Building My Computer

Check out this page for a description of why I ended up building this machine and what parts I selected.

Here are the parts, all in their neat packages, on my kitchen table.

I've never spent over $150 on a computer case before, but let me tell you, it was well worth it.  The COOLER MASTER COSMOS RC-1000-KSN1-GP Full Tower Case has lots of room and two tons of features.  Here is a picture of the motherboard tray.  Notice the paper layout telling you where you need to put the mounting posts for your motherboard.

While the guide was nice, it didn't quite match up with the ASUS Maximus Formula motherboard as I only had nine mount points and had to take out post I.  That is why after you mount the posts you make sure you have them all and none are missing.  The mounting posts provide support for the motherboard and provide grounding to the case.  Here is the motherboard mounted, notice all of the extra space to work in.

Next I installed the COOLER MASTER Real Power Pro 750W Power Supply.  It would make Tim Allen proud, 750 watts of power.  Yes, they make them bigger, but 750 watts is more than enough for the parts that are going in this case.

Next to be installed is the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Quad-Core Processor.  Again, more power, four CPUs to handle anything I want to throw at them.

Next was the stock Intel heat sink and fan.  This gave me a bit of trouble initially, but after installing and removing a couple of times I finally got it figured out.  You want to make sure that your heat sink is properly installed as an improperly installed head sink will result in problems due to the CPU being too hot.  The stock heat sink will come with the CPU if you purchase the retail version and is fine for normal use.

Next I installed the sound card that came with the motherboard.  I had issues with it not seating properly and this seemed to result in no rear channel sound so it was later removed and replaced with the Creative Lab Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card from my other machine.

One of the cool features of this mother board is an external LCD POSTER display.  During the POST (Power On Self Test) it displays the status.  After POST it displays the time.  The pass through is build into the case insert that comes with the mother board.

A very cool feature of this case is the push to lock feature for the 5 1/2" drive bays.  Simply slide in the drive and push the big blue button to lock it in place.

Here are the LITEON LH-20A1L-06 20X SATA DVD Burner and a drive tray system that I use on all of my machine that make it very easy to install an IDE drive into my machine to work on it or pull files from it.

There are six 3 1/2" drive cages at the bottom of the case.  This picture shows one pulled with the Seagate Barracuda 750GB Serial ATA  Hard Drive installed.

Here is a look at the other side of the drive cage.

Here is another nifty feature of the motherboard.  One of the worst parts about putting together a computer is attaching all of the case wires.  These are the wires that go to the lights and power switch.  Asus came up with an adapter that you can connect the wires to, outside of the case and then install the adapter in the case.

Here is a shot of the back/bottom of the case.  This case allows you to route the wires out of sight to connect your 3 1/2 inch drives.

Things are starting to fill up the case and my wiring looks a bit shabby, but we'll clean that up later.

Here is a picture of the back with three 3 1/2" installed.  Thank goodness all of these wires will be hidden.