All about the Pentiums (my attempt at building a PC, final update)

[SageRuffin]

I'll keep this brief considering it's quarter after 3 in the morning in my neck of the woods.

So... after doing a hefty amount of modifying my current PC I figured I'd bite the bullet and try my hard and building an entire rig (not for gaming per se, but definitely an enthusiast's build). I had all my materials - intel i5, liquid cooling, SSD, massive storage, the works - and everything was going well, until one small unwritten detail whilst installing my liquid cooling system sent everything crashing down in an ungraceful disaster.

I'll spare everyone the exact details, suffice to say that I'm assed out half my weekend and approximately $600US. D: I haven't quit just yet - I'll just to try again once I ge? a few more dollars and sense.

What of the rest of you all? Do any of y'all have some tips and tricks that might my next attempt much less migraine-inducing?

Statement: I totally need to go to bed. I've nodded off about 6 times already.

Peace.

Addendum (2:08 EST, 9/28/2001): The Sisters of Fate just love fucking me over when it comes to certain hobbies, it seems. First came MvC3 and my lack of progression in the online ranked matches, then came Mortal Kombat and the ever-fucking-constant rage-quitters. Now here I am trying - and failing - to build my own little Sage-PC and the decided to hammer me with frustration and clouded judgement (I realized too late that things may not have been so bad... after I had decided to start over and did away with everything already).

Things were starting to look up. I got my old PC back together and managed to more or less do a "preliminary setup" so all I had to do is just port certain parts of the hardware over to the new PC - I had already backed up my data from my old 2TB HDD and that's now working quite nicely, and had installed various programs and other assorted knick-knacks to my new SSD with little trouble outside of the occasional update.

...Then came the file restoration. Everything was going as it should if kinda slow, but then I guess the Fates noticed I was in a little too good a mood, so they decided to horse-kick me in the balls with cast-iron cleats several times as my external HDD failed literally in the middle of the file restoration. Long story short, a massive chunk of entertainment (take that for what you will), INCLUDING MY OWN DRAWINGS AND MUSIC/GAMEPLAY VIDEOS, is now scattered to the winds, and I'm not about to spend half a paycheck to go to a data recovery place with no guarantee that I'll get everything back.

I'm so depressed and angry right now... I just wanna take this drive and shatter it into a quintillion microscopic pieces.

Addendum (18:05 EST, 10/01/2011): The Fates can go stick it, for this time I am triumphant.

Here I am posting on my new created PC. Nice and fresh and with power out the ass and moderately low voltage to boot (if I'm reading the numbers right). The only thing I don't like about thing is that the chassis is about the size of the trash can, and I had to do a bit of rearranging in order to get to the fit with my computer desk. That, and it weighs an excess of about 50 pounds.

I kicked forth about an extra $130US to get an i7-2600k and motherboard to boot, plus this massive chassis that's taking up half my comp desk but hey, it has 4 case fans, and I can add another 4 or so if I so choose in the future. I also forewent the liquid cooling - after doing a bit of research, I grabbed a Cooler Master Hyper-212 Plus, apparently giving ri-goddamn-diculous performance at a ri-goddamn-diculous price ($30US? sheeeeeeeeee-it). Long and short, my 360 makes more noise than my PC.

Kinda wish I had taken certain precautions sooner (like having a second backup), but alas - live and learn, right? And while I still can't do anything about the lost data, worst-case-scenario I can simply rebuild.

Thanks for the tips and the encouragement. I'm gonna take my ass to the store, get some cheap booze and pizza, and play me some fucking video games.

 

[SageRuffin]

Do any of y'all have some tips and tricks that might my next attempt much less migraine-inducing?

Yes: Don't bother with liquid cooling. There are few scenarios with a PC where liquid cooling is strictly necessary; it is unlikely that you will encounter any of them.

This. I have yet to meet a person who really needed/whos rig benefited from liquid cooling. Its completely unnecessary and there are much better alternatives.

I have, however, met a lot of people who had a bad experience with liquid cooling. I guess youre going to stay away from it anyway following that debacle you mentioned, but yeah.

Im sorry to hear your hardware got ruined though, that sucks.

That's the crazy thing (a few actually) - I don't really know if the hardware got jacked up, or if my system just doesn't recognize my video card (as the motherboard has no onboard graphics). Incidentally, once I realized that there was a few I should've done before putting it all together, everything was already put together.

Also, I'm running a liquid cooling system in my old PC now and with the exception of me installing the fan on intake versus exhaust, everything worked fine. Although considering the chassis I have, I was doomed from the start since it sturned that the fans were so massive that I couldn't get one of the side panels back on.

Ah well. The two of you who responded, thanks for showing me the error of my ways. It's back to the drawing board for me then.

 

[jpoon]

Liquid cooling is a horrible idea if you aren't a skilled computer builder. Why would you even attempt it when there are plenty of excellent (even better than liquid) air cooling systems that are a breeze to use?

Just remember one all important thing for the next attempt...air cooling. Good luck on the next go man, sucks to have that happen!

 

[Hoplon]

Less migraine inducing?

Hell yes.

Little things like main(mother)board and GFX card matching, while not strictly necessary it means the the compatibility is never an issue.

do the switch connectors first thing after installing the main board.

if liquid cooling using parts that where factory made for it means you don't kill 2 GFX cards before you get it right when installing the heat sink.

 

[SageRuffin]

I feel like such an idiot right now...

