So, between the kids needing to use my machine more lately,
the Windows 8 stuff going on, and my ongoing Windows Media Center pain, I was
clear I needed to get a machine in John’s room and fix the connectivity to
Thomas’ machine. What better way to do
this than to first build a new honking machine for me, and let all the other
bits roll downhill…
John’s build was painless, because there was nothing to do…I
had a beautiful Corsair 650W PS sitting around, bought a nice Rosewill case
(with LED fans in the front and everything…) for John – moved the motherboard (including
CPU cooler, memory and an 8800GTS video card), a DVD drive, a couple of HDD
from my 3U server rack case to the new one, powered it up and, as expected, worked
first time… just need to wipe some of my
stuff off the data HDD, and he’s good to go.
Thomas’ machine (a nice quite Shuttle) is still probably enough
for another school year…connectivity is by USB WiFi – will play with that while
they’re out of town to see if there’s anything I can easily fix (short of
drilling a hole in the floor and running Cat5e...).
My build however…the best of times / the worst of
times. Got the mbd mounted (new Gigabyte
Z77 board), CPU in (unlocked quad-core i7 J),
16 GB RAM, re-jiggered the fans to accommodate the 2x120mm fans for the H80 water
cooler :D, and powered everything up. My
good luck streak continues, posted first time – except one H80 fan was on full
bore, the other not rolling at all… No
problem, plugged ‘em into the mbd headers, no problem, back into the H80 – same
result…grr. OK, we’ll fix that later, it’s
running, and too fast = cool, not cooked CPU…
we can live with it for the moment…
Now the new 680 GTS video card – cool!!! Mounted it in the
mbd, and posted – no problem – ‘til I realized that in my 3U server case, the
top of the case is just a TINY bit above the screws to hold the backplate
risers in…these new video cards not only extend almost ¼ inch above the case
line, but they expect power jacks to be plugged in vertically into the
card. NO WAY my case is ever going to
close with this card (or any similar card) installed….we’ll have to see what
kind of goofy case mod this is going to cause me to perform…
Here it is in the rack…case open, haven’t yet done any cable
management, but I did install a 240 GB SSD to boot from, and it is faaaast…
about 8 sec from dead stop to login prompt, about 2 sec from login to
desktop. Nice.
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