Here for your reading pleasure on Holy Shit NO!!!, is an account firsthand of the building of a computer written by someone who has hobbies other than building computers. (I kid, overclocker geeks, I kid.) If you're looking for a how-to, this probably isn't the place. I pretty much just winged it from the user guide of the motherboard and what meager (if any) installation instructions came with the other components. Even so, it was pretty easy. Lemme show you some pictures, I guess.
This is my chassis, the Cooler Master CMStacker 830SE, with my 750 W power supply, the Silencer Quad Blue by PC Power & Cooling already mounted. I bought both of them quite some time ago and just recently (after much saving of monies) bought the guts of the rig. Shown here is a lovely feature of the Stacker: the removable motherboard tray.
Here's the tray sitting on an anti-static mat on a table.
And now with some spacers to hold up the board.
Bad lighting here, so it's hard for you to see it, but my anti-static gloved hand is holding the screwdriver with which I have just finished screwing down the motherboard. (For those wondering, it's an ASUS P67T WS SuperComputer board.) Funny story here. The plate that goes in around the motherboard's back panel connectors is only mentioned once in the manual. All they say is that it's in the box. Yes, it is in the box. What they don't say is that you're supposed to put it on as you're placing the board onto the spacers. I didn't even notice the damn thing until the chassis was closed up and I was ready for First Boot. Fuck, that made me feel like a dumbass. As I write this, the plate is still in the box, as I have not yet figured out a good way to ghetto rig it into place. I'm not going to take the whole computer apart just for that little thing.
Detail of the LGA1366 CPU socket.
The same, with the lid open.
The protective cap is removed. Look at that sexy, sexy mobo. Don't you just want to stick your processor right into that wide-open socket?
And that's exactly what I did to 'er! There it is, the Intel Core i7 930 2.80 GHz CPU. (Yeah, I know. That sex joke was pretty half-ass. I'll try better next time. Maybe.)
If you squint a lot, maybe this blurry photo of a syringe of thermal grease preparing to dispense onto the processor looks vaguely sexual? But wait, if the processor was supposed to be the penis in the last gag, does that make this some kind of kinky bisexual orgy?
Thermal grease applied to processor.
The socket now closed, I prepared to install the heatsink.
Here's the heatsink (a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus) in place after much convincing with a screwdriver. Funny story here. Turns out this particular heatsink mounts by means of a backplate that you have to bolt to the back of the motherboard behind the CPU socket. Of course, I didn't figure this out until after I had already installed the CPU. So then I have to unscrew the mobo, bolt this little plate on behind the socket, being very very careful not to touch the CPU or the thermal grease on it (contaminated contact between processor and heatsink is bad,) screw the board back down, and finally operate the tricky means of screwing this heatsink into position. I put some more thermal grease on the heatsink for good luck. Probably ended up using more grease than I needed to, but no excess gooshed out of the contact point, so it's all good.
Then I added another fan to the heatsink to improve airflow. This one's a Scythe S-FLEX SFF21E.
Now to give my rig some RAM! This is 6 GB in triple channel of G. Skill DDR3 1333.
The EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 GPU, or as I prefer to call it, "M'ah big-ass honkin' huge graphics card!" Takes up two expansion slots and is damn near as long as the mobo is wide.
This is my system drive. It's a solid state drive (an Intel X25-M Mainstream 80 GB, to be exact.) It has no moving parts, so it's faster and more durable than a conventional hard drive. It's slightly bigger than a credit card. It's screwed into an adapter bracket to fit a 3.5 inch drive bay. The bracket has no proper screw holes with which to mount it in the drive bay. That is duct tape you see there around the back of the bracket so that there is more holding it in place than just gravity. Ghetto fucking fabulous.
My optical drive, mounted in one of the Stacker's no-tools-required 5.25 inch drive bays. It's a LITE-ON DVD burner in case you were wondering.
This is my data drive. It's a Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB hard drive. Screwed to its sides are a pair of adapter wings to make it fit into a 5.25 inch drive bay.
And here it is mounted in one such bay. I later had to move it down a bay to optimize its position along the power cable.
"What the hell is that?" you might be thinking about this strange camera angle. Well, the point of the photo is the fan. The Stacker has a fan bracket at the top of the case, so I put a fan in it. It's another Scythe fan, just like the extra fan on the back of the CPU cooler.
I had ordered a 250 mm fan, planning to ghetto rig it somehow into the side panel, but my CPU cooler turned out to be too tall. So for my side panel air intake, I have three 120mm Apevia fans with blue LEDs.
My one complaint about my motherboard is that it wasn't running my CPU fans or my front and rear chassis fans any faster than about half their top speed. So I went out and got this Aerocool Touch 1000 LCD touchscreen fan controller. All my fans run at full speed now.
And here I am, chillin' out with my new PIMPIN' PC! After I save more monies and buy more gear, this computer will be part of an audio workstation. That in mind, I have decided to name it after an amazing piece of technology from a long-running TV show whose main title theme's original 1963 arrangement was one of the earliest pieces of electronic music. I shall call my computer the TARDIS. What does it stand for in my case? Terrific Audio Rig Developed In Stacker.But wait, there's more! I mentioned earlier that my solid state drive is faster than a hard drive. The result of this is that the computer boots faster and programs load faster. Here's a video of the TARDIS's incredible boot time:
