It’s been a long time coming.

My last all new build was 4 years ago. In that time, all I’ve done is upgrade my graphics card and add some hard drives. The old computer still works reasonably well, but it was starting to choke on newer games pretty consistently. I’ve been saying for almost 2 years that I was waiting for Intel’s new 32nm chips because of the inherent performance and power gains… but I just can’t wait anymore. With the new i7’s being released, it seems the rest of 32nm line won’t be coming for probably another year (currently, 32nm only exists in the i3 and i5 Lynnfields and the i7 980X Gulftown). So, without further adieu:

Since I’m using my trusty old aluminum Lian-Li, I had to do a rebuild (which included cleaning off fans of 4 years worth of dust). I’d forgotten how much time can be involved in that, assuming you’re careful enough to do everything the right way. It took me somewhere between 2 and 3 hours to tear down and rebuild with the new components (everything looks really pretty though!). Of course, the first time I pressed the power button nothing happened… That was an easy enough fix. I had the power/reset/LED headers backwards. After that, everything came to life. I went into the BIOS before doing anything. I wanted to make sure the hard drives were all in the right order and that the floppy drive was disabled (the motherboard doesn’t have a connector for a floppy so no reason for anyone to look at it); while I was in there I noticed the BIOS underclocked the RAM so I set that to where it should be. I had the hard drives in the wrong order so I had to go fix that and then I would be on to installing Windows 7. Except… the CD-ROM wouldn’t boot… Turns out, since my DVD burner is IDE, I had to enable a storage controller in the BIOS and enable a boot manager for it. I guess that is the penalty you pay for buying an enthusiast’s board… but I would think things like that would be a little more default. Whatever, I did get the DVD to boot. Unfortunately, it sat at the Windows 7 background for about 5 minutes. I was confused, but pushed on. After clicking on Install Now, it sat at “Starting Windows Setup” for about 10 minutes. I started to think it might be an issue with the IDE controller because the DVD just wasn’t spinning up, but I let it go once the install started. It crashed ~73%… I tried the whole process again with the same result… Still thinking it was an IDE problem, I formatted my thumb drive and tried to install from that and, of course, had the same problem. Pissed off, I searched google for the long waits and the best advice I could find was to disable the floppy in the BIOS… Just for fun I double checked and it turns out I didn’t actually save the settings when I disabled the floppy. After that the USB install went well.

Once Windows was installed I started getting random crashes and reboots between installing drivers and programs. A crash during my office install actually corrupted Windows… twice! Pissed off, I opened up CPU-Z to see what my timings/etc were. The first thing I saw when clicking on the memory tab was that the RAM voltage was 1.5V, which is fine for most RAM but the OCZ is supposed to run at 1.65V… it seems that the profiles on the RAM auto selected more bad settings than just the speed. I fixed the voltage issue and tried to reinstall MSO. It failed… Not wanting to fight with the Windows registry or my user profile I just decided to reinstall Windows. For the most part everything seems to be stable now. I fought with the RAM for a few days trying to get stable timings. It is supposed to run @ 8-8-8-24 but that causes freezing/rebooting issues. Right now I have it set at 9-9-9-24 which is going pretty well. I also have the 930 running @ 3.5GHz which is pretty stable. I want to go higher, but I need a new cooler for that. The stock fan only spins @ 2000RPM which, while quiet, doesn’t do much for super overclocks.