Building up my new PC

Over the past couple of months, many of you might have become tired of listening to my non-stop jibber-jabber about various computer components, RMA process and bargain deals. Well, the good news is that it is all coming to a halt now!

I have just fitted in my last PC component (the fan controller) and the build is now complete. Yay! The entire process took over two months – from finalizing the spec to ordering and assembling.

These days it is much simpler to just order a pre-made PC online but than building up your own rig yourself has its own excitement. Like, comparing various options and combinations, waiting for orders, assembling, cable management, mods, benchmarking, etc. – come on, it is fun!

Anyway, I do still have a few more things in the pipeline before I can start over-clocking the system. But that can wait for a while. So, the spec isn’t “mind-blowing” but decent enough to help me get over my trusty three-years old Dell laptop which has now started to shut itself off intermittently.

Build:

Intel i5 2500K 3.30 GHz (@ 3.70 GHz)
MSI P67A-C45 motherboard
OCZ 600watts modular (ModX Stream Pro) PSU
Cooler Master Elite 330 ATX Case
XFX ATI Radeon HD 5770 (1 GB GDDR5)
G-Skills Rip-Jaws XL 8GB DDR3 @ 1600Mhz
Samsung 1 TB Spinpoint F3
Cooler Master Sickle Flow 2000 rpm fans
3.25″ bay fan controller
Lite-on LightScribe drive
Sharkoon CCFL Blue

Total cost of the build: < £450
(n.b. special thanks to Amazon’s Employee discount)

Assembly:

The Cooler Master Elite 330 is a very good case but the only drawback is that it doesn’t have built in support for cable routing and management. You have to pretty much improvise but other than that it is quite a nice little well-ventilated case with four 5.25″ front bays with air filter.

In terms of cooling, I wanted to have good air circulation in the case and that’s why I ordered two extra fans to suck air in from the front. The case only supports one fan in the front so I had to modify it a bit. As I am not planning to utilize all but one 5.25″ bays so thought about fitting in the second fan over the remaining ones.

Because of the lack of support for cable routing and management in the case, I had to use a lot of cable ties (a lot!). I think it is still quite manageable to keep cables tucked away safely from interfering with the air flow.

Other than these (workable) issues, everything else was pretty straight forward to fit in.