gjwhisnant's blog

Today I thought to myself why not build a new computer from scratch, so I thought I would share my project with you.  I am going to build a new computer with the latest and fastest hardware available.  Below, I am going to elaborate on what specific parts I will be using, where I am going to buy these parts, the price of each part, and the assembly process I will be using with these parts to create a very fast, state of the art, desktop computer system.

Let’s start with my parts list.  All of the following components listed below can be purchased at Tiger Direct.com.  This electronic and computer superstore has everything you need to build a computer, not to mention the latest hardware and even pre-packaged kits for a computer building project.  You can purchase all of the listed items below online at www.TigerDirect.com.  I have listed the required major components below for my new computer project in order to build a working state of the art fast and reliable computer system.

 1. Corsair CMPSU-1000X 1000Watt Power Supply                                                                $239.99

 - ATX Form, SATA Ready, SLI Ready

2. Cooler Master HAF932 Black Full-Tower Case                                                                    $139.99

3. EVGA X58 SLI Classified (Intel i7 Specific) Motherboard                                                $379.99                      

 - LGA1366, Intel X58, SATA, SLI Ready, CrossFireX Ready, HyperThreading, Triple Channel DDR3 Support, RAID                                    

4. Intel Core i7 950 BX80601950 Processor                                                                               $569.99

 - 3.06GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, HyperThreading, with Fan

5. (2x) Corsair Core i7 Dominator 6GB PC12800 DDR3 RAM                                               $207.99 x 2    

 - Tri Channel, 1600MHz, 6144MB (3 x 2048MB), DHX, Memory Kit

6. (2x) EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Video Card                                                              $219.99 x 2

 - 1792MB GDDR3, PCI-Express 2 x 16, SLI Ready, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV, VGA Support

7. OCZ Vertex Series 120GB Solid State Drive                                                                          $339.99

 - 120GB, 2.5”, SATA II

8. (2x) Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 750GB Hard Drive                                                         $69.99 x 2

 - 750GB, 7500RPM, 32MB, Serial ATA-300

9. Lite-On IHA S22406 Internal DVD Writer                                                                             $34.99

 - DVD+R 24x, DVD-R 24x, DVD+RW 8x,

  DVD-RW 6x SATA, Lightscribe

10. Plextor PX-B320SA Blu-Ray Combo Writer                                                                        $144.99

              – BD-ROM 8x, DVD+R 16x, DVD+-RW 8x,

               DVD-RAM 12x, CD-R 48x, SATA, Lightscribe

11. (2x) Acer H213Hbmid 22” Widescreen HD LCD Monitors                                          $179.99 x 2

           - 5ms, 1920×1080, HDMI, DVI, VGA with Speakers

12. Microsoft FHA-00001Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 Keyboard and Mouse            $106.99

           - USB, 2.4GHz, 4-Way Scrolling, Battery Life Indicator                                                      

The Assembly Process:

Now, the first thing I will do is ground my body to something that will eliminate all chances of any static charge.  Grounding my body will help to prevent an electrical static discharge that could damage or ruin any number of items.  You can buy a wrist grounder at your local electronics store that you wear on your wrist and clamp on to a grounded surface.  For the small amount of money it cost it is well worth it to have.  Heaven forbid it be the core processor or a chipset on the motherboard that gets fried.  

The first thing I will do is install the power unit into the computer case or tower.  I picked the 1000watt Corsair power supply because I have had great success in the past using Corsair products; they are rock solid units and its SLI ready which is nice since I will be utilizing nvidia SLI 2-way performance scaling.  All I have to do is insert the screws into the power supply from the bottom lower section opened up for a power unit in the tower chassis and that it.  Next I will install Intel’s new i7 Processor to the EVGA X58 SLI classified motherboard.  I will get into why I picked out this motherboard and processor at the end of the blog.  After installing the i7 Processor to the motherboard, making sure to have perfect pin alignment and making sure to use some thermal compound I installed the CPU’s heatsink and fan.  I then plugged in the correct wiring harness from the CPU fan to the motherboard receptacle.  On to the memory, I will be installing 6 sticks of 2048MB PC12800 DDR3 RAM.  This is very simple.  The memory can only fit one way into the 6 single memory slots.  The max amount of RAM recognized for each slot of 4GB, so the motherboard can run up to 24GB of DDR3 RAM.  Insert the RAM into the first slot making sure the cutouts at the bottom of the board matches the receiving slots.  Gently push down on each sides of the board until the RAM module locks into place by 2 outside edge clamps holding it in the slot securely.  I will repeat this process five more times for 5 more memory modules.

