Building a new PC ...

[Kalah]

I've bought the parts ...



Now I'm working on putting it into the new cabinet:


The motherboard goes in:


Then the CPU, RAM chips, the power supply and the SSD HD (yes, I bought one of those)


The two old HDDs - recycled from the old PC - go in the new cabinet.


New and old, side by side ...


I have placed the fairly new graphics card from the old PC into the new one, and thought I'd use the old optical drive too, but it turns out that it uses an IDE connection and buying an IDE-SATA adapter cost marginally less than buying a new drive, so I have ordered a new drive.

Btw. if anybody wants my old RAM chips (2x 1024 MB DDR2), gimme a shout.

[GreatEmerald]

Oh hey, that's the same power supply I'm using as we speak

What kind of a term is "cabinet"? It's normally called a case or a chassis.

As for the memory, you can't just state the type and size, the other characteristics are also very important (data rate and timings) when using dual channel.

[Kalah]

The old chip specs are
1024 MB DDR2 PC4200 CL4, 533MHz, 128x64, 240-pin Unbuffered, 1.8V,
1024 MB DDR2 PC5300 CL5, 667MHz, 128x64, 240-pin

I'll post the full specs on my new PC when it's built.

[Variol]

...bloody thing looks like a small server!

Did you transfer the old video card as well?

[jeff]

Impressive; but I have my people build mine. You know Dell or Alienware.

[GreatEmerald]

The old chip specs are
1024 MB DDR2 PC4200 CL4, 533MHz, 128x64, 240-pin Unbuffered, 1.8V,
1024 MB DDR2 PC5300 CL5, 667MHz, 128x64, 240-pin

I'll post the full specs on my new PC when it's built.

Huh, so you were using single-channel memory all this time?.. That hurts the performance.

[Kalah]

Did you transfer the old video card as well?

Yes, the video card was pretty much the main thing I wanted to transfer from the old PC, because it was fairly new (come to think of it, I installed it in 2009) - along with the hard drives, of course. No point in discarding those.

Huh, so you were using single-channel memory all this time?.. That hurts the performance.

I already bought new RAM once (see this topic) and I couldn't be bothered doing it again; the real performance block was the CPU, I think. I'll put in one of those X3 games later and see if performance is good.

But it does mean that I'm finally doing the thing I set out as a future plan back in 2010 ...

[Variol]

Is your 430w PS going to be enough?

[GreatEmerald]

Is your 430w PS going to be enough?

It's enough for my GTX 660 + quad-core Ivy Bridge i5. The latest technology is much, much more efficient than the old one when it comes to power draw.

[Kalah]

The build is going slowly but steadily; I'm busy with work so I just pop by the tech dept. when I have time. I've put it all together, but then there are also small glitches: the old CD drive I had used a 5-point power connector and I had only SATA cables available, so I bought a new drive. Then it turned out the cables weren't long enough for my setup (I put the HDDs low and the CD drive high), so I bought a new cable. As things stand, I think I'm just about ready to fire up this beast and install the OS.

[Kalah]

My new computer has been assembled.

It's a beast!

Specs

• Chassis: Fractal Design DEFINE R4 BLACK
  Power supply: Corsair CX430M
  Main Board: ASRock Z87 EXTREME3 - Haswell
  CPU: Intel Core i5-4670 Haswell - Box
  RAM: Kingston 16GB HyperX Beast DC DDR3-2133 (2x8GB)
  Graphics card: XFX GeForce GTS 250, 512mb PhysX CUDA, PCI-Express 2.0, 2xDVI, 738/2200MHz (taken from old PC)
  HHDs: Samsung 840 Basic EVO SSD 120GB (system)
  160 GB 7200rpm SATA (taken from old PC, will reformat)
  1 TB 5400-7200 SATA 3 GB/s dynamic, 64 MB. Western Digital Caviar Green
  Optical unit: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE

Installed Win7 on it today and now I have a whole evening ahead of me, installing stuff and reformatting the old HDD.

[Angelspit]

Yeah, better enjoy it before it gets outdated.

[Kalah]

Oyh!

I'll post a pic of my new setup later ... Probably gotta buy that new XCOM expansion, and I either need a new gaming chair or I need to rearrange the furniture so I can sit closer to the TV.

[Pol]

Is your 430w PS going to be enough?

That depends on the card efficiency. For newer card I tend to agree with GE but for older ones..


For Kalah's one it will work, 250GT has maximal power drain 150W, thus require 450W PSU.

Now, let me say, for quality PSU there's no big difference between 430 and 450 watts and the selected Corsair can handle that.

Still it would be much safer to start with 500W PSU. On the other hand, when K. will once remove his 250GT and replace it with some current card, from "occasional serious gaming segment", which will be stronger than his 250GT anyway. He will likely - at that time - triple the performance and cut the consumption to max 120W. In other words, he will be very happy.

(Once!)

@K
There may be happier idea to not to connect all the drives permanently. And left 160GB one as external.

[Kalah]

Here is my current setup (yes, I need a new chair).


About the power, what you're saying is that I have enough of it right now, and that if I upgrade my video card in the future, I am likely to get a better card with even lower power need? Sounds good to me. The things I am likely to upgrade in the future are probably the video card and RAM, in that order. I also have lots of HDD space so I can buy more of those.

There may be happier idea to not to connect all the drives permanently. And left 160GB one as external.

There are 8 HDD slots in this tower (albeit MB only has 6 HDD connections), which gives me the possibility of keeping all the drives inside the tower, yielding the very tidy setup you see in the picture above instead of external drives lying around with cables going everywhere. The old 160GB drive is kept simply because I had space for it, and it is going to be reformatted after I save all the contents on another drive. I cannot see a time when I will fill up all the slots with HDD drives, but if such a time comes, I will remove the oldest one and put new ones in, with several terrabytes of capacity.

[Kalah]

Hmmm there's a problem. I can't format the old HDD. There's just an error message saying that Windows cannot format the volume - I guess because of the partitions and the fact that there's a system on it? This is the old main/system HDD with WinXP on it, that I don't need for anything but storage anymore, because I have installed Win7 on a different drive. I just want the old drive for storage.

[Pol]

I guess because of the partitions and the fact that there's a system on it?

You could be right. Use gparted live, disconnect other drives and run.

If you had boot manager on it it will be lost! How to check? Disconnect this drive and reboot the system.

Then delete partition table and create a new one.

Good Luck!

[Kalah]

I hate not being eech savvy enough to understand this kind of thing ... If I disconnect all the HDDs except the old one I want to reformat, I cannot even boot the PC. So how do I run any kind of program with those drives disconnected?

[Pol]

#1 - download the Gparted Live
#2 - burn it to CD or DVD
#3 - boot from here


But first disconnect the old drive and check if your PC can boot up. If yes, it's all good, and you can proceed safely.

If no, it will be a longer story.

[Kalah]

first disconnect the old drive and check if your PC can boot up.

It does not. It says NTLDR missing and wants me to go into the setup ...

EEEK!! reconnecting doesn't work either - now my PC won't start up at all!!

Edit: I got it to work by setting the boot menu to boot from the old hard drive ... but how am I supposed to change that? I wanted it to boot from the new SSD, and the old hard drive to have no other role than storage!