Building my first computer

Motherboard must say Core2Quad ready. Some are and some are not.

Power supply is also critical, and watt rating is not good enough to go by.

The biggest tip - Don't go overboard. You dont' have to buy the Best of Everything or take on a design that is too ambitious . The beauty of computers is that you can upgrade and rebuild them over time - and the parts only get cheaper and better!


yes, for power supply, I would recommend a brand name you've heard of. Get one that is SLI rated. YOu may never do SLI, but the extra power will futur proof it to some extent.

Personally, PC Power and Cooling is my preferred brand. I've been building Personal and professional Rigs and consulting for about 10 years now, and they are the best in terms of stability and reliability.

I've only had one instance where it failed and that was when my powerlines got hit by lightning (my house is wired from the 20's and 50's - thus no grounding). And even then, the PSU took the brunt of it. I lost the mother board and CPU, but everythign else survived and was salvaged.

Also with that much RAM, you'll have to run a 64-bit OS to make use of it. 32-bit essentially tops out at 2 gb's for all practical purposes. I've not tried Vista 64-bit, but from everything I've read, it still has some serious bugs and stability issues, not to mentian an overall lack of drivers. It might be better getting XP64 and waiting for Vista to get up to speed, or for the next OS, which is due (according to MS) around 2009-2010

COOLING--
The Case - Most cases will come w/some generic fans. There are 2 types of Case fan out there: Ones that plug into the motherboard and ones that plug into the power supply. Make sure your mother board can handle the # of fans you have or use fans the use molex connectors (power supply). Air enters the case at the bottom front and leaves out the top rear. Make sure the fans are aimed in the right direction.

If you buy the RETAIL CPU, it will come with the proper fans, paste, and instructions on how to attach them. If you buy OEM (cheaper), is sometimes will not. You can buy your own fan and attach it (I've been using thermaltake for 4 years now and have been fairly satified). Just make sure, when selecting a fan, that you look up its specs to make sure it will fit on your motherboard. You'll also need to buy thermal paste (Artic silver. <-period)

You really don't need to replace the generic fans and cooling devices unless you are planning on overclocking or are going for a unique design (silent PC, for example)

sorry for spelling - Its past my bedtime and I ought to hit the sack

Good call on the OS I will stick with XP I think. Vista makes me nervous with all the horror stories I have heard. From wht I understand Vista is a RAM hog and doesn't really add any features I would be terribly interested in. With Blue-Ray being the new DVD format Vista doesn't even offer a way to watch Hi Def movies.

Speaking of Blu-ray...
I noticed you didn't mention optical drives in your OP. I personally feel Blu-ray is just too expensive at the moment to justify buying one for your new rig. I know it isn't as cool, but it might be better buying a good DVD burner and buying a Bluray drive later - once the price has come down and there's a little more selection.

Of course that a very personal decision - If you own or plan to watch a lot of Bluray movies via your computer it might be worth it.

I've personally owned Several Lite-on CD and DVD burners. They are very rugged (No rubber bands to snap- Uses gears instead)and versitile (great error correction - very good speeds!) My Lite-on DVD burner is 5 years old (doesn't even do double layer - that came out right after i bought it, lol), and I've never had a problem with it.

On a side note. I've found, that I don't do a lot of burning of DVD's or CD's. With consumer electronics becoming more advanced, I've found that I can plug everything straight into my computer or stream it through my network, or use a jump drive to move data. Other than the occasional CD for my car and some Physical Backup dics (both of which can be replaced with an IPod - or something similar), I rarely use them.

I am leaving the blue ray out of my computer until there is cheaper software and hardware available. I can't justify 300-400 when I could go and pick up a PS3 for a bit more.

I do think I will scale back the RAM for the moment to 2 gigs and stay with a 32 bit OS. Waiting till 64 bit OS and drivers are up to speed sounds like way better plan than the headaches they will cause now.

one thing about the motherboard I pick currently picked is the spec says ATI crossfire ready... does this mean a nVidia chipset is incompatible? That would make me sad seeing how the prices for a comperable ATI graphics is 3x as much the 8800 GT nVidia.

On my current setup it looks like my CPU is under aa heat sink and a fan... is this normal? Does the heat sink and fan normal come included in one of my purchaces?

Thank you for the feed back it has saved me some headaches before I even invested in anything!

I'm glad to see Blu-Ray winning the market. I had a feeling it would as soon as I saw Disney promoting it.

I have a Lite-on combo drive and I'm very happy with it, good product.

I find I'm using my writer less and less. Now I've got eSATA and use a regular hard drive for all my external storage. File sharing is done over my LAN. With flash drives becoming standard, external storage will only get more convenient. Right now, an external hard drive is rather bulky, but backing up data at full hard drive speed is wonderful. A more compact flash drive would be even better. Heck, I may find I don't need a writer at all.

Intel boxed processors come with a heatsink/fan (HSF). It's possible to buy the OEM unit which is just the processor by itself, but the boxed product is the retail version and is more common.

