Re: Building a new PC
I completed building my PC yeserday. I am very happy with the outcome. The speed is breath taking. There were a few set backs but not a big deal. All in all, it was a great, rewarding experience. I haven't overclocked the processor or the video card yet but I may be doing this in a few days.
Here are the issues I ran into:
The case has two 3.5 drive bays. The holes upper one doesn match the holes in the hard drives so I cannot screw my HDs in there. The upper bay that carries 3 hard drives is useless for me. The bottom bay that has 4-hd capacity was the way to go anyway becasue thats where the front panel fans are blowing lotsa air. So I ended up using that bay. That bay is a removable bay with thumb screwes. Makes it very easy to handle. I like!!!
The Case doesn't have a slot for floppies. I was planning to use a floppy disk but there isn't any slot for it. I dropped the idea of putting the floppy. You can put one in the 5.25 bay with some tools but than you will see dark holes on the both sides of the floppy drive in your front panel. No biggie but still.
The SATA power cable that came with the PSU was one cable split into two and could only go so far apart. The SATA DVDRW that I boguth was placed on top inside the machine and the SATA HD was at the bottom. The sata power wire couldn't reach both of them. Still no biggi. Fortunately the SATA drive had the standard power pins too.
The motherboard only had one IDE connector but I knew that up front. So it wasn't really a setback. Most IDE hard drives you can have on it would be two unles you buy a PCI IDE Controller card or use a SATA to IDE adapter or something.
No Serial port on the mobo. I knew this up front too so no biggie here.
All of my PCI slots are already occupied.
The Case has USB ports and audio outputs on top of the case on top (instead of on the front). I have to slide the whole case out of my work desk to be able to use it.
The case is slightly bigger and heavier than normal mid tower.
The side air duck is giant. It was pushing one of the wires to get in the way of the CPU heatsink fan. I had to tie some of the wires to avoid that.
Here are the good things...
I love the hydraulic door and the LED lioghts, especially the front lights. I love how easy it was to put all the pieces together. A lot of space inside the case. Very good ariflow. Hard drive access is extremely fast. DDR2 800 SDRAM worked like a charm. The ASUS mobo is rock solid. The utilities it comes with are superb, espeically the one for BIOS update from within Windows. Everything powered up with the very first try without a glitch. The picture is very crisp and clear.