Well now I am at a point where I can mount the motherboard to the computer case or tower side panel.  It is usually mounted by screws, which takes about 2 minutes.  This will allow me to just pop the side panel on the tower with motherboard, processor, and memory all installed.  At this time I’m not going to worry about the I/O device cover on the rear of the tower; that is just one small thing out of a dozen that I will have plenty of time to do later.  Once the motherboard is inside of the tower I can install the video cards.  One thing I do before putting the motherboard and its contents inside the tower is test the power supply.  It’s a lot easier to fix or replace a part when they are not already all wired in an enclosure.  I just wanted to say that there is a cable from the power supply directly into the motherboard usually it is a 20+4 Pin module.  Once the power supply and the contents of the motherboard are getting approximately the right current I can go ahead with the video card install. 

I will be installing (2) EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 video cards.  Since I am using a 2-way SLI setup, I needed two high speed GPU’s that are made for SLI operations and have a lot of memory.  I chose these cards because of the 2 GB of DDR3 Ram and their core clock speeds, not to mention the wonderful price for such a loaded graphics card.  These video cards are built   to be installed in the PCI-Express 2.0 slots or PCI-e 2×16 slots. First, I need to locate my bottom two PCI-E 2×16 slots on the motherboard.  The two cards will be linked together in a 2-way SLI system configuration boosting my performance and graphics up to 7 times more than the original processor and memory performance.  I will mount these cards in the two lower PCI-e 2.0 slots which will save me space and make it possible to use all of the other PCI slots including certain motherboard built-in features. The last stage of installing these cards is just mating up the power connectors from the power supply.

My next step will be installing the secondary storage devices.  I will be using 3 hard drives, one solid state drive and two mechanical hard drives.  The reason for this decision is so that I can use the 120GB solid state drive as my boot drive thus increasing load and start up time while using the two 750GB SATA hard drives as my primary and slave drives.  These three drives will be installed in the first three internal 3.5” drive bays in the tower enclosure.  Once they are installed, I just have to hook up power inputs and then SATA cables from the motherboard.  I will be able to configure each drive in the CMOS after initial computer startup. The reason I picked these three hard drives is because I wanted the speed and fast boot up of a solid state drive; and I went with the Seagate 750GB hard drives because of its reliability, 32MB of cache, and its 7200RPM speed.

Continuing on, I will be installing the DVD Burner drive and the Blu-Ray Disc drive.  I chose to have two DVD drives just in case I needed to copy something from one DVD to another DVD, or just as a redundancy issue.  I chose the first Lite-On DVD Burner because of its 24x burning speed and its price.  I chose the Plextor Blu-Ray drive because of its price, speed, and reviews by a dozen or so people. To install these drives I just have to insert the drives in one of the 5 bays for external devices in the tower enclosure.  Now I just need to connect them to the motherboard with a SATA connector and power cable from the power supply unit and I am good to go.

There are only a couple things I need to do before I can start this machine up.  They are plug in my dual Acer 22” HD LCD Widescreen monitors into one of the graphics cards in the rear expansion slots.  I will also need two DVI cables to run from each monitor to one of the dual graphics card.  Each graphics card has dual DVI outputs so that you can run two monitors off a single card.  I chose the Acer 22” HD monitors because of their resolution, price, and size.  The last component to my new computer system is a cordless keyboard and mouse.  I chose a Microsoft FHA-00001 Wireless Laser Desktop Keyboard and Mouse Combo to finish off my system because of its style, its wireless, and there are so many programmable keys.  Installing these two items is a piece of cake.  All I have to do is plug in the USB receiver (included) in one of the front USB ports on the tower and put the rechargeable batteries (included) in the mouse and keyboard.

Well this concludes my new desktop high-tech state of the art computer system build.  I will be using Windows Vista 64-bit Ultimate with Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade as my operating system.  I wanted to explain the main reason why I picked the motherboard and processor.  I picked this motherboard out because of its integrated features. Those features all go toward enhancing the bus, memory, and processor speed. The biggest reason I picked the X58 SLI Classified motherboard as the base for my new power machine is for its NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface capabilities (SLI), its 3 PCI-Express 2.0 Slots, its ability to use up to 24GB of Triple Channel DDR3 memory, not to mention its new updated HyperThreading technology, and that this motherboard is made specifically for the Intel i7 Processor using SLI technology  The combination of the i7 Processor and the X58 SLI motherboard is a formula for speed and performance. 

