Day 3&4
UPS dropped by my house a couple times leaving behind some very nice packages for me. As any gadget freak knows, half the enjoyment of buying online is the anticipation of the delivery, receiving and opening boxes, removing the shrink wrap, unwrapping the product packaging and finally reaching in and appreciating how great technology can be.
My living room is a total mess. I ransacked the packages and ripped up packing material, empty boxes and useless manuals are strewn all over the place.
Here are my first impressions of the various components:
- Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66ghz Quad-Core processor
What a gorgeous piece of hardware. I actually expected it to be much bigger, considering Intel somehow squashed four cores into one processor. One huge plus is that the processor doesn’t have a multitude of small pins on the bottom that interfaces with the motherboard. There was always the risk of bending them by mistake and ruining the processor.
- Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
It’s not the prettiest motherboard I’ve seen. Gigabyte put too much effort into color coding, which ruins the overall aesthetic. The heatsinks and various parts seem very solid and well made. Like any $200+ motherboard, it’s jam packed with features. There are no cheap LGA1366 motherboards. They are all premium parts loaded with extras and top notch components. SIX ram slots. EIGHT SATA ports. EIGHT USB ports. Support for THREE graphics cards running in triple Crossfire or SLI. Ridiculous.
- 6GB OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 1600mhz RAM
These sticks are almost gaudy with gold-colored metal covers. I love the idea that I’ll have SIX gigabytes of memory at my disposal. If I want, I could get three more sticks and have TWELVE gigabytes. I have no idea why I would need so much memory, but I love having the option.
- Corsair 650w TX power supply
Corsair is renowned for making some of the best power supplies and this one appears to be no exception. Solid and heavy construction with a buttload of wires, each covered with a black fabric mesh. It’ll be easy to do a good cable job that doesn’t look too messy.
- Cooler Master Centurion 534 Plus Mid Tower Case
For a $50 case, this is a well made product. Unfortunately, I’m used to playing with $100+ cases and I can see where Cooler Master made compromises. It looks very nice, expensive and clean. Definitely not one of those gaudy, overdesigned cases made for gamers who have no sense of style.
I have a major problem with the hard drive bays, unfortunately. The hard drive cage only holds three drives and they are all squashed together. That means it only holds two drives, if you care at all about cooling. There are two 3.5″ drive bays, but they are an extremely tight fit and not made for hard drives. I tried sticking a dead drive into one of the bays to see if it fits and it required far too much force, scratching up the drives completely. The case comes with FIVE 5.25″ drive bays. Why the heck would anyone need FIVE??
There are three locations for 120mm fans, which is good, but none of the openings in the case have dust filters. I’ll have to patch together some homemade filters.
The side panel has an air funnel for the CPU and a side fan, but both will have to be removed to make room for the monster CPU cooler.
- Scythe Mugen-2 SCMG-2000 CPU Cooler

Comparison with stock heatsink
This thing is a beast! I’m a little worried it’s not going to fit into my case, even though I did all the research beforehand. One thing I love about Scythe CPU coolers is that they are some of the best performers, but somehow they aren’t ridiculously overpriced. Some CPU coolers are $70+ dollars and many of them don’t deliver. On the downside, the way Scythe attaches the fan to the heatsink is really cheap and ugly. The baseplate has a mirror finish, which means hardcore cooler freaks shouldn’t have to do any extra work trying to get the cleanest connection between the heatsink and the CPU.
The BUILD
ARGH!!! ARGH!!
That’s all I can say right now. It took me six frigging hours to do this build…by far the longest and most frustrating build I’ve ever done. Luckily, I didn’t have any dead parts, but somehow I managed to entangle myself with what felt like every possible mishap and mistake. I basically built dozens of computers today because I kept putting it together and ripping it apart trying to troubleshoot every little problem.
Here is a sampling of some of the problems I encountered. Some problems, I had no idea how to fix, so I ripped the computer apart and put it back together again, hoping it would magically work (it did!!).
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Motherboard with huge heatsink
The Scythe CPU cooler requires a weird and complicated installation and I messed up several times. The first couple times, I didn’t screw down hard enough to make a good connection between the CPU and the heatsink, resulting in 70+ celsius temperatures and immediate shutdowns. I’m getting good temperatures and the Mugen-2 is a cheap product, but I don’t recommend it unless you have a lot of patience.
- I have a lot of experience with ASUS and DFI motherboards, but this is my first Gigabyte. With the Gigabyte, I had to manually reset the CMOS over and over again. I’m used to a motherboard that automatically reboots to the last working configuration. I’m not happy with the Gigabyte motherboard right now.
- You won’t believe the variety of error sounds that I got from the motherboard. Long screeching noises that made me think the computer was going to explode….
- Numerous times, after doing yet another rebuild, I would forget to plug one power connector, resulting in yet another error message and more time wasted.
- Since the hard drive bay doesn’t have rubber or silicon parts to minimize vibration, the drives make far too much sound. I had to fudge together a craptastic fix to muffle the noise.
- When I finally got to the Windows 7 installation, I kept getting a Linux GRUB error message. I was booting from the Windows installation CD so it made no sense whatsoever. I tried various boot discs (Windows 7, Vista, XP) and even swapped out the DVD for an old fashioned IDE drive. No luck. It finally turned out that my Raptor (hard drive) had an old Linux installation, which I completely forget about it. If I’m booting from the DVD, I don’t know why it would get an error message from the hard drive, but it did. I eventually formatted the drive using another computer.

Finished!!
In any case, the build is done and Windows is running so smoothly, it brings tears to my eyes. No problems with drivers. No problems with incompatibilities so far. It’ll take me a while to get everything reinstalled and working the way I want, but I’m ecstatic.
I’m not that anal about doing a perfect wiring job, but it looks pretty good to me. In case I need to go in and fix something, I don’t want to zip tie anything or put too much effort into hiding the cabling.
For now, I’m letting the Core i7 run at stock speeds and using the Gigabyte software (EasyTune) to overclock. It’s at 3.2ghz right now. Honestly, I’m not sure EasyTune is even working, but everything is really fast and snappy. Everything loads so quickly.
Things I would do differently
Overall, it was a fun build (maybe a little frustrating, but the challenge is what makes it fun). I learned a lot and I’m sure my next build will be far more successful.
- Skip Gigabyte and go with an ASUS motherboard. Gigabyte recently held an overclocking competition and they picked the GA-EX58-UD4P as the platform. So obviously they think it’s a great overclocking board, but I don’t think it’s a very novice friendly board. I went with Gigabyte because I wanted to try a different brand, but I would recommend ASUS motherboards.
- Get a better case. The Cooler Master Centurion 534 is a good case, especially for the price ($50). But I am really picky about noise, vibrations, fans and dust. So I need a case that is better suited to my needs.
- Get a more user-friendly CPU heatsink. The Scythe Mugen-2 is a great heatsink, but it’s so difficult to install. My other choice for a cheap, but effective heatsink is the Xigmatek Dark Knight ($40). It also looks much better.
- Consider upgrading to SSD drives (Solid State). They are still really expensive, but soon enough, it will be affordable for the average person. The cheaper SSD’s ($100-$150) have too many problems right now. For many computers, especially at the high end, the hard drive is the weak link. With quality SSD’s, the difference is enormous.
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