Any PC builders out there - just did another one

My previous mid-tower was getting very long in the tooth and needed a major cleanup (like a wipe-out and fresh install of XP) after years of use.  It was becoming progressively more cranky with Adobe products I use (Photoshop, GoLive, Acrobat), so I decided to give NewEgg.com a stimulus package by buying a bunch of parts from them for a new build.

I won't go into much detail here unless there are interested geeks.  I always try to stay six months to a year behind the latest and greatest components which is a very good price-point.

The cpu is an Intel E8500 Core Duo which out performed the new AMD quad core Phenom in several benchmarks, so I based all the parts around the cpu.  The motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P populated with 8 Gb of hand-selected Corsair Dominator DD2 ram.  The case is a full tower Antec 1200 which is targeted primarily at gamers, but it has a bunch of room to work and is the best case I have ever used in years of building PCs.  The six fans are nice also  8)

I am on a bit of a kick to kick out Bill Gates from the house, so I planned on dual booting 32 bit  XP and 64 bit Mandriva.  I have never done a dual boot before and this was trivially simple thanks to Mandriva and grub bootloader .  I don't want to buy Adobe CS3 or whatever the latest is, so that's the reason for sticking with XP - my Adobe apps work with it.

Vista was never in the cards for me - too slow and CS2 is not compatible with it.

A side note - Jane needed a new machine so I found a deal on an Acer micro tower that came with a dual core AMD cpu of some kind and pre loaded with Vista (and 2G of ram.)  I played with it in that state for a while and thought the Acer was a bit of a dog.  Then I loaded Mandriva One 2009 on it (32 bit) and it turned into a greyhound - I couldn't believe what I was experiencing  ;D

I can provide more details if anybody is interested about my build.

What did you choose for a graphics card?  I'm getting very close to rebuilding my tower with new mobo, memory, graphics, but keeping the drives and case/PS.  I, too, will not install Vista, except as a virtual machine, and might use Linux as the primary OS with XP in a VM as well for the various Windows applications I still need to run.

What made you choose Mandriva over the other popular distros like Ubuntu and SUSE?

I also went the other way and bought an MSI Wind Netbook for those occasions that I want to take a computer with me but don't want to disconnect all the cables from the notebook and lug it around.  A 17" screen notebook isn't exactly lightweight   The 10" display on the Wind is fine for web browsing and web mail, with a 1024x600 display.

John,

How about walking us  semi-techs through this process. I've never re-built a PC or built one from scratch, and the times I've been inside a tower were merely to add drives, change cables, insert cards, replace a component, and vacuum out the junk. What's the criteria for choosing the case? In addition to the motherboard and CPU, what components did you buy? Is there a handy dandy diagram simple procedure available for reference?

TIA.

Ned - I used an 8600 something or another - forgot the model - I'm not at home, but it is an Nvida chipset.  It was only about $70 and Linux was vary happy with it.  Linux can't do >8800 I think.  I tried CentOS and another couple of live distros and Mandriva was the *only* one that came with all of the plugins configured for Firefox, and media players.  I spent literally days trying to get Jane's new Linux box set up so that Flash worked, she could watch Youtube video and listed to CDs.  Never could get it all going.  Mandriva worked out of the box for everything.  64 bit Mandriva was not free, I paid $59 for the "PowerPack" download (all 4+ gig of it!)

Tom - I'll put together a howto for the board.  Building your own PC is a lot of fun and you can get 50% more bang for your PC dollar by 'rolling' your own.  My total price tag for this screamer was ~$1200 (including a fast 300 Gb VelociRaptor drive and a 1Tb WD Caviar Black drive.)

John, that's the advantage of Live distros, we can try them all to see if they support our hardware.  I've read good reports of Mandriva so it would be on my short list.  I just put Ubuntu on my Wind Netbook using Wubi, and it seems to support everything but the wireless adapter.  I'm going to try a few other distros using a USB boot to see if any of them work with the wireless.

I have to agree with the Nvidia choice, they seem to be ahead of ATI these days, especially in drivers.  My next graphics card will be a Nvidia card.

Ned - the Graphics board is an EVGA 256-P2-N751-TR GeForce 8600 GT.  256Mb which is plenty to drive my display at 1920 x 1440 native resolution.  Link to the graphics card on newegg.  I was wrong about the price - it is $40 with the rebate  ;D ;D

Link to the motherboard I bought.

That particular mobo did real well in benchmarks, the manual is actually in good English, and the board is very high quality and very well laid out.  It also is very Linux-friendly.  If you want to fool with overclocking, this is your board.  Even if you don't, it is still a nice board.