It’s crazy, as soon as I build this machine something so much faster and cheaper has already come out on the market.  You can’t ever keep up with technology, that’s just the way it is.

Another week gone by, how the time does fly.  This week in class and out of class we learned about information and how that information is converted to 1’s and 0’s eventually so that the computer can read or do whatever it is told to do with the information given.

I really like the class comics.  There not long, they tell you what you need to know, there different than the standard note taking “my hands going to fall off and I think im going out of my mind” class, and it saves time. I would have to say what I love most about the class is that most of the things you need to know are on the comics, not every single thing but a good amount of the information in the class is within the comics. I am not saying you dont need to come to class, I am merely saying  read and print, if you can, and it will help you so much when test time comes around the corner.

The binary conversions we learned seemed to come natural to me, I guess it just clicks. I mean once you learn the base numbers and the hexa and octal numbers its pretty easy.  Im sure a lot of people wonder why do u even need to know binary and decimal equivalent, but it truely shows how a computer at its lowest level works.  Its like starting from the bottom of a pyramid and working your way up. You have to start from the ground up. Once you start to see things on a binary scale you realize how the computer actually works and can build off of that to learn programming languages or just have a better concept of the operating system and internal commands and structure of a computer. 

Well, thats about all for this past week.  I will post again soon, see-ya! 

Greg Whisnant

Hey everyone,

I thought I would blog just a little about myself. I am 26 years old, I am currently just a full time student, no job at the time, and am looking foward to finishing this class as well as all my classes this semester.  I am not your usual college student. I have been going at it with cancer since I was 16 and as you can see I have won each battle.  I hope everyone here enjoys Dr Brown as a professor.  Last fall I had this exact class and I have to say he is very understanding and willing to help you as long as you ask for it.

Anyway more about me, I love guns in general.  I shoot competition in 4 different classes when my health doesnt interfere and I am up to the challange.  I shoot 600 yard and 1000 yard F-Class Long Range Rifle, I shoot 3-Gun Tactical, and I shoot Carbine Tactical Competition.  If you have any questions or would like to talk long range shooting, guns, ammo, tactical gear, or anything of the sorts, just email me or grap me after class.  I shoot all of these competition in Oak Ridge, TN.  I also travel to shoot in long range 1000yard and tactical sniper competitions each year in Quantico, VA.  My main hobbies are like I said guns, shooting, camping, hunting, scuba diving, computers, anything outdoors, trying to keep in shape, movies, military and history channel, just things I find interesting.

I was born in Knoxville, TN, raised in Lenoir City, Tn my whole life.  Im proud to be a TN man.  Im not a big vols fan which may make some people mad but I just dont care for it.  I like my solitude and being in a stadium with 100000 plus people, half drunk, yelling and screaming isnt my idea of a good time.  I have always been the survivalist type.  I just seem to always be prepared for any event thats on the horizon. I am also a Rescue Scuba Diver for Knoxville and Loudon County Rescue Squads.  I have been a member of each for the past 6 years.  When I am needed I lend my time to the Loudon County Sheriffs Department as a Reserve Deputy.  I am a certified law enforcement officier. I have been through National-Accredited POST and have also had the opportunity to take Department of Homeland Security classes. 

I feel like going into Computer Science I can get involved in a fast paced, always evolving career that still lets me use my security experience and interests, but at the same time is more health friendly. What I mean by that is ever since my cancer returned I needed a job/career that would and could accomedate me better than being a law enforcement officier full time.  Not to mention the pay is quite a bit better!  My father worked for TVA as a senoir systems analyst for 29 years and now being retired works for the City of Knoxville, as an IT Security Analyst.  I have grown up with computers my whole life.  Being around them, learning new software  and hardware, feeling out the different interests of computers and having just a natural feel for them, for the last 26 years growing up everyday there was always talk about computers, systems, software, hardware, programming, networking, security, you name it! 

So I thought why not get my degree in Computer Science/IT!  Well if you would like to know anything else about me, feel free to ask!

 

Greg Whisnant