[Ekrbcbvh]

I feel awful.

As some of you are aware, I started getting spontaneous reboots a few months ago. Suspecting my SATA cables with inlaid EL strips were bad, I purchased some replacement cables from performance-pcs.com and installed them last week. I made sure that all my cabling was secure, my voltage specs from my Zalman PSU were good, and that my BIOS was updated. Life was good for awhile...

Then the machine would not boot up Monday morning. Kept telling me there was a CMOS error, even after swapping out the battery. Since Monday it's been stable, but I can't risk losing what I have. I knew it was time. My first build will be scrapped this weekend and replaced with Build 2.0.

I was so thrilled when this n00b put power to his creation and it POSTed. Windows loaded up perfectly and I was happy. An intel D865PERL mobo with a Prescott 3.2 GHz CPU and a whopping 1GB of DDR 400 RAM. I had some no-name AGP video card in there, but I soon upgraded to a ATI Radeon X800 GTO with a blazing fast 256MB of DDR3 RAM. My air-cooling solution would not work for long as the Prescott kept overheating, resulting in the mobo lowering voltages and throttling back the CPU. In went a liquid cooling system from Thermaltake. And it looked cool in my Lian Li case, with the UV lights hitting the dressed cabling and the cooling tubing. It looked sick, lighting up the office in a blue/green shade.

That was 2004. I spent somewhere around $2800 for this build, counting the sound card, HD, networking, and such. Now? I keep the networking, the case, the sound card and the HD (soliciting donations for a velociraptor, btw), but I put into it this: ASUS P5Q Pro mobo, an intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz CPU, four 1GB sticks of DDR2 1066 memory from OCZ, a Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 video card, and a Zalman CNPS9500 CPU fan (stock coolers suck). All for less than $550 after rebates, thanks to newegg.com. This machine should be overclocked easily and I expect it will scream.

I expect this build to be easy and hard. Easy putting things together, but it could be hard at first until I flash the latest BIOS into the board. It will be sad to flush out the cooling rig and stow it; it's doubtful I'd use it again, preferring to go with a homebuilt system from dangerden.com. Quiet is good. Fan noise gets in the way of Metallica, after all.

Wish me luck. I will enjoy the new build, but you don't forget your first love.