memory diagnostic tool (thanks Shivaranjan!). I had been previously unaware of this utility; I'd had it in mind that I'd need to find a 3rd-party utility to do the job. I ran the utility (which was designed to run after a reboot of the machine, and then automatically running the utility on the subsequent boot before Windows loads). To my relief, the utility reported that all of my RAM was ok! However, this meant that I needed to continue looking for the cause of the bluescreens. Heat Issue? My experience over the years has shown that weird, sometimes-reproducible, sometimes-not, hardware-related issues are often attributable to overheating. I found a nice, free utility for Windows, SpeedFan, which gives a readout of CPU temperature (among other features). SpeedFan reported that my two CPUs were running at a temperature of between 70 and 75 degrees C -- very hot, dangerously so, for the CPU! I also rebooted the machine, entered the built-in BIOS utility program as the machine was booting, and checked the temperature there; the BIOS utility program confirmed that the CPU temperature was a very high 70+ degrees C. So, at this point I thought I'd found the cause of the problem; the only question was how to fix it. I turned off the machine, opened up the case, and checked the heatsink. I found that the heatsink was slightly loose -- I was able to wiggle it back and forth slightly with my fingers; if I had installed the heatsink correctly, then I shouldn't have been able to move it at all. The problem turned out to be that two of the four "posts" on the corners of the heatsink which bolt the heatsink tightly down against the surface of the CPU were not tightened down all of the way. As a result, the heatsink wasn't making tight contact against the CPU surface, and consequently wasn't doing a good job of drawing the heat away from the CPU. I properly tightened down the heatsink, and confirmed that it was now tightly bolted down against the CPU surface, and couldn't be "wiggled." I turned the machine back on, and monitored the temperature with SpeedFan. This time, the CPU temperature never rose above 40-45 degrees C, even after the machine had been on for a while. Much better! Unfortunately, after I left the machine on overnight once again, I came back to it in the morning to find that it had, once again, bluescreened while it was unattended overnight. This meant that I needed to continue looking for the cause of the issue. BIOS and Network Driver Update At this point, I was running out of ideas of things to check. I had been doing some large file copies over the network while the machine was unattended overnight (copying photos and music files from my old PC to the new one); I thought that maybe a problem with the network driver or the machine BIOS might be responsible for the bluescreening problems. I visited the Foxconn downloads site (my motherboard manufacturer's site), and downloaded a new Network driver and installed that; then (unfortunately violating the troubleshooting principle of "only change one thing at a time between tests"), I also downloaded and installed an updated BIOS, using the Foxconn LiveUpdate utility, also from the Foxconn site. After the BIOS update, I was afraid momentarily that I had "bricked" my motherboard when, after the machine rebooted following the update, I was presented with a scary-looking error message following the machine's power-on self-tests: CMOS Checksum Bad However, after some hurried research via Google search (on another machine), this error message turned out only to represent a notification that the machine's BIOS had been updated. I was able to just bypass the error and continue to boot into Windows, and the machine was fine. This notification is a good thing, in the case that I might have had a virus that had performed a BIOS update (for who-knows-what purposes). However, (1) the error message was somewhat unnecessarily scary/unhelpful, and (2) it might have been nice if the Foxconn update utility would have warned me about the message in advance, so I didn't have to get so worried upon seeing it! The same "CMOS Checksum Bad" error message appeared again upon a subsequent boot, but I was (apparently) able to clear it simply by going into the machine's boot-time BIOS utility, and then doing a save-and-exit from the utility (without changing anything). Conclusion In any event, after installing the BIOS and Network driver updates, I've had no further bluescreening problems! The machine has been rock-solid stable ever since -- just the way I like it. I can conclude that either or both of the BIOS and Network driver updates was responsible for fixing the problem -- although as I noted earlier, it would have been nice if I'd performed the updates one at a time, so I could better conclude what the specific solution to the problem was. I'm also happy in retrospect that the bluescreens occurred, since it led me to discovering the heat issue with the machine and the improperly-installed heatsink; if I hadn't noticed that, letting the machine run for a long period of time at 70+ degrees C might have had a significant negative impact on the life of the CPU. I also got to discover a couple of cool utilities that I hadn't been previously aware of, namely, the built-in Vista memory diagnostic tool, and the SpeedFan temperature-monitoring utility.
