Haunting Thunder – Maurice Walshe’s Blog

The PC is now initially built.

I had a lot of problems getting the stock INTEL heat sink to seat properly on the i680 board especially once its in the case – subsequently  I found that other’s have had the same problem and advise fitting the heat sink with the motherboard out of the case or using a different heat-sink

After a hiatus (I was feeling under the weather for a long time) last week end I finally managed to get the HSF to seat properly and not have the system go into thermal shut down.

The build went ok apart from the HSF problems - the SATA drives where tricky to get the cables in and I am pondering buying another 4 drives and having a raid 0 for system and a 4 disk raid 5 array for data/programs.

Its fairly stable I have  had a few driver crashes – but as I used a Linksys USB adaptor that gave me problems on another Nforce board I suspect its that.

The Antec 900 looks impressive when powered up the blue glow looks nice and the all the matte back case looks understated.

Next steps:

• Sort out front panel USB/Fire-wire – there’s a few niggles with one of the USB front slots and the front audio doesn’t work (I may have disturbed this during the HSF re install.)
• Install all the other stuff USB hubs and keyboards and Control surfaces
  Install latest nvidia drivers and BIOS
• Decide what to do about RAID
• Possibly Install floppy (I brought a black one to match) 
  Possibly Install a Black DVD/RW drive.
• Decide on sound card I have a Maudio delta 44 that I may reuse will look in sound control in MK to see what the options are.
• Decide what to do with the baby mixer ime running out of chanels
• Decide if I want to buy speakers for the 8 channel sound 
• Reinstall XP when I have the RAID setup sorted and register it