Building a Computer

If you are reading this you probably know me and already know what I am up to but here is a summary just in case. As a summer project with my 10 year old son I decided to build a computer. Given how people can interact with the internet these days the distinction between, what is in cache, system memory, on the hard drive, or on the web is quite fuzzy. I thought actually putting the guts of a machine together would be a fun project and educational for both me and me son. I have no other reason to put a computer together then as a project. (This reminds me of the joke about the guy who bought a computer on the installment plan. When asked how it was working out he said, "I don't know yet. I get power supply tomorrow). Ultimately, this machine will sit in our living room and be the center piece of our home entertainment system. Thus its primary goal will be to play movies and games and run a sound system.

Having never done this sort of thing before I needed to do some research both with vendors and with reviewers of various sorts. I am not normally a "cutting edge" kind of guy so I was not inclined to go for the fastest chip available, but after some serious soul searching and a couple of talks with some of my more tech savvy friends (who rolled their eyes at my concerns), I did decide to go with Intel's most recent addition the to the market, the Core i7 (http://www.intel.com/products/processor/corei7/index.htm).

Here was a useful review (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2333764,00.asp)

That decided things fell into place pretty quickly. I found another build blog for an i7 machine at (http://www.ademiller.com/blogs/tech/2009/05/an-intel-i7-based-development-machine-the-hardware-and-build/). This guy seemed to know what was what and so I could use his specs as a starting point.

I think I am going with the mid range i7 940 processor clocked at 2.93 GHz rather then the 2.66 GHz machine or the far more expensive 3.2 GHz (Extreme) processor. I then picked out a mother board and memory. The guts of my machine will be

Mother board: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA

Intel® Core™ i7-940 Processor

CORSAIR 6GB KIT TR3X6G1333C9

I could have gone with the Intel motherboard but the ASUS had better recommendations and seemed to be better tuned to the chip. This seems odd but that was the impression I had. I have picked out a cooling unit, the MASSCOOL 8W503F1M4 CPU Cooling. This was one of the few I could find that was rated for the the i7. It has a been recommended that

I use thermal gel rather then the glue that comes cooling unit.

Power supply, case and video card in the next post.