Saturday Plus Sunday

Third Time's A Charm

I think this is the third time I have glued two days together in the last ten days, and it's probably not good for me. As you may know I received the parts to my new system on Saturday and that evening I set about taking an old one apart and assembling the new one. It took about 13 hours including installation of some basic drivers and tools, and I am pleased to report everything when perfectly fine first time. 

The only stumble was that the new motherboard only had USB 3.0 ports, and Windows 7 did not have USB 3.0 drivers during the installation step which meant the keyboard and mouse died as soon as I entered a Windows page. The solution was to insert an old PS/2 keyboard into the combo PS/2 port they kindly left on and I completed the installation via the keyboard only.

Once I was in Windows, I installed all the motherboard drivers (including the new USB 3.0 driver) and all was well with my ports and mice again.  The over-clock I had purchased disappeared and the Easy Tune provided by Gigabyte was certainly easy but not particularly nice, so I un-installed that and was about to over-clock it the old fashioned way when I found Overclockers UK had saved a profile in the BIOS which was a perfect 4.4 Ghz over-clock  and a generous 2100+ memory over-clock too!

I Name Thee Noisy Bugger

I had bought the parts that would produce a nice quiet PC, but I neglected to consider the parts that where staying in from the last system. That is, the Power Supply!  It generates a rather annoying 65db under any load which was quite a distraction. At first I thought it was the CPU fan and the case fans, and spend all kinds of time switching to voltage reduction on the fans, inserting Ultra-Low interceptors on the fan cables and then I realised it was the power block.  I've had to send off for some more parts, and will put the machine away for another week. If I am to use the machine for the next few years, I may as well make it do everything I need it to do, which is to be quiet enough that I can think, and also not have gaping holes in it.  Another small issue was that the new motherboard had no floppy IDE and no HDD IDE (of course) and only 6 SATA ports and some other strange things. Next week I plan to plug these holes and hopefully have a machine I can start loading up with software and work files.

Lights Camera Action

I thought it would be a great idea to video capture the whole thing, from taking out the old board to assembling the machine and plugging it in. As you can imagine, it's a LOT of footage so will take time to convert to something you tube will accept, and I might have to (will have to) time lapse it so you don't have to sit through 10 hours of head scratching.

Signing Off

I have a meeting all day Monday, but will resume my antics and blogging Tuesday. If we can call this blog Mondays blog, then I have technically not missed a work day so far in 2013 ;)  It's 3PM now, and I plan to be asleep for 8PM so going to load up Dishonoured and see if I can get to the end of the single player mission so I can shelve it (and allow some new games to rush in). The problem with researching games is that when you find a good one, you tend to do a little too much research!