Recently, I bought and built my current computer. Now, I’d built computers before, but only stuff like late-90’s Pentium II-based pieces of mediocrity. This marked a major step in my geek education, and it’s only fair that I let the rest of the world know about my computer.

Right, here are the specs:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 @ 3.00GHz (up from 2.66GHz stock speed)
• CPU Cooling: Zalman CNPS9700 NT
• Case: Antec Nine Hundred
• PSU: Zalman ZM-850-HP 850W
• Mobo: Asus Striker II Extreme
• Primary Hard-Drive: WD Velociraptor 300GB @ 10,000 RPM
• Secondary Hard-Drive: WD Green Power 500GB @ 7,200 RPM
• Memory: Corsair DDR3 Dominator 4GB (2 x 2GB) 1800MHz (pdf)
• Video Card: XpertVision GeForce 8800GT Super+ 1GB
• Optical Drive: Sony SATA 20x DVD-R/RW Drive
• Monitors: 2 x Samsung SyncMaster 2243BW
• Mouse: Logitech MX400
• Keyboard: Razer Lycosa

That’s all the bits and pieces. The next step was putting them all together and seeing what happened…

After a few driver installations, we got through a clean install of Windows Vista Business 64-Bit and checked the Windows Experience Index:

Awwwwww yeah baby, 5.9 across the board! I was seriously happy with this since this was at the stock settings. I hadn’t even started overclocking yet!

When I went to start overclocking, I encountered the most interesting problem – whenever I’d try to change the processor’s Front Side Bus speed, upon reboot the computer would reset the processor to 1.56GHz. This was even if I changed the FSB speed from 1333MHz to 1334MHz. Intriguing, no? After wrestling with this for a day or so of trying different combinations of things (I had run into a bit of trouble before with using 4GB of RAM), I finally had a ‘Doh!’ moment and installed the latest BIOS. Eureka! From this experience, I cannot stress enough the importance of having an up-to-date BIOS. Once I got over that tiny problem, I started the overclocking process: bump up a bit, test stability, repeat. After all, repetition is manly!

I eventually got up to the current speed, 3.00GHz. I bought a new CPU cooler before I got this far – I made it to about 2.9GHz with the stock Intel cooler before I figured it would probably be safer to buy a more powerful cooler. Not that there’s anything wrong with Intel’s cooler – don’t get me wrong, for stock speeds, the stock cooling is great, but I just wanted to be sure I was in the clear. I might try overclocking a bit more some time in the future, since I’ve heard lots of success stories about these Core 2 chips.

I think I’ll finish off with a pic of where the computer is currently at. For benchmark comparison purposes, I currently have a 3DMark06 score of about 13640. Anyway, without more ado…

These and many more pictures of the build can be found in the Picasa album I set up here.