Ultimate gaming PC

[warpus]

Thanks guys, I'm in heaven over here. I haven't been doing anything but playing games and I don't know when I'm going to stop.

No unusual behaviour from the system aside from 1 system lock when I was a dumbass and launched 2 games at a time while installing other things while windows updates were running. That was just after the build was complete, before many drivers were up to date either. No blue screen, just a freeze requiring a reboot. I chalked it up to most things not being up to date. Since then I've been playing random games and everything runs like clockwork, no slowdowns, no locks, nothing unusual at all. Everything I've thrown at it so far runs smoothly at the highest possible settings. I might need a bigger monitor. In fact, I am going to buy another ~250gb SSD so I can have more games installed. I will also definitely need a 1-3tb regular hd so I can install slower games on it and other things that don't need to be lighting fast.

Looks like we have a very successful build on our hands! .. but.. I think I need to do a bit more stress testing. Using video games.

 

[timtofly]

Sounds pretty awesome. Glad it's up and working! And Europa Universalis IV is a pretty good game, too.

Those are pretty good temps, too. My desktop is about 10 degrees hotter at idle, but that's with the stock cooler. Your gigantic one probably is making a lot of that difference.

And those are some pretty nice specs. Kind of makes me want to go over to Micro Center and buy some a CPU cooler and maybe a faster SSD myself. Although the more rational part of my brain is thinking I should probably find out just how much space I'd have for the cooler first.



From back when I built one, assuming the power button cable is connected, when you press that, it'll send a signal to the motherboard, which will start up the BIOS, which in turn will do its regular startup routine, just like on a desktop you buy from the store. Traditionally it would try booting from a floppy disk first, then a CD/DVD (if it was bootable), and after that the hard drive; nowadays some might not even have a floppy option. The very first time, you probably don't have anything bootable in the CD drive, so you'll get the "No bootable device detected" message, at which point you can put a CD in, restart, and start installing an operating system.

Now how it figures out which of the SATA connections is a CD/DVD drive, and which is a hard drive, I don't know. There must be some way that the drive can communicate that with the BIOS, but at least when I built my desktop, there wasn't a requirement to connect optical drives to certain SATA ports. This is likely part of what the BIOS is doing as its progress bar moves slowly from left to right (or more quickly if you have EFI).

Ah, got it ;so the BIOS lives on the motherboard. I don't think I ever realized that. So does this imply that the BIOS is flashed at the motherboard factory? Are there better and worse BIOSes for different home configurations?

Yes the BIOS is on the mother board and the latest boards have integrated wired and even wireless ports. With these and a network connection you can pull down a image from a server that even eliminates the need for an optical drive. If the image is small enough you can load from USB also. As pointed out the board can be flashed via USB even without a CPU or drive. Once the basic windows is up and running most drivers and updates are pulled offline as well. While a image is usually for a certain hardware configuration, they can be generic enough for the motherboard and then adjusted later for all the added cards or accessories.

On commercial mass market units, the drives can be imaged on a machine that will do multiple drives at a time pulling down an image from a network. They are then placed in the computer and when initialized are then "serialized" to be unique to the computer it is placed in.

 

[warpus]

I don't have an optical drive in the pc, I installed windows via a USB key. This is a big change for me as my last build had an optical drive.. and a disk drive even.

 

[leif erikson]

Yeah, it is a bit strange to have no removable storage, especially for an old guy like me.

In my new build, I left out optical drive as well, but then decided to cheat.
Got a USB Blue-Ray portable drive that I can plug into any of my computers, or my kids computers. Working out so far...

 

[warpus]

I might very well get one, or just install the dvd burner I have in my old, non-working case. We'll see. For now I'm very happy with what I have, even though I should be looking up HD deals and such. Hooked up one of my external HDs to it (it was hooked up to the media centre in my bedroom, nothing is networked yet), it'll have to tie me over for now.

I distinctly remember the days when I had an atari 800xl.. my first computer. No harddrive, no optical drives, just a tape deck. How much we've advanced as a civilization to allow me to play all these games at such high speeds!

 

[Zelig]

I've found OS network installs to be horribly finicky. Probably worthwhile if you're pushing them out to a company full of PCs, but I'd never recommend it to a home user.

I've also been optical-drive free other than a single portable USB drive for several years now. Only actually use the portable drive about once per year.

 

[warpus]

I don't mean to tease and not show what it looks like with the cover off, but I found this photo on my camera, I took it right after I finished putting it together:



That's the cpu cooler fan you can see through the window. It snaps on and off very easily, so maybe I can get a black one. I don't care so much about that for now, when I'm playing games I can't see that side of the case But eventually it will have to be looked into.

You can see a bit of the video card there too, right below. It looks closer than it is, there's some clearance there. The ram is obscured by the cpu cooler in terms of visibility I think..

The bottom of the case has 2 dust grills you can pull out from the front and the back that snap into place when you put them in. The top has usb ports, fan control, power, reset, etc. but also a button that turns on lights in the back for when you need to plug crap in and it's dark. Very slick.

 

[warpus]

Update: I just ordered 2 drives for this machine: a 512GB SSD and a 3TB HDD.

Everyone's saying that 750GB of SSD is overkill, but whatever. I found really good deals on those drives ($220 for the ssd) and I really want more games installed that run as fast as possible. It's going to be glorious.

So far I've been playing a lot of EUIV and Civ V. Nothing really testing the limits of this machine, although Civ V on a huge map with lots of civs is crazy. I have a couple random FPS games installed (metro, stalker, mass effect) and empire: total war. oh and I just installed skyrim yesterday, but whenever I install a mod it crashes, which is unfortunate..

So basically so far I'm just trying games in my steam library. Anything I should try that would look pretty and be immersive? I usually buy games when they're on sale but I'm willing to treat myself it the game is good enough. Only games I bought so far is Singularity and take on mars and they were not really that great.

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Update: I just ordered a 3TB optical drive.

I must admit I'm somewhat perplexed. I thought you were going to compliment your build with a portable optical, never mind where the 3TB spec comes from.

 

[warpus]

I must admit I'm somewhat perplexed. I thought you were going to compliment your build with a portable optical, never mind where the 3TB spec comes from.

Er I was too excited.

I meant 3TB HDD of course

I've since moved my 3TB external to my bedroom, where my media centre is. The 1.5TB external is still hooked up to my gaming pc.

 

[warpus]

My 3TB "optical" drive arrived today, just finished installing it and setting it up. I'm dumping all my vacation photos onto it, among other things. The more copies of those photos that exist, the better.

I also got an email about the 500GB SSD drive I ordered. It was a "mislabelled" product and the price was actually for the 256gb version. Figures...

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

I would consider that false advertising and request my money back.

 

[peter grimes]

I've just spent the past few days looking into pricing on SSDs and it seems to be about 2Gb/$1.

 

[warpus]

I would consider that false advertising and request my money back.

Yeah, I'm getting my money back. The price did seem to be too good to be true...

 

[illram]

I also got an email about the 500GB SSD drive I ordered. It was a "mislabelled" product and the price was actually for the 256gb version. Figures...

That's crazy. Who was the online retailer so I know to never shop there ever? Please don't say newegg or amazon...

 

[Zelig]

That happens not infrequently on amazon, it's kind of inevitable with the kind of volume they do.

They nearly always cancel your order and sometimes send you a $5 or $10 giftcard for your trouble.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, it was amazon. Every couple days I just do a scan for SSD deals, and that one came up so I bit. It's not vital that I get this drive right now, so I'm going to be patient until another deal comes up.