My Workhorse

I finally built a computer with one of my favorite motherboard brands, which is TYAN. I like them because they are sturdy and very dependable. This motherboard uses a socket 939 Athlon 3800 single core. It comes with 4 banks of memory and I purchased 4 1 GB sticks for it. The computer case that I got is a nice black shiny one, with a side window, so I could put lights and nice color cabling inside it in order to show off the components.

When it came to the power supply I decided to splurge a little bit and got a nice Thermaltake 800 watt baby, also in shiny black. Since I care about overheating and considering that I wanted to put 4 hard disks inside the case, I could justify the purchase. Which got to my first and biggest challenge, because the power supply is quite hefty and thus, it uses these thick cables which I had to struggle to fit in the case, with 2 DVD drives and 4 hard disks. The problem is that I had to let the air circulate efficiently around the case. And I had to keep the cables from obstructing the CPU fan, otherwise I could run into overheating problems.

When I put everything together, I chose to use Windows XP professional, and my machine works great. I am very proud of having built my own machine. And I call it my machine because it is a workhorse. I do most of my work on it. I still have a little concern about the CPU fan because it gets noisy sometimes, and I think it does that because it cannot spin fast enough to compensate for the heat generated by the CPU. Anyway, that is a component I should have spent a little bit more on. In summary, it has been a very rewarding experience for me, I enjoy building PCs!