Building a computer, Part II
Last time I posted my part list. After putting this and that together over a course of a couple of evenings, I spent most of a day assembling the rest of the computer.
Blood. So far the only blood was from the over sharp and spiky PCI slot covers.
Sweat. The water cooling gaget quadruples the difficulty of buidling the computer. I there wasn’t enough room in the case for the pump, there wasn’t a suitable place to mount the radiator. The tubes take up so much space I’m worried I won’t have a PCI slot left over for the sound card.
Tears. The machine is DOA. No POST beeps, no fans spinning. Only brief blinks of the HD and power LED’s on powerup and a green standby light on the mother board. And that is it. I probably still don’t have the speaker connect correctly, or I damaged it by plugging it in backwards.
Advice from the web is is to disassemble and reassemble. Sometimes that will work, implying a talentless power connection or a random short.
Assemble and reassemble while testing with power at the minimum number of devices (enough to get video out) and then adding devices until the bad device is found.
Here are some techology comments:
Dual SLI requires a huge case. The cards are huge to start with. They take up the space of four PCI slots and make it impossible to reach most things inside the case. Other than that, installing a graphics card was one of the easier tasks.
CPU. Installing the CPU is nervewracking. You alternate betewen instructions that say becareful, use no force!, the slightest touch will destroy the device! and instructions that say you have to apply a lot of force to clamp things in place–once for the cpu and then again as you clamp the cooling device onto the CPU.
Water Cooling. The water cooling device has leak points inside the case. This is really unacceptable. The clamps have to be leak proof for 8 years. I’m thinking about my sinks–they can’t stay leak proof for 8 years. In my set up, a leak would destroy $400 of graphics cards $100 of audio cards and a $100 mother board, and probably the $200 CPU, or 1/2 the cost of the computer. There are not suitable places to mount a radiator, there are not suitable ways to get the tubes out of the case and there is nowhere to put the pump, not internally or externally, especially if you have dual cards. I used the fan mounts to mount the radiator, which I suspect will destory airflow.
Cabling. The cabling is a nightmare. I have real respect for the craftsmanship of builders who can keep their cables undercontrol. I think controlled cabling requires longer cables. Many of my cables seemed like they could only reach
Documentation. It varied from vender to vender. The worst was the case, which seems to have included a big bag of random screws and washers and had no advice on where we expected to use the different types. This lead to some rework.