Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Richeydog's Uber Cheap PC Build Thread

Or Crucial. Crucial's usually cheaper than Corsair.

After finally receiving my power supply and 8 gigs of memory(Kingston HyperX Blu DDR3 1333) I did a not so quick hookup and post tested the motherboard. Being a first timer, I was a bit leery on doing this but after reading a few articles I figured it would be a good idea to find out if everything was working okay.

So, I positioned the flathead screwdriver onto the power pins and immediately noticed the cpu/power supply fans spinning right away...But I'm not seeing anything on screen. Thought I might have something wrong with the mobo. Turn if off then on again and still nothing. So, after thinking a bit, I decided to take out 1 stick of ram and run it again. This time it worked. Don't know why? Tested that same stick in the other slot and it worked. Then put both back in and it's running fine now.

Anyway, pretty soon I'll put this into my existing case and see if it all fits. The case(uATX) is pretty old so I'm not sure what's going to happen but hoping for the best.

Your screw drivers are awfully clean. Are they virgins?

Touched for the very first time...

About a week has passed and I finally have all my components to start this build. First I had to take out existing parts. Quite messy in there as you can see.




About a half hour(?) later, this is what she looks like with a clean slate.




Now time to install the new stuff. Here is the mother board, cpu, and ram installed.



More to come...

Oops, I ran into a slight problem. The new power supply won't fit into the case. The opening is too small. If I could move the dvd cage it would work, but that thing ain't going nowhere.

I had a feeling this might happen and was prepared to invest a few dollars more if I needed one.

The adventure continues...

You need a new case. I don't see any shiny blue lights on that one at all??????

Can't recall ever hearing about a uATX case, but if so, that explains why the full size ATX psu may not fit.

I did a HTPC style build for a friend last year. He wanted a budget of $500 but is a gamer. Doable, but not with what other things he wanted as well (larger hd, updated vid, a monitor, needed peripherals like mouse, keyboard and a new OS).
I found parts that worked for $800 or so after taxes and shipping, but that was before he mentioned the OS, monitor and peripherals which put the price up to just around $1100.

What started budget, didn't end as budget IMO.
But he has a solid up to date gaming system in a HTPC style box.

I don't know if the case is uATX, but the old motherboard definitely was labeled as such. uATX is the same as Micro ATX.

Old psu - 5.9W x 3.4H x 3.9D Inches (Micro ATX)
New psu - 5.9W x 3.4H x 6.5D Inches (ATX)

The old psu was shorter in length, which made it easy to insert between those brackets. The new psu, even though a bit longer, would not interfere with the dvd cage. If I could make it work, it would leave me with 3/4" of space.


I've stayed on course with my budget so far. I planned on upgrading everything, including a new case...yet hoped to avoid it if I could. No worries.

As Murph said above, I'll need something with shiny blue lights!

Windows XP vs Vista Ultimate?

In this corner I am currently running XP SP3 and am comfortable using it.

In the other corner I have a retail copy of Vista Ultimate that I was thinking of trying. I briefly used it on the Pentium 4 system some time ago and remember it being incredibly slow. Since I have a new processor with 8 gigs of ram I was wondering if it be worth the hassle of installing it again?

I guess I could try it and see...

I would stay with XP before going to Vista unless you have a need for it. It's true it's actually stable now but I still disliked it.

My advice if money is the key, is to stick with XP and save up for Windows 7 as quick as you can.