I recently bought a retail E6750 and didn't like the factory HSF mounting system at all. It uses plastic push pins that require quite a bit of force to engange. You really feel like you're going to damage the motherboard installing it. If the design has not changed, I would reccomend getting a good after-market HSF, one that uses a better mounting system. I found one that uses screw down springs and a backplate. It's very easy to install and works as good if not better.

I seem to remember reading something about SLI license issues between Intel and nVidia. In any case, it's not something to be concerned about for single card configurations. It's only an issue when running multiple cards. You won't have any problem running a single 8800GT on an Intel motherboard. Personally, I'm running one on an Intel based motherboard myself.

Yep - The heatsink draws up the heat and the fans whisks it away. Like CraigHB said, the Intel HSF's take a good amount of fource to mount them. Today's Motherboards are actually fairly durable compared to boards of the past. I've easily put 50+ pounds of pressure attaching a heatsink without a hitch. Make sure you follow the instructions when mounting as its still pretty risky (cracking the mobo or cpu is not fun)



Here's the general gist....Your mobo has an Intel 975x chipset. This is the part that is "Crossfire ready" This means that if you are planning on ever having multiple video cards slaved together, you'll have to do it with ATI parts (ie Crossfire compatible cards).

If you are just planning on having one video card, any brand card will work with it.

If you are planning on getting multiple Nvidia cards in the future, I would suggest getting a motherboard with an Nvidia Chipset. IT will be branded SLI ready. EVGA makes excellent boards (Great warranties)

Speaking of incompatible parts:
Gone are the days where certian brands of parts didn't play well with eachother....except for memory. Before you buy any RAM go the the mother board's website and you should be able to find a list of compatible memory.

Make sure you buy an oem copy of vista, if you do in fact go with it. They cost about 300 dollars less. Also, 4 gigs of g-skill ram (which I found better than any kind of SLI ram) costs about 100 dollars. Have fun!

You should get about 3.25 GB user RAM out of 4 GB physical. This is what I got with XP Pro 32 bit (retail). Interestingly, I got 2.25 GB user RAM out of 8 GB physical with the same OS, and XP Pro 32 bit does see ALL 8 GB physical RAM. It just uses most of it for a pagefile.

However, XP Pro X64 (XP64) gives you about 7 GB user RAM out of 8 GB. 32 bit programs are limited to 2 GB each, whether x86 or x64 OS.

A user over on Daz3d.com forums was wondering why he was getting out of memory errors with a Core2Quad and 2 GB physical RAM, and found out that the RAM is divided equally among the cores. So 2 GB minus what is used by the OS divided by 4, does not leave much per core.

4 GB physical RAM is a good amount for 32 bit Windows, and minimum for 64 bit windows.

64 bit OS is not going to give you much without 64 bit application(s), except that you can run more of the 32 bit apps at once with 8 GB physical RAM and no slowdown.

I spend almost all of my time in XP64 and only reboot into XP32 when I need to.

yes, that's the problem w/ using more than 2gb with standard XP. It really doesn't make good use of the extra RAM. In some cases, it will see it, but It won't (can
't) use it.

"yes, that's the problem w/ using more than 2gb with standard XP. It really doesn't make good use of the extra RAM. In some cases, it will see it, but It won't (can
't) use it."

Not exactly. Yes, there is a problem with more than 2 GB physical RAM, IF, the RAM is DDR (non-server), where the max I have had recognized is 2.5 GB in XP Pro 32 bit. (3 GB installed and only 2.5 GB recognized of DDR 400.)

4 GB DDR2 gives the user 3.25 GB and the rest is used by XP32. Up that 4 GB to 8 GB, and the user only gets 2.25 GB. I can hear XP Pro 32 bit oinking in the background.

Aye, not to mention stability problems with that much RAM. I would suppose that XP would recognize more DDR2 due to the nature of the memory controller (new and imporved over DDR!).

Now, I know windows will see the extra RAM, but will it make use of it? By that I mean when running an app, can you actually fill more than 2.25GB or does it top out at 2.25 and leave the rest sitting there?


Oh yeah, g00berhead - buy a floppy drive. If for whatever reason, you use sepcial drivers for your hard drive (RAID, SATA, STATA RAID - Boards w/ an Nforce chipset were a huge problem -are they still? Anyone know?), you'll need a floppy to intsall windows XP. Windows won't let you add new drivers during the install process via CD.

Alternatively, you can use Nlite and create your own XP install disc with the drivers integrated (Saves a lot of headaches - hell you can even preinstall some basic apps, like a firewall, antivirus and all the servics packs and hotfixes.)

I don't think your motherboard would have that problem, as far as I know, it only really existed with Nforce boards but, a simple floppy isn't a terrible investment to have.

