A new PC is born

So finally I managed to get a PC worthy of a gaming rig. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that. First, a shot from before the upgrade. That’s my old PC and my iMac, sitting happily together on my desk. Ah, the memories. It’s like a silicon version of the black and white cookie.

And now, the new gear. First, a shot of my case and PSU in their boxy homes, and second a shot of my motherboard. I decided to be lazy and let the guys at the store mount the CPU and memory for me with my cooler. Saved me some time, and it was free of charge. Can’t complain about that. Lastly, a shot of the case after I installed my PSU.

Motherboard, CPU mounted and ram already in

After that I got pretty busy installing all the other stuff, so I didn’t take too much time to take pictures. On to the action shots.

Got the requisite “gamer in the dark” pictures accentuating my lack of sunlight exposure, and the last one has a flash on to show some details on how much I need to wipe down my glass desk. My iMac has subsequently found a home off to the right where my printer was, and the printer is on the floor waiting for a home.

It was a great bit of fun doing the build, I have to say, and it’s even better that it booted up on the first try. At some point I’m going to have to wrangle the cables a bit better, but this thing blows away what I upgraded from. Here’s a list of what went inside:

Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gamer Case
Intel Coreâ„¢2 Duo Processor E6600 2.4GHz w/ 4MB Cache
Zalman CNPS9700 NT Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler
Asus P5B w/ DualDDR2 800, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, SATA II, PCI-E x16
Corsair 2GB XMS2-6400 TWIN2X Dual Channel DDR2 Kit (2 x 1GB)
eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB PCI-E w/ Dual DVI, HDTV-Out
Seagate 320GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA II w/ NCQ, 16MB Cache
Corsair HX 620W Modular Power Supply w/ Triple +12V
Dual Samsung SyncMaster 206BW 20in Widescreen LCD w/ DVI, 2ms, 3000:1

And no, I didn’t go with Vista on this thing (yet). No real reason to yet. 🙂

Oh no, back into Robotech

Robotech Poster So recently they released The Shadow Chronicles on DVD, which is basically a feature-length continuation of the old Robotech series which a lot of anime fans came to know and love/hate back in the 80’s. The DVD’s actually pretty good, and does require that the viewer be familiar with the Robotech series.

Anyway, now I’ve been re-bitten by the bug, and I ended up going to Amazon and bought the Protoculture Collection box set. The price is actually pretty reasonable considering you’re getting all three series’ plus another 7 discs of extras. It’s mind-blowingly comprehensive.

For those who’ve never seen the series, it’s pretty epic. Even though it’s an anime, it had some very mature concepts at the time for a cartoon, including deaths of main characters, worldwide destruction and death, intergalactic war, love triangles, you name it. The animation’s a bit dated now but generally still holds up even though this is a 20 year old series.

Maybe later I’ll post some unboxing pics of the set. 🙂

No WDA this week?

I know, I know. It was a silly weekend, and I didn’t get a chance to get one done. Besides which, my PC is on its last legs, so running Photoshop is a bit of a craps shoot. So an upgrade is due (well long overdue really), and should be happening very soon.

Finally. I’ve been tootling along with this my 1.7GHz P4 for far far faaaaar too long