One thing where I thought I jacked up was that my new PC didn't recognize my graphics card. Turns out I didn't connect all the proper wires. So all that mess about the screen being black and having no signal was probably more that than anything truly significant.

This makes me wonder if anyone else had an equally royal fuck-up... Curse my frustration!

I'll make sure to do all the proper research for this weekend. I'm not gonna have another fruitless weekend.

 

[Etni]

This makes me wonder if anyone else had an equally royal fuck-up...

Well, the first time I built a PC completely by myself was a royal fuck-up that I'm almost proud of. The case had these counterparts (what do you call them?) for screwing in the motherboard, and since the first two seemed to be in the correct position, I just assumed the rest of them are too, and it didn't cross my mind to actually make sure. As a result I tightened one motherboard screw directly into the case, effectively shorting it.

The computer wouldn't boot up, which I in hindshight realize has to be some kind of failsafe against idiot users such as myself. I did random things like trying to remove memory sticks, gpu etc. until at the the Nth attempt I guess the failsafe got tired with me, the computer booted up, and then there was sparks and a nice little flame. Only too bad they came out of my motherboard.


tl;dr I once assembled a PC and unintentionally set it on fire.

 

[SageRuffin]

The Sisters of Fate decided to fuck me sideways (and not in the fun way). Read where it says "Addendum" with the time stamp for more details.

 

[DasDestroyer]

Unless you are building a monster of a PC that can cook a steak to a crisp in five seconds, don't bother with liquid cooling. It's much easier to install a good fan, and you wouldn't have had to spend those extra 600$.

 

[flaming_squirrel]

You went for a liquid setup on your FIRST BUILD? May I ask why? I'm guessing that's a 2500k so you must have it at a pretty mad clock to justify it.

Also in what way did the HDD fail? It may be a recoverable situation as yet without spending £500 on data recovery.


Feel free to pm if you need any system building advice though.
As long as it had nothing to do with liquid cooling.

 

[MrTub]

Do any of y'all have some tips and tricks that might my next attempt much less migraine-inducing?

Yes: Don't bother with liquid cooling. There are few scenarios with a PC where liquid cooling is strictly necessary; it is unlikely that you will encounter any of them.

This. I have yet to meet a person who really needed/whos rig benefited from liquid cooling. Its completely unnecessary and there are much better alternatives.

I have, however, met a lot of people who had a bad experience with liquid cooling. I guess youre going to stay away from it anyway following that debacle you mentioned, but yeah.

Im sorry to hear your hardware got ruined though, that sucks.

Well I guess you have heard of one now at least =)

I need liquid cooling since otherwise my gpus are at 90-95'c at 80-90% fanspeed (100% is 4.9k rpm)on 100% load.

I wouldnt recommend liquid cooling for you first build. And Im glad you fixed the problem with gpu(s) =)

 

[flaming_squirrel]

Well I guess you have heard of one now at least =)

I need liquid cooling since otherwise my gpus are at 90-95'c at 80-90% fanspeed (100% is 4.9k rpm)on 100% load.

I wouldnt recommend liquid cooling for you first build. And Im glad you fixed the problem with gpu(s) =)

You're not running 480's in Sli are you?

 

[MrTub]

Well I guess you have heard of one now at least =)

I need liquid cooling since otherwise my gpus are at 90-95'c at 80-90% fanspeed (100% is 4.9k rpm)on 100% load.

I wouldnt recommend liquid cooling for you first build. And Im glad you fixed the problem with gpu(s) =)

You're not running 480's in Sli are you?

Yes I am. It sounds quite a lot.

 

[SageRuffin]

Unless you are building a monster of a PC that can cook a steak to a crisp in five seconds, don't bother with liquid cooling. It's much easier to install a good fan, and you wouldn't have had to spend those extra 600$.

The $600 came from the new case, processor, etc. So even if I didn't mess up the first time the cost still would've came to that.

You went for a liquid setup on your FIRST BUILD? May I ask why? I'm guessing that's a 2500k so you must have it at a pretty mad clock to justify it.

Because it wasn't the first time I've installed such a system. The thing that threw me off was that the directions didn't indicate that one of the pieces (the mounting bracket, to be specific) was supposed to go on the back of the motherboard - it simply said "place the mounting bracket" or something akin to that. Even the picture digram was vague as all hell because it didn't specify what was what part (hence the "unwritten detail" note I originally made).

I guess how I got it right the first time was that I looked up some directions from various places, which is probably what I should've done the second time (although one of the fans stuck out too much and got in the way of the side fan, but that's another discussion).

Also in what way did the HDD fail? It may be a recoverable situation as yet without spending £500 on data recovery.

If you want the full story, I started the file restoration and went to sleep. After waking up and checking my PC, I noticed that the dialog box was stuck on a single item: a relatively small picture in fact. I canceled the restoration, then tried to restart the drive. Next thing I know, my PC is telling me that the drive cannot start and it's emitting this weird low beep every 5 or so seconds. After a bit of digging, I've ascertained that pretty the worst thing that could've happened did: irreversible hardware failure.

And even if I could get the disk spinning again to pull the data off it, I'm not getting my hopes up since the file backup was a single image file, and it was a total of around 260gb. I highly doubt that can be recovered in one piece (although if it does I'll probably faint from relief).

So, I'll just have to keep going and try to rebuild (the file collection, that is).

 

[SageRuffin]

One last update on my progress. Check the second addendum in the first post for details.