Building The Rig - Part 4

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



Bro's blog has a trove of screenies.

Building The Rig - Part 3

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

My personal adage, fortunately or unfortunately, never fails. When it comes to computers, nothing ever goes smoothly. After the assembling, it was time get those some juice into our rig. Lots of excitement on my bro's part, I tried to warn him.

To make things easier, I've arranged our woes in chronological order.

Booting up the tower
Since we only had one monitor, we had to switch VGA cables. (A VGA cable connects your monitor to your CPU.) Ready to plug into the new rig, only to find out that the new PSU only had one slot, already connected to main power line.
Solution: Bought a VGA-to-3pinplug, the same one that connects the PSU to the electrical socket.

No video input when the old comp was working 10 mins ago?!?
Before we went out to buy the VGA cable, I wanted to use the old computer. CPU boots ... "No video input" No way a perfectly fine computer could die in a space of 10 minutes. Panic & frustration on my part after an exhausting night assembling, sms-ed big bro. Opened the casing to reseat all the cards, while taking the opportunity to clean the CPU fan(which has since stopped its loud humming sound).
Solution: Bro had connected the VGA to the onboard graphics(which I assumed is spoilt or smtg) instead of the graphics card.

Formatting and OS installation went fine. Drivers and apps followed suite.

Every single game crashes
By this time, my bro and I were stressed out to the max. Plonking down RM3000, we envisioned the perfect gaming rig, capable of running the latest game engines smoothly and on high graphics settings. Horror of horrors, not one game could run longer than 30 mins. Its like buying a Lamboghini only to realise you can't drive it for whatever reason..
Awfully dreadful feeling, took the mood out of everything.

We spent about a few days scouring the web for solutions, updated drivers, tweaked with clockspeed and fanspeed, all to no avail. We reached our final straw and implored our dad to take us back to Low Yat to let the professionals handle it.

Culprit: Faulty RAM, unstable OS and the most crucial, I hadn't used the screws to separate the motherboard from the casing, resulting in the current getting grounded. In other words, the computer crashed due to insufficient power, especially when runnning games that stressed the system.
Switched to Kingston RAM as recommeneded, though Corsair's RAM looked cooler, but anything goes as long as the rig works.

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.