I received all the parts for my PC last Saturday. I said I wouldn’t jump into putting it together right away, and I didn’t (kind of). I did un pack some things to have a look at some of the goodies though. ;) However, once I started looking at stuff, I couldn’t help myself.
The build went really smooth. No DOA parts (thanks to Newegg and MWave for excellent service), no incompatibilities, nothing. Since it was my first build ever, I was a little concerned when installing the CPU, heatsink and fan. Also, installing the motherboard in the case was a bit challenging. Between lining up the mounting holes on the motherboard with the brass nuts on the case and the rear I/O panel, it was king of a pain. But it worked out fine. The rest of the parts (graphics card, memory, etc) was all pretty basic stuff I’ve done before, so nothing new there. I’ve read several reviews on the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra that the placement of the 24-pin ATX power connector wasn’t ideal but I didn’t have a real problem with it. Granted, I don’t have a lot of drives installed so there’s not a big mess of cables I had to worry about (one SATAII HD, one optical and one floppy). Great thing about this motherboard is that EPoX includes some nifty “round” ATA cables which helps limit the air restriction that normal flat ribbon style ATA cables can cause.
First boot when off without a hitch. The mother board detected all my hardware and configured the settings and I was up and booted (with no OS) right away. I checked out the Phoenix Award BIOS real quick and there seems to be quite a few options if I should ever need to squeeze a little bit of extra power out of my AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU. I’ll mess with that later.
The case is nice too. The last case (PC case that is, Apple has always had supperior cases in my ming) I had to deal with was my mother’s ancient case. I must say, the whole tool-less thing is friggin great. Can install a drive in seconds… no screwdriver needed. The PCI slots in the back are just as friendly. My only complaint about the case is the supplied fans. I disconnected the from 80mm fan as it was just too lound (and it didn’t seem to affect CPU/case temps all that much since the front of the case is a metal mesh material). The rear 120mm fan would be quiet, but there’s an annoying ‘tick’ that I can hear as it spins. Just might have to replace that thing. While I’m talking fans, the PSU is super quiet. The fan on the CPU is probably the loudest component in the system with the 120mm fan in the back taking a close 2nd.
I needed a dual boot system (I know, but, I need to have Windows on there for the wife unit) so I set up a partition scheme that I think will work out well. Installed XP Pro (SP2) without any issues and installed the required drivers for the nVidia chipset (since it controls the onboard sound and GB ethernet, I didn’t really have a choice). Installed the graphics card drivers for the XFX GeForce 6600LE and I was done.
Now, for Gentoo! This went surprisingly well considering nVidia isn’t sharing specs or code for it’s products (or so I’ve heard) making it hard for the open-source community to develop drivers for the hardware. Nevertheless, I got it installed and had everything working relatively quickly using a stage 3 install. After emerging X and Gnome I had to get my graphics card set up. I’m using nVidia’s kernel modules and glx drivers. Again, no problems. I have working sound a la ALSA (haven’t tested the 7.1 channels yet, but stereo is good enough for me… I have a nice surround sound setup in the living room that works just fine), ethernet, video, mouse, keyboard… pretty much everything I need. Even have my external firewire disk setup and working with no problems. Sure, some of these things required a little research and effort to get working, but the Gentoo Handbook helped out a lot.
I’ll post more on Gentoo if anyone is curious about getting it installed.