Windows 7: Show Us Your Rig [4]

What is it?

Yay! Got my upgrade... What a nightmare getting it to work though. Lol. The smallest and simplest of things can be a real pain in an inappropriate place..

Anyway, as promised.. Pictures attached below.

I'm thoroughly impressed with my 'new' (to me anyway) motherboard, a sexy MSI 990FXA-GD65 v3.0. Pretty sweet stats on this board too. Like 8x USB2, 2x USB3, 6x SATA3 (with no SATA2), dual PCI-e 16x (that don't drop to 8x with SLI or CrossFire), and I think it also supports all the x4 and x6 AMD chips too....

The board didn't have the CPU heatsink mounting bracket attached when it arrived and I couldn't find any screws that would fit it, so I ended up steal the mounting bracket backplate and screws from my old XFX 750a board. Then when I finally got everything connected, I installed it in my case.

Well, let's just say I could've saved myself a lot of sore fingertips and foul language by testing it open on my desk first.... It simply wouldn't boot. Motherboard lights came on and the heatsink fan started spinning, but no POST, no BIOS, no beeps, no video output, just nothing. After removing it all from my case again, and setting up a makeshift testbed, I resorted to swapping out the CPU for my older x3 710.

Now here's the funny part... When I picked up my Zalman heatsink, the x4 975BE came out with it. It looked like it was in properly and it didn't fall out while I was fighting with the heatsink backplate (which went on for about 4 hours), so it was the last thing I thought of checking!

Anyway, I sat pulling wire for about 2 hours to get all the cables where they were happy without being in the way of anything else... And now I have a new PC. I must say though, I love the sideways facing SATA connectors, all my drive cables are hidden nicely with a small loop to the right of my drive bay, completely out of sight... I'll post benchmarks and stuff when I get back into Windows, I'm still in Linux downloading drivers at the moment.

It looks real good, ZaLiTH. I know you'll be pleased with it. These things can make you pull your hair out and kick things across the room can't they? They can also make you say some words you don't normally say. But, that's the fun of it, right?

Ah yes, most definitely.. Followed by the thrill of booting up a new PC and running every benchmark app one can find in their installs folder.

It's a mechanical keyboard. Most who have used them will never go back to a regular membrane keyboard. Mechanical keyboards are sold based mainly on what type of "switches" the keys have under the keycaps. The switches are what actuates the keystroke. The most common are Cherry MX Blue, Black, Red, and Brown.

I personally went with a keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches, and I liked it immediately. It was pretty spendy, but for how well they work, the features and how long they last, it was worth it!.

[QUOTE=ganjiry;2326000]Well, my fears just intensified. I got my LSI 9211-8i yesterday, read the directions on how to install the driver and knew even less than I knew before I got the thing. From what I'm reading, I have to install the driver as part of the Windows 7 installation process. I do NOT want to have to do that again (especially dealing with the M$ updates again) so I fired off an email to LSI asking if that was necessary and, if not, how to install the stupid driver. Until I hear back (they said it takes up to 48 hours for a response and I don't know if that means 48 any day hours or 48 business day hours), I'm dead in the water since I don't want to load and configure any more programs (I have only security related programs installed right now) if I'm going to have to do it all over again.

I am going to change out the fan on the CPU cooler today. Changing out the fan can be easily done without removing the cooler (thank God!; the only way to remove the cooler is to remove the MOBO and that would take a few hours to R&R since so much stuff is in the way and would have to come out first). However, the graphics card has to come out (again!) for me to be able to get to (or even see) the CPU fan header so I'm going to have to lug the boat...er...ship anchor back to the washing machine so I can see what I'm doing without killing my back (if I don't kill it lugging the ship...er...battleship anchor around).

Thanks for the info Kelly, Osmium sounded like a medication of some sort.

Andre your system looks good. Steve and I have learned the hard way to always set up a new system and test it before putting the board in the case, it's easier to slap on a lot of cables too.

And of course all the cable management getting every back in where it belongs afterwards. Lol. I've spent a good few hours on that today...

It's amazing how much weight all the little extras add hey..? Between GPUs, nice big CPU coolers and HDDs, suddenly a PC case becomes a hefty box to move around.

Too true, think I've learned my lesson now though.. I didn't have nearly as much stuff in my case when I originally got my XFX board, so I haven't actually worked on building or rebuilding any PC in ages. I'm somewhat out of practice. Looks like you've got a nice little test bed layout there, my desk hardly ever has enough space to do things like that properly (and I was too lazy to remove my PSU, so I just plonked it next to my board today when I did that).

I'll be redoing all this again pretty soon, I made a plan for a Corsair Graphite 600T the other day, which I'll be getting at month end. At least I'll have a ton more space in the case to play with though.

You've already been given the explanation, now how about some pictures?

Go here.