Building The Rig - Part 2

Part 1 - Pre-shopping Research
Part 2 - Buying & Assembling
Part 3 - Troubles
Part 4 - Look! It Runs Crysis!!1

Bought everything from the same shop in Low Yat Plaza on the Monday after PC Fair, avoided PC fair like the plague. While PC Fair is a good place to get peripherals, gadgety knick-knacks and whatnots, a common misconception is buying computer hardware there. Prices are no different from what one usually gets at LYP, and the crowd, omg, the crowd.

Bungled up the fitting of the CPU stock fan, big thanks to my bro for pointing out the mistake. The graphics card was the most expensive and impressive component, and way bigger than expected. Our Palit HD4870 was about 4cm thick, complete with 2 fans and metal coils that wouldn't look out of place in a kettle. Relief on my part that PSU had enough PCIE plugs for the graphics card.

CPU Box

Motherboard


Power Supply Unit


Glorious Palit 4870 Sonic Dual complete with two fans.

Picture does not do justice to the actual card - can't see the metal coil.

I can now officially say that I've built a computer from scratch. Half the fun came from selecting and assembling the parts. Never will I buy pre-built ones like those from DELL, god knows what they put inside those towers.

Geek cred +1

Building The Rig - Part 1

Part 1 - Pre-shopping Research
Part 2 - Buying & Assembling
Part 3 - Troubles
Part 4 - Look! It Runs Crysis!!1

This has definitely got to be one of those defining moments - building a rig from scratch. And a high-end gaming rig, no less. It sure has been an emotionally filled week, from deciding the hardware specs all the way to getting it to run smoothly, without crashes.

The sole purpose of the rig is gaming. With a clear objective, choosing the parts was just a matter of making sure everything works well together and within budget. Got onto lowyat forum to get opinions, especially for mobo(motherboard). Got the lowest clock speed for the best dual core processor series, quad-core was out of the question since games are optimized for dual cores. RAM was performance stuff, big no to value RAM. Choosing PSU meant looking for reputable brands and calculating power needed.

After giving rough estimates, providing we didn't get a monitor, graphics card fund was at RM1000, which was enough to get us the best single core GPU. But Kenn reasoned that if we chose the lower end GPU, we could still get an LCD. In the end, however, we decided the monitor could wait, graphics would come first.

I proudly present my rig's specs, along with the price o.O

Hardware
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 RM600
Gigabyte EP45-UD3L RM399
Kingston HyperX 2GB RM210
Palit HD4870 Sonic Dual RM899
Gigabyte Odin Pro 550W RM380
CoolerMaster 334 casing RM150
Seagate SataII 500Gb RM185
Samsung DVDRW RM 80

The price was rounded up to RM3000 including a surge protector. Don't be jealous, you're now RM3000 richer than me and my bro.

Now, on the fund. There was absolutely no way we could've gotten such an expensive rig if it wasn't for the money that was supposedly for a trip to Bali. Kenn & I had a RM1000ea, but early on, we knew we'd pass the Bali trip for a rig. I mean, you go to Bali for, what, 3 to 4 days, get darkened by the sun, take some pictures, then come home and forget about the trip in a couple days time. A gaming rig with the price tag of RM3000 on the other hand, will have a gaming lifespan of up to 4 years, 2 years if you're a graphics whore. With a windfall of 2k, we each added another RM500 of our savings, and whala, the gheyest gaming rig amongst everyone else we know(for now, at least).

And for the very first time in our gaming life of 12 years, new releases.

More Books, and Some Soldering Equipment

Friday
Pay Less Books Warehouse Sales @ 3K Inn, Subang Jaya. Picked 5 fiction, mum bought some cheapass music books and a couple extras. Just getting William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was worth the trip to Subang (50km to and fro, the petrol...).

Saturday - 'Book Fair' at Atria, Damansara Jaya & a stop at electronics shop is SS2. Misaa says the 'book fair' is an all-year round affair. Brand new novels, and just slightly more than what I pay for secondhand books at normal price. Book-buying spree, naturally. Moved on to SS2 for lunch with parents, before that, stopped at the electronics shop to buy soldering equipment. Had prepared a list of components for a couple electronic projects, but joy of joys, the shop had beginner kits.

All the books. Couple months of book supply. Bye bye, studies.

