new PC

I've been building a new PC.

Well, no, that's not quite the entire story. I have been building a new PC, but I've also been rationalising my existing PCs.

I currently have 5 PCs in various states of working order and of various performance levels. I also have several of the (now famous) plastic crates worth of "PC gubbins" out in the shed.

The idea is to eventually end up with 3 computers.

The first will be a dedicated gaming rig, which is the new computer I'm building. This is a really powerful machine, the juicy bits of which are a quad-core, 2.8ghz core i7 chip, 8gb of RAM (using 4*2gb sticks to take advantage of hyper threading), a Velociraptor 2 drive, which spins at 10,000RPM and is SATA 2 (couldn't afford one of the SATA 3 ones), and a 5970 ATI card, which has, I believe, 2gb of RAM and a dual-core processor with a clock speed of 1ghz, which, when you think about it, is like having what was a reasonably good computer from a few years ago sat inside my computer :/.

It's also going to be running windows 7 64bit and should basically be able to cope with anything the gaming world can throw at it for a good few years to come.

The second machine is what I'm currently using as my games machine. The idea is that I'll upgrade this to windows 7 32 bit and will use it as my regular, run of the mill machine. However, I'll also be able to play older games on it using the windows 7 XP mode thing. I'm also updating it to have two relatively cheap ATI cards running in cross-fire (more an experiment than a necessity, if I'm honest) and am bumping up the RAM.

The third machine will be what I'm currently using as my regular machine, but will essentially become a file server with my printer on it and also a whole bunch of hard-drives for storing stuff and doing back-up, etc. I'm also going to put this machine next to my TV, so I can watch stuff on it (really, my new TV is more like a monitor). I'm upgrading this machine with some more RAM too as it was cheap, but also, crucially, a Blu-Ray drive, so I should be able to watch Blu-Ray stuff (well, if I ever buy a Blu-Ray disk that is :/).

Everything else I'll put on e-bay and then, since most of it is so old and won't sell, I'll take it all down the recycling place.

It's been ages since I last built a machine and stuff has moved on quite a bit, but some things stay the same. The main thing that stayed the same is the fact that I made some gigantic cock-ups.

The main cock-up this time was with the power supply. When I was putting the system together, I started out with my absolute dream system, which cost a small fortune, and then stepped things back to a more affordable level. However, I think I must have gotten rather mixed up with the case and power supply.

Basically, the case I bought has a power supply that's recommended for it and initially I was buying the pair. But I think at some point I decided to look for cheaper alternatives, and managed to confuse myself that I'd changed the case, so I picked a different power supply.

Except I hadn't changed the case, and the case has an odd design in that the power supply is at the bottom, so you need rather long cables and the supply I bought fell short. Now, this wouldn't be such a problem, because my other supply has super long cables, but the new PSU is also not sufficiently powerful to run both the cross-fire graphics cards if I swap them over.

So, in other words, I've had to buy the first PSU I picked as well :/.

My existing games machine case is actually an over-sized one and it was originally my intention to put the new gubbins in there. However, when the new case turned up, it was a really nice case with some neat features, so I tried to put it in there. But, as well as the unusual design, I also found that the graphics card just wouldn't fit.

Now to be fair, that's not really the fault of the case, because the card is an absolute monster. I was actually quite shocked at the size of the card when it turned up. It's actually longer than the motherboard is wide. In fact, it's almost as big as the motherboard is tall!

Which kinda backs up what I was saying at the beginning about the graphics card being like a mini-computer.