Miracles can happen (Pics)

[little P]

I took a few pictures along the way for posterity as I never thought I'd ever tackle a pc build on my own. Maybe a few upgrades here and there (I've only ever changed a gfx card and psu both of which went wrong) but never from case up So I thought I'd share with you all so you can see how it went Special thanks to everyone who helped me on the forum, over teamspeak and Duke and Wapwap for their donations of old pc parts. You guys are awesome and I hope the pictures involving whipped cream and fruit that are en-route are ok. Some of the positioning requested was a bit of a stretch but I think they turned out very artistic!

Here's how it began...

The old pc, on it's last legs for years but it bravely battled on until the bitter end.





I'll miss the old girl, it had... character.





The guts of the fallen, notice excellent cable management, and you thought Kitty's was bad..





Could still play Asteroids and Tetris (non-colour) on this, so it wasn't too out of date.





Boxes everywhere, started to feel a little bit daunting at this point. But knowing Duke and Wappy had touched two of these boxes I gained power through the fragtard force.





The task ahead didn't look too bad once everything was out of the packaging. Started to feel confident at this point.





Stripped the case right back and then realised I had no idea how to get the contents of the previous picture into the contents of this picture.





It's at this point I realised I had absolutely no clue what I was doing and that it was probably going to take me a little longer than the half hour I had originally thought it would take.





Nonetheless I strode forward confidently (ie. read the manuals very, very carefully) and managed to get the CPU, CPU cooler and ram installed. I went ahead and ordered some Corsair ram as everyone was telling me the 4gb of Wappy's ram wouldn't be enough for this build.





After a number of attempts I finally managed to get the mobo in place and secured. Cable management was a priority for me so it took a few attempts to hide the myriad of wires via the case routing system. Also, the posts for the mobo just did not want to screw in... a bit of wd40 and a pair of pliers soon fixed that. Thanks goodness I found my magnetic screwdrivers otherwise screwing the mobo down would have been almost impossible.





To be continued...

 

[little P]

Optical drive, Hard drive, fans, power and temperature sensors all hooked up.





GPU installed, starting to see light at the end of the tunnel now.





The finished article with the backplate on, bit of a squeeze behind there. In hindsight I would have bought a modular psu to save space but it was ok in the end, quite happy with the result for a first timer.





After going and buying a usb keyboard this morning I was ready to power up, and miraculously, it didn't explode!





After fiddling around in the bios (which was an eye opener for me, the graphical representations are brilliant and mouse support is awesome) I managed to get the ram registered as 1600mhz rather than 1333mhz. Windows did not want to install at all, (I had the "bootmgr is missing" message) but managed to get round that again after playing around in the bios. When I think there was a time when I wouldn't even touch the bios, now I'm playing around with clock speeds etc. It just goes to show that even a complete n00b like me can build a system with a little bit (ok a lot) of patience and a bit of time. The whole thing took me four and a half hours start to finish, and that included a lot of tea breaks and head scratching lol



Now all the drivers and software are installed and up to date, I'm looking forward to trying out a few games, and seeing the difference, but so far so good! Temperatures look good, and everything is stable

Thanks again everyone, without the support of my Fragtonians I would have never have even attempted this, but I'm so glad I did now it's done

Specs:

Psu: Corsair CX600
Mobo: Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3.0
Cpu: Intel Core i7 2700k 3.5 - 3.9Ghz
Cooler: Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo
Ram: 8gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3
Gpu: Gigabyte GeForce GTX650 Ti Boost 2gb
Hdd: Western Digital Black 1TB

 

[Kitlope]

Very very nice Big P! You're now a Big P in my eyes!

So you gonna get some BF3 going or hold out a couple months until BF4 is released?

 

[Engnr]

Nicely done sir.

 

[Shilka]

So you used a magnetic screwdriver and motor oil on delicate electronic components and still got it to work? I think buying a lotteryticket is your next priority :icon_lol:


Awesome job P!

 

[Kenadian]

So you used a magnetic screwdriver and motor oil on delicate electronic components and still got it to work? I think buying a lotteryticket is your next priority :icon_lol:


Awesome job P!

lol I actually cringed when reading those parts.

Still, you got it done little P so job well done! I'm pretty sure that you'll notice a night and day difference between this new build and the old PC.

 

[mondo]

Among other things, I knew you had it in you.

 

[little P]

lol thanks guys. Hey it wouldn't be me if I didn't so something st00pid eh?

I've just come out of playing BF3, it defaulted to Ultra when I started it up, so I thought "that's a good sign" and holy crap does it look good! Blows away the Xbox version, and I couldn't even run it on lowest settings on the old pc...

If this is anything to go by the Xbox onesale and PSflawed can kiss my ass!