Clarkson's book for RM8, way lower than Kinokuniya's price. Just finished the fourth Artemis Fowl at time of posting. Need moar Artemis Fowl books!!!

3 more Neal Stephenson novels, bringing the count of Stephenson novels to 5.

The gems, Cryptonomicon and Pattern Recognition.
Very nearly overlooked Cryptonomicon, and was the last available one. Close call there.

Brand spankin new soldering equipment.

This week's loot.

5 December 2008

3.00am - Heard the resident cat fighting with another stray. Rushed down to check on the cat(who's having a litter of 3 kittens), caught a glimpse of the stray catnapping one of the kittens, ran away with the kitten in its mouth. Another kitten's was motionless on the floor, with a slash wound across the body from its shoulder to the hind leg.

4.00am - Another round of catfight

9.00am - Kitten's body gone, presumably taken when the stray came back at 4am to get(eat?) it. Not sure whether the third kitten is still around.

10.00am - Pay Less Books warehouse sales at 3K Inn, Subang Jaya. Grabbed an absolute gem - William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

1.30pm - Somewhat lost my way around Sunway while trying to get from 3K to Inti. Returned/borrowed books at college library.

3.30pm - Resident cat sniffing at kitten blood stains and spot where dead kitten was. Siesta.

8.00pm - Siesta end.

9.30pm - Went out with Aliaa & my bro to BSD McDonalds for ice-cream. One wrong turn, 2 helpings of strawberry Sundae and one small fries for me. Another round of successful parallel parking.

11.15pm - Balik. Missed a turning coming home. Tyre screeched from sudden braking, speeding downhill, didn't see the humongous hump, tyre gonna spoil again. Luckily wasn't driving my brand spankin' new Saga BLM. -.-"

I have no sense of direction...
I waste a lot of petrol by taking wrong routes...
Nvm, petrol cheaper now...
Then again cheaper petrol means more cars on the road...
Slow moving traffic...
*sigh*

Snow Crash

Author : Neal Stephenson
Genre : Science-fiction, Cyberpunk
Pages : 468
Notes : Times 100 Book List

Net diving, online community MMO-style, hacking by coding, what more could I ask for?

Stephenson seamlessly weaves in Sumerian mythology into the story. Throughout the book, you'll come across whole sections quoting and explaining Sumerian myths. No surprise that the story is pro-altheism. In the story, the Christian ideology of speaking in tongues is thrashed. Well, it was a good story anyway.

I did, however, find some characters loosely tied-in to the plot. Perhaps I hadn't been thorough enough, but felt the supporting characters' motives, or lack thereof, odd. I'm the type that likes details like these to be made clear. Oh yes, and there's the no-nonsense ending, which doesn't give us any epilogue or anything.

Spinach Mee

Apparently, the youth from my mum's church loved this dish. It supposedly detoxes.
The mee is made from wheat and spinach, has a fistful of spinach leaves in the dish, and the broth is made from spinach juice with too much mint. SPINACH JUICE. I abhor leafy greens (vegetables), but my mum bought the dish for me anyway. Needless to say, I didn't touch it. Neither did anyone else.

Exhibit A

Self-explanatory.

The Blind Assassin

Author : Margaret Atwood
Genre : Fiction
Pages : 538
Notes : Booker Prize 2000

The Blind Assassin is a story within a story, much like a nesting doll. There are three distinct stories, all which will late relate to each other. Summary here.

It was all good, but I have to admit that it was a weary read midway through the novel, where we have a very cynical old lady narrating about her marriage. Maybe I have had too much of a dose of strong-willed characters, which might explain why I was quite annoyed with the novel's protagonist. She seemed so complacent, leaving everything to run its course while her (evil, duh) husband & sister-in-law usurped every aspect of her life.

Needless to say, persevering through the novel had its rewards. Towards the end the paces picked up really fast, as Atwood reveals the connection between all the different story lines and presents really nice plot twists. In terms of writing, it was definitely enjoyable, Atwood's prose was what kept me reading during those dreary middle chapters.

First Post

I had a personal blog at Friendster, but since that's a networking site, and as we know networking sites get outdated very fast, I've decided to move to blogspot. Decided against combining personal blog material with my pure tech blog at n-w-n.blogspot.com

Opinions, events(not much, boring person here), photos, rants(hopefully not much), diary material, you know the drill.