A long, long, long, time ago, I made a little post about my initial thoughts on building myself a gaming rig. What I had originally planned on buying then, and what I ended up were quite different. The cup was the same... but some other stuff was somewhat different. And some of it was the same. I kept the video card, but I threw out G.SKILL in favor of CORSAIR, and I favored COOLER MASTER for my cpu cooler.
But that is all besides the point. I have a new computer - one that is wholly mine. I built it myself from scratch. I chose each and every component. This was my creation. And it never felt so good to see that boot up screen on my monitor (a tiny 1280x1024 one. It will be solved soon, I promise!).
To be at the end of the road, it is nothing less than weird. When I first bought that Intel Core i7 waaay back, I was fairly certain I would end up selling it after giving this affair up. But for some reason or another, I persevered. I'm not one for commitments. I like quick satisfaction, and to actually spend a year buying the parts for a high end computer was a fairly big departure from the norm for me.
There was quite a few road bumps, most specificly me trying to figure out why nothing would show up on the monitor despite the fact I plugged everything in right. It only took me 12 hours and 1 help post on a computer builder forum for me to find the problem culprit in a DOA RAM stick.
Oh, and did I mention I had trouble getting the cpu to lock into place, and it had to take my engineer dad to do it for me? Yeah, that was an interesting moment.
I also had to redo it 3 times (first time because I forgot to install the backplate for the cpu cooler, second because I put the cpu cooler in the WRONG direction, and the third time to see if that would solve the monitor issue).
But at the end of it all, it was all worth it. I love having a 5.4 out of 7.9 system rating from Windows 7, and the only reason for that would be due to the "slow" transfer rate of the primary hard drive. What with everything else being 7.3/7.4, one could hardly call this an "okay" machine.
And I can hardly describe how darn cool it is for me to finally have a computer with an Alienware case! It is quite intimidating.
