New PC!

I ordered the parts for my new PC on Moday, they turned up Tuesday...

I started putting it all together, and found a few minor issues. I'd chosen to base my build on what Scan use for their 3XS range, figuring if that's what works for them would probably work for me. The case is a gamers box with transparent sides and large, quiet fans. The first minor issue: I didn't expect to find the power supply had to be at the bottom, and upside down. The second was the size of the CPU fan. I could see problems trying to fit the thing. I watched a flash movie on the Zalman site and it made sense but I felt trying to screw down a sprung loaded bar might not be that simple. In the end, it went in, with a few mutterings.

I powered it all up and was rewarded with the BIOS screen. Ran memtest for a couple of hours and it was fine. Temperature seemed much better than I've seen with my Athlon 2200+ where it regularly hit 70C. This one was running at 40C (CPU) and 35C (motherboard). The big fans are a bit noisy, but they are quieter than my aging Athlon (aging? It's not that old!).

Since I've switched on ASUS Q-Fan, the CPU fan is running much quieter - seems every other fan is low speed, big and quiet...

So what I've got is an Intel Duo with four cores, 4GBytes of RAM (not all of which is visible), 8800 GT graphics, 750GByte SATA drive... all in a colourful box with blue lights and a green glowing CPU fan. Be interesting to see it do some raytracing once I've got everything set up - with four cores that ought to be a sight to see.