After recently building my new PC, one of the few problems I had is that the front audio connection on the PC wasn't working. The PC case (a XION II XON-101) included an audio jack on the front panel of the case, and the motherboard (a Foxconn P45A-series) supported that front audio connection, but when I would plug in headphones to the front audio jack, nothing would happen; sound would continue playing through the speakers (connected via the PC's back panel audio jack), and no sound would come through the speakers connected to the front audio jack. I opened up the case and double-checked that the audio cables from the front panel of the case were properly connected to the motherboard, but everything appeared to be fine. After some Google searching, I ended up finding the clue to the solution in a post near the bottom of this forums.whirlpool.net.au forum thread: A manufacturer-specific audio driver needed to be installed, instead of the default Microsoft driver provided with Vista. Checking my motherboard manual, I found that the onboard audio was provided by Realtek. I downloaded the Realtek audio driver from the Foxconn support site, installed it, and the problem was solved! Audio now plays properly through the headphones when headphones are plugged into the front audio jack.
Earlier this month, I built a new PC to use as my primary home desktop machine. It was the 3rd PC build I've done, with the earlier builds having been in 2004 and in 2000. One of my goals for this build was to keep the budget under $700 (not including a monitor). This is the parts list that I ended up with: | Motherboard | Foxconn P45A-S LGA 775 Intel ATX | $110 | newegg.com | | Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale 2.53GHz | $80 | frys.com (on sale) | | RAM | Corsair 4 GB (2x 2GB) DDR2-800 (PC2 6400) TWIN2X4096-6400C5DHX | $26 | frys.com (on sale) | | | Crucial 4 GB (2x 2GB) DDR2-800 (PC2 6400) | $30 | frys.com (on sale) | | Hard Drive | Western Digital 1 TB SATA2 16 MB Cache | $120 | newegg.com | | Video Card | XFX GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB | $110 | newegg.com | | DVD-RW Drive | LG|GH20NS15 20X SATA | $23 | newegg.com (on sale) | | OS | Vista 64-bit Home Premium (OEM) | $100 | newegg.com | | Case + PSU | XION II Black Steel ATX Mid Tower | $60 | newegg.com | Total cost of all parts and software: $659 Everything else that I needed either came integrated on the motherboard (sound, network) or else was "recycled" from my previous machine (monitor, mouse, keyboard, UPS, XBox 360 USB gamepad). Here are the assembled goods, just prior to the build: 
I was able to snag the good deals (at least as of this month, 11/2008!) on the processor and RAM via my RSS subscription to slickdeals.net; I knew that I was going to be building the machine in November, so when those deals came across Slickdeals in October, I snapped them up. I also was able to save some money on the cost of the system by putting all of the individual parts on my birthday wish list; I got some of the components for my birthday, saving me from having to buy them. (Thanks very much Dad, Dad-in-law K., and Jeremy!) I snapped a few more pics during the early stages of assembling the machine. The empty case: 
The motherboard (Foxconn P45A-S), fresh out of the box, with no parts inserted yet: 
The motherboard with the CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo E7200) and heatsink mounted, in the case: 
So far, I'm really enjoying 64-bit Vista. With the 8 GB of RAM and the other parts I put into the system, it runs very smoothly -- as fast, if not faster, than XP ran on my old 2004 machine that was built on a similar budget. In particular, Vista seems to start up (from a cold boot) noticeably faster than XP used to. Based on my experience so far, I'd recommend Vista over XP for anyone purchasing a new desktop machine, at least for any machine with better than low-range specs. I did have an initial issue with the machine bluescreening on a few occasions when I left it running overnight, which I've since resolved; I'll detail my experiences in troubleshooting that issue, and the eventual solution, in a future post. With the set of hardware in this build, I have a Vista Windows Experience Index score of 5.4 overall: -
5.4 Processor -
5.9 RAM -
5.9 Graphics -
5.9 Gaming Graphics -
5.9 Hard Disk This is pretty much in line with my expectations; the nice thing is that I picked out a motherboard which will allow me to upgrade to a faster, quad core, processor in a couple of years should I feel the need to do so. (With the good deal that I got on the processor that I bought, upgrading from the 2.54 GHz processor I bought to even a 3.0 GHz would have run me around an additional $80 -- double the price of what I paid -- so I'm happy with the deal I got, even if the processor is slightly "underpowered" compared to the rest of the machine.) In practice, the machine has run very smoothly with several of my older games that I've tried out on it that chugged a bit on my older system, such as Oblivion and Titan Quest; I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the machine also runs Call of Duty 4, a fairly new game which was included with the GeForce 9800 that I bought, very smoothly as well, even on "high" settings. Hopefully this computer will turn out to be serviceable for use as a gaming machine for at least a few years (in addition to its roles as a hobbyist development machine, and general household use PC)!
|
|
Posts
