Building a Box

My brother-in-law recently gave me a motherboard. He had been thinking about building a PC, but life got ahead of him and he decided he wasn't going to do it just yet. Since he was also moving to Australia, he decided it was something he didn't want to take with him.

It took me a while to decide what I was going to do with it. I've never built a complete PC all at once. I've replaced every part in more than one system, but that usually would take place over a couple of years. It's not that I didn't want to build a computer, but it was generally less expensive to buy something pre-made and then tweak it. But now I had this shiny new motherboard, and a pretty decent one at that. So I decided to take the plunge.

This seems like a great topic for a series of posts... walking through the process of obtaining the parts and software, putting it together, then testing and running benchmarks to see if it will perform as well as I hope.

I'll start with a post about the planned specs in the next day or so.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Douk P1 DAC/Preamp/Headphone Amp review

A few weeks ago I decided to build a fun sound system for my home office (see this post for details). The goal was something that looked interesting, sounded good, and was expandable. The Douk P1 DAC/Preamp/Headphone Amp serves as the centerpiece of the system. After using it for a few weeks, I can say that it is a decent piece of equipment. Pros: Small size Switchable tone controls Good Bluetooth (stable, easy connection, APTX support) Built-in DAC Cons: No optical input Unnecessary bright blue light on power supply Clicks when turning amplification on and off on Bluetooth It has a good build quality. The tone and volume knobs turn smoothly with soft clicks. It feels sturdy and all the connectors are solid. Setup is easy - plug in the tubes, connect to the speakers, plug the PS into the wall, and hit power. The tubes that came with my unit went right in - I didn't have to mess with the pins, but YMMV. Pressed power, flipped the switch to Bluetooth and the unit went into pairing m
Read more

Overclocking Without Permission

Image
Sorry for the long delay between posts this month. I really want to try to get to posting a couple of posts a week, but Real Life keeps popping up and using up my time. In any event, I am going to try to get back to that frequency starting now. I have a lot of ideas for posts, and am going to start actually typing them up. I'll start off with something I promised a while ago. As I mentioned in the post about my custom PC build , I had an issue with the system crashing randomly. It only crashed twice - once when I was running the Windows Experience Index, and once overnight. This worried me because it was a brand new system, and everything should have been in tip-top shape - unless I screwed something up (or received a faulty piece of equipment). I was really hoping I wouldn't have to redo all or part of the build. Luckily, I enjoy troubleshooting almost as much as I like building PCs, so I put on my thinking cap (do they still make those) and started working. When I checke
Read more

Building A Box - Specs

I've done a lot of thinking about the specifications of the computer I am going to build . My two main priorities are speed and storage. I use my main PC for video editing, some Web development, and as a media server for the house. I figure that whatever I build will replace it as my main desktop, and then I can give my current machine (a two-year old Dell Studio XPS 8100) to my wife. Motherboard Since the motherboard was a gift, there wasn't really a choice. It is an ASUS P8Z77-M Pro , which is a decent Micro ATX board that supports 3rd gen Intel  processors. It is a little light on the internal expansion ports (three total), but has decent built-in sound and video as well as support for several USB ports (front and back) in both 2.0 and 3.0. It can handle up to 32 GB of memory. Processor Since I have the luxury of shopping around and buying parts over time, I am looking at getting the Core i7 3770k processor. It is currently the fastest Core i7 that will fit in thi
Read more