Over the weekend I built a computer for my friend and future brother-in-law Chris, A.K.A. Ultimate Photon System (see post below), and man, what a pain in the ass and awesome joy it was! I built my tower and have upgraded it here and there over the past few years so this was my second complete build. I got him hooked on PC gaming via Battlefield 2142 so now I have a gaming buddy! So we shopped on Newegg.com for all the components and ordered them about a week and half ago for just over $700. It’s not a water cooled quad core triple SLI sonuvabitch but it gets the job done. The beauty of building it yourself is that you can always upgrade down the line, the reason I convinced him not to buy say a proprietary HP or Dell system. His specs are:
Cooler Master Case
Intel Core 2 Duo E7200
2gb GSkill RAM
500gb hard drive
550 watt PSU
Vista Home Premium 64-bit
NVIDIA 7800GT (a hand-me-down from yours truly. His first upgrade will be the GPU but it plays BF2142 smooth as silk so he’s happy for the time being)
ABIT Ab9 Pro Motherboard <----POS
The motherboard. This picky piece of shit caused so much frustration that we ordered new RAM thinking that it was the reason it wasn’t booting up. Investigation into the matter from the hundreds of other people who had issues with this board indicated that it needs certain RAM from certain vendors with a particular voltage and specific timings. The new RAM didn’t work so I thought it was the video card. I swapped it out with my 8800GTX and still no dice. I then discovered online that the E7200 was troublesome on this board too. So F that, it wasn’t worth anymore time or frustration. We ordered the a board from Gigabyte and boom bam it’s up and running. So watch out for HawlendRion and...em...JellyBean2142... to frag yo ass! See you online.
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