Last Thursday the parts for my new Behemoth of a PC arrived and I spent a few hours that night building it.
The CoolerMaster Cosmos S full tower case is massive, and has 3 fans mounted in the case and a massive fan on the side door. It has some cool features though, it’s all tool-less, so real easy to get into, and install any new cards or devices. There is a set of ports at the front on the top, 4 USB, fire wire and eSata ports, and headphones and mic of course. Another good thing is that the labels are backlit, so you can see them in the dark.
I also got an Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard, socket LGA1366 ready for my Intel i7 975 Extreme processor, and it has some nice features too. There is an LCD poster that shows the BIOS post messages when its booting, so no listening out for case speaker beeps, and all the mobo ports are lit with an OLED display, so you can see what port is what when you are lying on the floor under the desk trying to plug something in.
In went a couple of SSD drives, 6GB of 2Ghz dominator memory, and to keep the cpu cool a massive zalman heatsink and fan.
Graphics is provided by a Gigabyte GTX-295 geforce card.
When it came time for the big switch on it’s always a nerve wracking experience… will it power up at all, will there be issues? Well I did cheat a bit and power up the mobo, cpu, gfx card and 1 stick of memory before I put it all in the case just to see if it would boot, so I had a good idea it would all work.
And it did, the fans burst into life, there was a glow from inside the case, and the whole of Sydney’s lights dimmed as it sucked all the power from the grid :)
Then it was onto installing Windows 7 and getting things up and running.
It’s been running for over a week now, and I am well happy with it. It is lightning fast, it hooks up to my HP MediaSmart home server seamlessly, and Windows 7 RC 1 (as the only o/s on the machine at the moment) really is good too, 64 bit version and all my apps are working fine. I am getting a windows experience rating of 6.3, although everything is at 7.6 and 7.7 other than the gfx, which I haven’t enabled SLI mode yet, as I like twin view on my 2 widescreen LCD displays :)
Next on the list to install is Visual Studio 2010 beta 1… we’ll see how that goes!
