Seth’s Media PC Build
Although there’s been complications with Brandon’s PC recently (static electricity frying of the motherboard scale), I have built another successful PC recently, though not without its troubles, as well.
Seth’s Media PC for work
- APEVIA X-SUPRA G-Type Black Computer Case
- ASUS P5E3 WS PRO LGA 775 Intel X38 ATX Intel Motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 Yorkfield 2.66GHz
- 2x Patriot 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Dual Channel Memory
- SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 3870 512MB 256-bit GDDR4 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Video Card
- Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000 RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s Hard Drive
- 2x SAMSUNG 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives in RAID 1
- 2x SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA
- HT OMEGA STRIKER 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card
- Thermaltake 750W Power Supply
This has been the most difficult build yet, but I find myself learning new stuff every time. I just recently got on board with the idea that you test to minimal build first, which although that’s by the book, I’ve been ignoring that cardinal rule lately, and it has gotten me into trouble (troubleshooting Brandon’s PC troubles took forever and a day).
So, we got the minimal up (fyi: minimal build here is PSU, mobo, processor, and ram) just to make sure we got power to the board. However, once we added the video card, we found we got no POST, which, in fact, was not a fault of the video card. In reality, we got no POST because of a bad stick of RAM which I again neglected to test. You see, the motherboard is supposed to beep at POST to announce a successful POST. With all four sticks of RAM in, it did not. I, however, ignored testing this which took only about a half hour to figure out. Easy enough. However, the rest is nightmare hell.
Let me point something out here that will help in understanding this. We had to put two of the 750GB Hard Drives into RAID 1 (in other words, mirror the drives to help prevent data loss on a drive failure). IF we didn’t have to do that, this build would have been simple. Open and shut case, literally. Insert all components, install Windows, load drivers, and bam!, you have yourself a PC. However, RAID 1 was difficult. For one, I’d never done it before, though I knew it wasn’t hard, just a setting and configuration in BIOS. However, Windows XP, by default, needs a floppy driver disk for any RAIDs that are newer than about 2001 (XP’s release year). So, after figuring that out, we had a hell of a time making a driver disk (which finally happened after choosing a good floppy disk, a good floppy drive, and the utility from ASUS. Then, installing the driver during install was hell (F6 at the very beginning). There are four to choose from, and the correct one kept blue screening of death the install. The BSOD, in fact, was a memory issue that I was twiddling over forever. Finally, I tried taking all but one stick of RAM out, and it finally worked (which was weird because I memtested the set later and got a 100% pass on the 3 DIMMs). Anyway, long story short, I got Windows in, drivers installed, and Windows updates running. After one update, however, it wouldn’t boot, just a repeat reboot. <Sigh> I called it a night there, because my frustration was through the roof.
Next day, I reinstalled Windows, and did every Windows update one-by-one just to make sure none of them were breaking the build. After concluding all was safe, I figured that perhaps a hardware driver Windows update to the computer was to blame. So, it’s all safe now. The build is updated, RAID 1′ed successfully, and it’s good to go.
Phew, that was a long story, but well worth it in case anyone out there has trouble RAIDing on their board. If you do, just drop a comment.
Happy builds!
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