Have ordered new PC Bits!

[GilesGuthrie]

Firstly, I'd like to thank Flerbizky for taking the time to help me match up components, and for finding my new favourite store, eBuyer. I did spend some time trying to find cheaper stores, but couldn't. They were also cheapest for the camcorder my wife has just bought.

Anyway, I have ordered the following items, in preparation for building a new PC:
1 x AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 939pin retail boxed @ £363.47
1 x Abit AV8 SKT939 K8T800PRO 800FSB 8xAGP SATA Sound GIG LAN Retail Box @ £69.74
1 x Kingston HyperX 1GB 400MHz DDR Non-ECC CL2 (2-3-2-6-1) DIMM (Kit 2) @ £154.77
2 x Western Digital WD2500JD 250Gb 8mb Cache 7200rpm Serial ATA - OEM @ £102.79 ea
1 x Sony SDM-S93H 19ins TFT @ £355.28
1 x Lg 16x52 Ide DVD-rom Black Drive - OEM @ £14.31
1 x Nec Double Layer 8x DVD Dual R/rw - OEM @ £40.21
1 x Ebuyer 400 Watt PSU P4 Ready @ £8.99
1 x Chieftec BX-01 Extreme Black With Silver Front Panel ATX Case No PSU @ £29.99
1 x Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 PRO 128 MB DDR 8x AGP DVi & TV-Out @ £116.95

All prices exclude VAT @17.5%. It's all arriving on Monday 23rd.

Additionally, I bought a Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop, which Amazon were doing cheaper than eBuyer.

Time for me to start winding myself up into a frenzy!

 

[Event]

You got a 939 CPU, 9800 pro, but then you got an ebuyer PowerSupply? I highly doubt that thing will really put out 400W. Have fun with that. If you cant et your comp to turn on or if it turns off or resets occasionally, assume that it is PSU problem. You should've gone for enlight or Thermaltake.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

You got a 939 CPU, 9800 pro, but then you got an ebuyer PowerSupply? I highly doubt that thing will really put out 400W. Have fun with that. If you cant et your comp to turn on or if it turns off or resets occasionally, assume that it is PSU problem. You should've gone for enlight or Thermaltake.

Well, if it doesn't push out the required power, then it will be going back under the UK Sale of Goods Act...

I have two other power supplies that could be put to use on a temporary basis. We'll see...

 

[toyomatt84]

I have an Antec True Power PSU rated at 550watts. It has the best amperage ratings on the market for any PSU. You should consider picking one up, as I got mine for 80 us dollars.

 

[2ez2KiLL]

I would go with an OCZ Powerstream psu, I heard those were really good. Someone said that it puts out enough power to kill a human??

 

[GilesGuthrie]

Well, I got cold feet on the power supply, and there were some negative reviews coming in about it, so I substituted it for an Antec 430W unit.

It all arrives on Monday.

 

[Flerbizky]

Well, I got cold feet on the power supply, and there were some negative reviews coming in about it, so I substituted it for an Antec 430W unit.

It all arrives on Monday.

Mmmm... Looking forward to some benchmark numbers !.....

 

[Jordan]

Congratulations, Giles! I guess that makes two of us waiting on new computers to arrive. Mine will hopefully be here Monday as well.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

Congratulations, Giles! I guess that makes two of us waiting on new computers to arrive. Mine will hopefully be here Monday as well.

Cool Jordan. What are you getting?

 

[cardude2004]

Sounds like a good computer.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

Well, eBuyer sent me some wrong stuff, and took forever to correct the mistake (although there was a bottleneck in one part of the process - the rest of it went fine).

I picked up 4 Arctic 80mm fans on eBay for next to nothing, plus a longer round IDE cable so I can put the drives where I want them.

I'm typing this on my soon-to-be-retired main computer as XP Pro installs on the new one.

I had to "borrow" the floppy drive from this PC to load the RAID drivers into the XP setup process, but otherwise things are going fairly well.

 

[daan]

I had to "borrow" the floppy drive from this PC to load the RAID drivers into the XP setup process, but otherwise things are going fairly well.

That's probably the single most impressive thing about XP to me.

I hated reinstalling '98. It took about 17 restarts, installing device drivers from separate CD's each time, only to get in to system to find that there were still 12 unknown items there and then you got that ever so helpful message, "Windows has detected an unknown device. To install drivers, insert the CD now". To which my response was, "How the **** can I install the ******* drivers when you don't ******* tell me what it ******* is?"

The last time I installed XP, the only hardware device driver I needed* was my printer.



* I still had to load drivers, but at least everything worked straight away, just maybe not to it's optimum.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

Well, I was having the difficulty that without the RAID driver (on the disk, inserted into the floppy drive that I didn't have until I stole it out of another machine), XP setup said "Setup could not find any mass storage devices on your computer. Setup cannot continue", which wasn't terribly helpful. Or at least wouldn't have been had I not had a floppy drive available for scavenging from another machine.

Otherwise the XP setup went very smoothly. I joined the computer to my local network and left it overnight hauling 100GB of data from my live machine.