I'm gobsmacked at the difference, I'm now on an install frenzy to try all the others lol

I must say, getting used to a mouse and keyboard again for an FPS is going to take some time... I've been used to a controller for too long. Even after playing Arma, which is a slower pace than BF3 I kept hitting the wrong key and having to look down to find the right one, so in BF3 I don't stand a chance! I was tempted to play with the controller, but I know I'll get trounced in multiplayer so I've got a learning curve ahead of me, but at least I've got the hardware now to do it I'll be on tonight for sure and will aim to get on Sunday for some BF3 or Arma if anyone's around :icon_cool:

 

[Kenadian]

Do yourself a favor and turn off mouse acceleration in all games and go into your mouse settings in Windows and disable "enhance pointer precision".

This will make mouse movement much more consistent across all games so it's just a matter of adjusting sensitivity in each game to attain the same amount of movement.

Every competitive player I know does this as it helps build muscle memory which gives you a huge advantage ingame to those who aren't so picky about their settings. The other thing comp players seem to do is play at a lower sensitivity and DPI.

I'll have to check my settings when I get home but I believe I'm playing between 400 - 600 DPI and it's made a huge difference in my competitiveness in BF3.

Also, if you really want to be l33t, measure the distance it takes to turn 180 ingame and translate that sensitivity across all your FPS'.

 

[little P]

Do yourself a favor and turn off mouse acceleration in all games and go into your mouse settings in Windows and disable "enhance pointer precision".

This will make mouse movement much more consistent across all games so it's just a matter of adjusting sensitivity in each game to attain the same amount of movement.

Every competitive player I know does this as it helps build muscle memory which gives you a huge advantage ingame to those who aren't so picky about their settings. The other thing comp players seem to do is play at a lower sensitivity and DPI.

I'll have to check my settings when I get home but I believe I'm playing between 400 - 600 DPI and it's made a huge difference in my competitiveness in BF3.

Also, if you really want to be l33t, measure the distance it takes to turn 180 ingame and translate that sensitivity across all your FPS'.

That's funny you mention that, because the first thing I did was lower the mouse sensitivity in BF3. I've got it set so a 360 degree turn is to the edge of the mousemat and a 180 is halfway, that way I have a yardstick for other games, good idea mate. I've gone ahead and disabled pointer precision. I've had a quick look at adjusting dpi and I think I'm right in saying I need a posh mouse for that don't I?

 

[Kitlope]

Make sure to run fraps too, will help you tailor the video settings. And install teamspeak so I can hear your limey wanker ass

 

[little P]

lol will do ya caknucklehead

 

[Kenadian]

Don't listen to Kitty, DXTory is better

 

[Kitlope]

The best part Big P of doing your own build is when something goes wrong (because something WILL go wrong) like a HD failure or stick of ram goes bad you now have the Big P confidence to troubleshoot and fix. It can be a little time consuming but is much much cheaper than taking it to some computer place and spending 2 or 3 hundred bones on labour alone. And in many cases when the OS shits the bed all they do is press a few buttons in the course of an hour or so and bill the customer huge cake. I don't know if you have them there in limeyland but here we got Best Buy with "Geeksquad", a sub company that fixes computers and sets up home theaters for the n00b. It's a massive rip-off.

 

[mondo]

We have something similar at PC World. A fat, sweaty student takes your computer away to scan your hard drive for things to steal while their colleague turns of the lights, makes you bend over the counter and charges you for a service.

 

[little P]

We have something similar at PC World. A fat, sweaty student takes your computer away to scan your hard drive for things to steal while their colleague turns of the lights, makes you bend over the counter and charges you for a service.

:icon_eek: I always wondered what happened behind that door! Sorry to hear about your experience Mondo, some cream and therapy should get you fixed up in good time.

Completely agree Kitty, the sense of satisfaction I get when I power it on and everything works without any problems is worth the time I put in to putting it together

Looks like my monitor is on it's way out though, it's only 18 months old! :icon_rolleyes:

Getting screen flickering, it was doing it on the old pc so I know it's nothing to do with the build. Although the one common component is the psu and of course the vga cable.

Maybe I should try another cable first.

 

[Engnr]

My monitor took a dive recently. Turned out to be some capacitors on the power board. Un-soldered the blown ones and soldered some new ones in, as good as new. In and out for under $5.00 US. Apparently this is the main problem with all monitors, cheep capacitors. Before you toss it out, google the monitor and trouble, JK found me a couple of videos of exactly my monitor and problem and how to fix it.

 

[little P]

Cheers Engy. Traced the problem down to the monitor being out of phase. Was getting horizontal shimmering. Unplugged the DVI to VGA connector from the gfx card and hooked it up via HDMI and the shimmering has gone. I don't like the colours, they seem washed out and weird even after playing around with the colour settings. For example in your sig the red and blue text is very blurry. In fact all the red on this site is blurry now. But I'd rather that than the shimmering. The rest of the text is nice and sharp which is what I don't get?!

Something tells me I'm missing some kind of simple setting somewhere but I can't put my finger on it.

 

[little P]

I love google. After a bit of a trawl through the interwebs to no avail, I stumbled upon an old thread on some obscure site that said to change the input label for the hdmi input to pc and voila, crystal clear. Schweeeeeeeeeeeeeet! Everything looks amazing now

 

[little P]

I just watched a 1080p .mkv file and played the Jet campaign on BF3 and well... a picture can say a thousand words...