Son's new build commences!

[dbarrow]

Well, FedX showed up this afternoon with the rest of the parts.
Started assembly. This time, I am looking over his shoulder and making him do the work.

Love the new Aspire full tower case. It has 3 slide out drive bays and tons of room. W/500w PSU $85. Great case for the bucks. Side and top fans.

Asus P5P800 SE
socket 775 but still AGP for the X850XT PE vid card he has
805D CPU, expecting close to 4g with the Termaltake Big Water cooling kit and a healthy OC.
2x250 SATA drives, room for more later
DVD/cdrw, floppy
2g Corsair 2048 low latency PC3500

Got it 3/4 together in an hour or so. Should have fire in the hole in a day or so after I swap out the vid cards in the old machine.

His next chore is to pick a name for it.
Must please the gods of blue smoke with an appropriate monicker before the necessary incantations and sacrifices before plugging in the power cord....

[Dan18960]

Well, FedX showed up this afternoon with the rest of the parts.
Started assembly. This time, I am looking over his shoulder and making him do the work.


Well IT'S ABOUT TIME - he's 30 years old isn't he (tongue in cheek):ranger:

Having fun being a father just before Father's Day huh Doug.:hat:

[dbarrow]

Well ... I wasn't paying close enough attention!

Assembly wasn't all that involved.
New design of Thermaltake Big Water kit has good and bad points. The radiator is a little bigger and the frame has mounting holes that matched the 120mm fan vent on the back of the case for a nice secure and easy mount without having to drill any holes, except the side of the case will have to be modified as the fan is about 5mm too wide to close it. The drive bay slide-in reservior looks cool and holds more but the little filler cap is a real PITA to use without spilling and it gurgles like a fish tank. They left out the little vent plugs on the motor that made it easy to gravity prime the system. Stuck with no way to prime and get the air out of the lines, I found a 12v power supply and jumpered the cable to the motor to run it for a while and it was still a bugger to get primed. Entertainment value of watching the air bubbles circulate got stale after a while.
My older style was so much better as I just pull the little rubber nipple off the pump vent and gravity takes care of the rest. At least the fancy blue leds in the water block make it easy to see that no air is trapped in the CPU block.

Ready to rip... plugged it in for the grand event.
Nada ... mobo led was on but press of the power button yielded a brief blip and no powerup sequence. Frowns all around! Fearing for the worst ... dead mobo, dead CPU, bad PSU ... went to bed.

Next day, after a pot of coffee to get ready, I went through all the connections again unplugging everything.
It would appear...
Case harness had a 12v input molex and a 12v outlet molex that goes to a dial fan control on the face plate.
Son apparantly hooked output to an input and was dead shorting PSU.

My next try for powerup was greeted with lights, fans, action and first launch.
Easy Flash utility was a breeze to flash the latest BIOS, after I remembered to plug the power connector back on the floppy...

Just for S&G, as I went through the BIOS settings, I set the auto overclocking AI to 30% and the 805D jumped up to 3.445 with no complaints.

Next chore, after working the weekend, is to hit the 4g mark with a manual OC and Prime95 stress testing.
That 30 some page article gets a little confusing after a while but they say they can get 4.1 and so will I although I will be happy to settle for 3.8 without increasing the super low latency on that expensive Corsair which they say actually performs better at the higher OC.

Oohrah!

[jcampi]

Sorry if I missed it, but what processor did you use for the PC?

[dbarrow]

805D on Asus P5P800SE
A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130 - Can it be True?
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/

[jcampi]

I read the article and wasn't careful when I followed it the first time. This still seems like a great deal. This is a 2.66GHz chip that is rated at 4.1GHz in the article. I'm guessing the speed of 4.1GHz is a result of overclocking the chip. How is overclocking done in the BIOS and how do you know how far to go before damaging the chip?