not falling down

The aforementioned thermal grease is purchased, as is everything else. Unfortunately, due to credit card issues, it won’t all be here by this weekend–I’m hoping for next Tuesday. But it will be here. In many, many little boxes.

If you are capable of being as geeked out as I’ve been this week, you might enjoy the following stat-list of what will soon be my system. If not, you can skip this incomprehensible technobabble and go back to reading Scary Go Round, where Shelley is turning into, like, Holly Reborn.

Inside

• P4 at 3.2 GHz (Northwood core, as I’ll probably bump it to like 3.6)
• Zalman (enormous) all-copper CNPS7000A-CU heatsink, and some Arctic Silver 5 to go with it
• ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard (i875; 925 is for wienerbiscuits)
• 1Gb PC3200 Crucial Ballistix low-latency RAM (CL=2, bitch)
• ASUS V9999 nVidia GeForce 6800 (reportedly easy-overclocks to beat a 6800 GT)
• Creative Audigy ZS2 GE
• Thermaltake W0010 Silent Purepower 480W PSU
• Two Seagata Barracuda SATA 80gb hds, to run in RAID 0 (7200 RPM because it’s RAID, man, who needs that 10k stuff)
• One Seagate Ultra ATA 200gb hd

Outside

• Samsung 52×32x52 CD-RW / DVD drive
• Lite-On 48×24x48x / 12×8x12x CD-RW / DVD±R drive
• Mitsumi floppy drive / 7-in-1 memory card reader
• Cooler Master Musketeer (cool blue glowy thing with analog dials)
• Logitech DeluxePlus keyboard (which translates to “plain old keyboard that happens to have the right arrangement of shift-backslash-enter”)
• Microsoft Intellimouse
• 21″ ViewSonic CRT monitor
• Lian-Li 6070B Aluminum Quiet Case

Did I mention that every component available in multiple colors is nice and black? And then there’s some other stuff, like the irresistibly ricey blue LED case feet and the USB 2.0 TV tuner (so if anybody else brings over an Xbox, GUESS WHAT WE CAN DO). Almost all of the above came from Newegg, which seems to inspire a fanatical loyalty among its users, so I guess that’s good. With a little luck, I should be getting WinXP for free and then installing either Red Hat or Debian… for Dual-Boot Action! Plus I’ll be painting my old 17″ CRT black and using that as the auxiliary monitor… for Productivity Madness!

I apologize for the capitalization in the previous paragraph. It couldn’t be helped.

I thought quite hard about going the bleeding-edge route with a Prescott, a 925 mobo and a PCI-E card; I thought equally hard about going with a watercooling system to keep all that from blowing up, but I finally remembered that man, I’m no early adopter. Early adoption is for the weak. I’m going to get a stable system for cheaper, cool it with some fans and overclock the crap out of it. And I’m going to do it on a core that’s been tried in fire, or at least temperatures of up to fifty degrees Centigrade.

I realize I’m going to be putting a lot of labor into this. I’m sure it won’t work the first or second or third times. I’m sure I forgot something mission-critical. Still, I’m saving at least eight hundred bucks versus getting a comparable system built for me by one of the big names, and anyway I think this is a process every geek ought to go through once.

Total cost: $2738.63, plus $213.81 S&H, which isn’t much more than I would have paid in taxes anyway. So I spent that $213.81 supporting, er, greedy out-of-state corporations instead of my broke-ass Kentucky’s revenue. That’s good, I’m proud of that one.