Building the PC

I recently wrote about ordering the parts for my new PC. I received all the hardware and put it together yesterday afternoon. Haven’t flipped the switch yet because I’m going to pick up an OEM copy of Vista from my friend for far less money than I would have had to shell out if I’d bought it retail, and that’s worth waiting an extra day.

Some thoughts:

The Thermaltake M9 1000 w/ side window is not only a nice case in terms of looks and sturdiness, but it makes for an easy build. First, the tool-less installation of 5.25″ devices like the DVD and Blu-Ray drive was very easy; I didn’t have to mess around with a bunch of screws. The 3.5″ SD card reader was a little more difficult to install because it needed to go into a cage-like 5.25″ enclosure, which required screws and didn’t interface well with the tool-less design, but using a few screws here was a small price to pay for the otherwise incredibly fast build. Speaking of the tool-less design, my 5.25″ devices feel secure and adding more would be easy if desired. It’s difficult to describe the fasteners, but suffice it to say that each 5.25″ bay requires only one, and it takes about two seconds to position and fasten it.

Second, the removable HDD cage. This thing makes me want to wax rhapsodic. The other times in my life when I’ve built a computer or opened up a case, I’ve had to plan very carefully what to do and when to do it, because a lot of things connect near the middle and bottom of an ATX motherboard – SATA, PCI and PCIe cards, USB connectors, jumper pins, LED plugs, all kinds of crap. If I screwed something up, I was doomed to fiddle around with needlenose pliers and a flashlight for up to an hour because there isn’t enough room in your average tower case to get a hand in there and still be able to see. With the M9, the HDD cage (with attached forward-facing fan) is held in place by three more of the tool-less fasteners that I mentioned above. Removing those lets you slide the cage right out the front of the case, then reach in there to manipulate plugs, jumpers or components. I didn’t even have to unplug the HDD to do it.

Regarding the rest of the build:

The OCZ 2×2 GB of DDR2-6400 went in with no problems. The motherboard had two yellow and two black memory slots, and the instructions said to use the two yellow ones first. No worries. I am aware that a 32-bit OS will not recognize more than 3 GB of RAM, but I may upgrade to a 64-bit OS at some point, and $80 for even 3 GB OCZ at 800 MHz was a pretty good deal. Plus I don’t have to mix and match sets of RAM sticks, which has a slight correlation with memory errors.

I installed the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro fan just like in the instructions, with the fan side facing towards the front of the PC so it blows air towards the back. Incidentally, the M9 case has a fan which will help carry the hot air out of the case. The fan is completely enormous; much larger than the stock fan that came with the E8400 CPU, and side-facing rather than top-facing.

The XFX Geforce 9800GTX is, indeed, a huge card. It isn’t quite large enough to require drastic modification of the case (i.e. using a hacksaw to cut out chunks of it), but it is large enough that the bottom 5.25″ bay of the M9 case is not really conveniently accessible. I don’t foresee this being a problem; right now I’m using three of the six 5.25″ bays and I doubt I will ever need them all. However, hooking up another one for SLI will be somewhat difficult because it will require a lot of messing around with the HDD cage and the SATA connections. Bottom line, in terms of form factor, you can definitely fit an XFX GeForce 9800GTX into a Thermaltake M9 1000 case unless you plan on having six 5.25″ devices, and in that case you’re probably nuts.

I will hit the power button for the first time tonight (after I get the OS), and will likely have to spend a few hours or days downloading new drivers and resolving hiccups. Part of the fun.