I have an Intel ICH9 southbridge and XP has no problem seeing the SATA disks on installation. Loading disk drivers during installation is typically only needed for RAID or AHCI configurations. I believe most newer boards do not require extra drivers when using the default SATA mode. However, you'll definitely want to load OEM drivers afterwards (i.e. the ones that come on the motherboard disk). Vista is a lot more flexible in that regard because of the newer driver bundle.

I do use my floppy on install, but that's for the "unattended installation" mode which pre-answers all the installation questions. Since most motherboards still have floppy ports, it's worth it to have one just to support installation options for XP.

By floppy drive you mean the 3.5" floppies?

I have a copy of XP pro I got for like 5 dollars from my college, I think I will stick with that. XP has not given me very much grief over the years, although sometimes has a hard time shutting down frozen programs.

Just wating on money to start buying some of my hardware >.<

i would suggest against an intel-brand motherboard. they tend not to have much in the way of overclocking features, based on what i understand. for quality, i'd recommend, Abit, Asus or Gigabyte.

IMHO you don't need a floppy drive. most new motherboards don't use them the way they used to (FDD and IDE ports are not longer supported directly through intel southbridges, they usually have an extra chip to support those). plus most motherboards can boot the OS from a USB thumb drive anyway.

XP pro is the way to go. if you're gonna be neurotic about lots of RAM, go with Pro 64. Vista (especially DX10) = bloatware.

Craig, denyasis, sarissi -- good to see familiar faces

Yeah I meant the 3.5 floppy

I have an original OEM xp Pro disk. When I installed it on my Motherboard (w/ an nforce 570 chipset), I needed to use a floppy drive to install the SATA/RAID drivers. This was because the generic Drivers that XP shipped with didn't work with the newer hardware, hence I needed the floppy. Otherwise, XP couldn't see my harddrive, lol.

As Far as I know this was limited to Nforce boards and its more of a one-time installing XP problem, as the XP install process only looked at the floppy drive for extra drivers.

Dystopic has a good point about grabbing an enthusiast type board. Even if your not thinking of overclocking or doing anything funky, the enthusiast boards have some features that can be really useful (Q connector, built in wifi, etc). In addition, some of them support fairly advanced integrated sound, saving you some space and $$. Especially considering Realtek and Creative have been having issues with thier products.

They also have better warranties, lol.


Good to see you too guys! I hope all is well in your lives adn that you all haven't been as busy as I have been recently, lol.

Better yet, just slipstream any updates and the drivers as well right into the disc. I've got a copy myself that I got from MSDN at school which I slipstreamed SP2 and my motherboard (sound, network, RAID) drivers into, so the machine I built earlier this year was up and running right off the bat (and will be should I ever need to reformat). Plus you can do handy things like fill in the automated install stuff right into the disc itself.

Yeah, Nlite is my hero when I do my "clean out an' reinstall the OS fest" every year or so. I wish I had known about it earlier when I first put together the computer, sigh.

you also didn't include speakers. i use my PC as my main stereo and home entertainment system, so i've got Logitech Z-5500's and an Azurentech X-Fi Prelude. the sound card made a HUGE difference over the onboard Realtek sound with my gigabyte motherboard, but i don't think it would have been noticable without nice speakers.

as for a network adapter, virtually all motherboards have LAN ports, so unless you've got WiFi at home, you probably don't need to worry about it at all.



you probably won't need to do much at all. intel's stock cooler will do the trick unless you plan on overclocking, and if you download nVidia's nTune software, you should have all the heat management you need for your graphics card.

one thing to note, the stock fans that come with most cases tend to be low-quality. you can significantly improve airflow or reduce noise by swapping them out--not to mention lasting a lot longer usually. Yate Loons are a nice generic high airflow fan, and they under-volt (as would be needed with a fanbus) pretty well for reducing noise.

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what is this you speak of? i just picked up a friend's spare copy of XP pro to finally upgrade, and this sounds like it'd be a godsend.

[link="http://www.nliteos.com/"nLite Site"[/link]

Hey that rhymes.


nLite is a utility that can take an original XP install disk, and allows you to us it to make a new custom XP install disk.

You can add the Service Packs, Drivers, Programs, etc. You can also remove Items, services, etc from it to reduce the amount of crap added to your computer.

The process is called Slipstreaming.

It takes a little while, logistically speaking, as you need to go out, find and download what ever you want to add to your XP install (Service packs, Hotfixes, drivers).

The forum even has a list of links to addons, freeware programs that people have repackaged so that they can be slipstreamed into the XP install disk. It includes most of the mainstream freewre out there.

It nice to load up a fresh install and already have your firewall, anti-virus, and spyware in place. Not to mention they even have instruction (haven't tried it yet) to packaging DIY, so you could add in some of the lesser known programs out there.

Laslty it even will allow you to enter the critical info for the install (serial Number, name, region, etc) meaning that it can be totally automated.

For Vista Users, there is a Vista Version, called vLite.

Ps - thr program is fairly straight forward - But it does expect you to have a decent undestanding of what's going on