Link to Mandriva One.The really cool feature about One is you can boot it up as a live CD, then install permanently if you so choose.

If you want a DVD of Mandriva, let me know and I can download for you so you don't have to worry about your FAP.  Took me about 14 hours to download the 64 bit - I used gFTP and will do a restart (fortunately.)  I only have 1 Mb connectivity at the ranch, but so far no FAP to deal with.

I'm still trying to decide between Asus and Gigabyte for the motherboard.  Both make good boards.  I've had an Asus for the past several years and it hasn't given me any problems.  Good deal on the graphics card.  Do you run any 3D desktops on Mandriva?

I have most of the major distro ISO files, and most can be run as Live CDs or installed.  I check them out in virtual machines, but now I'm going to start putting them on a USB stick and boot them with the Wind.  I download my ISOs during the FAP free hours using my download manager.  The new 5 hour FAP free period is really nice.  I can get at least one a night that way.  DVDs take several nights

My last board was an Asus - good board and never had an issue with it.  Read a bunch of nice reviews on newegg about this particular Gigabyte mobo, and thought I'd try it.  The Asus boards I was considering P5Qxxxx (I think) generally had good reviews.  I also have an Intel board - they are your father's "Oldsmobile" - steady, predictable, nothing flashy and it works.  (Okay - no Oldsmobile stories here or I'll ask for moderation  )

I tried my Mandriva download last night to grab the 32 bit Powerpack and my 10 day download window has apparently been cut in half - couldn't log in with my Mandriva-generated username and password.  I have an email into Mandriva.

I built all the desktop PCs for myself, my wife, my sister, and my kids for 18 years or so -- probably about 15 different machines.  Two years ago I decided that with the price of good systems being so low, it just was not worth the time and effort to build from scratch.  I bought an HP dual-processor system that has been trouble-free.  I did do three things to it:  added more memory, added a second harddrive, and added a high-end video card.

When I was building my own, I settled in on Asus motherboards as being the most trouble-free.  The one exception I had was one that used a VIA motherboard chipset.  Every now and then it would totally lockup.  That wouldn't be so bad except that when it did, it would corrupt the operating system partition and I would have to restore the whole drive from backup.  I vowed I would NEVER buy another motherboard with a VIA chipset. 

Hey Frank,

Most of my builds have been Intel-centric - you can't go wrong with their chipsets.  Intel chipset+Intel mobo=bullet proof.

You are exactly right - for general use (email. browsing, Word), you can't beat an assembled system.  Jane (DW) needed a new PC and a friend turned me on to an Acer L100 dual core Athalon micro tower for sale at an outlet for $220 (less display.)  I paid $170 just for my new case.  I do a lot of Adobe work and really need a fast system and besides, it's a geek thing  ;D

The biggest disadvantage of buying a off-the-shelf system is the load of crapware that comes preinstalled.  You really have to do a complete bare iron reinstall of the OS to get rid of it, and since it's rare to get a true MS Windows CD with a system today, that's impossible unless you switch to Linux.  And then you've wasted the money you paid for Windows.  A reasonable compromise is to buy from a white box store and have a system built to your specifications and get it without an OS.  Then install the OS of your choice, Windows, Linux, etc.

Oh - that's right Ned.. forgot about crapware (aka bloatware.)  You can also buy a barebones system with the motherboard, case, power supply, cpu assembled. TigerDirect has several choices.  Spartan Technologies is another supplier for parts and systems that I have used for years.

"Vista was never in the cards for me - too slow and CS2 is not compatible with it."

I have been using Vista since it was a beta and it is much faster than XP ever thought of being. And I have been using CS2 with it the whole time and never had a problem. I have the 64 bit version and Lightroom really screams.

Here's an article from PC Mag with a checklist for the home builder on installing the software.  Much is obvious but there are a few items that could be overlooked.

Thanks for the link Ned. What does "check POST" mean in the first item numbered '1'? Why do I have the feeling that this will be one of those HFWPOH things 

Power On Self Test.  It will show any errors that the BIOS encounters during the initial boot phase, like bad memory, missing keyboard, stuck keys, etc.  Often the POST will issue errors in beep codes, especially if the problem is in the video and it can't display the error.  There are standard (more or less) beep codes for each make of BIOS.

Thanks Ned.

seilerbird said:

"Vista was never in the cards for me - too slow and CS2 is not compatible with it."

I have been using Vista since it was a beta and it is much faster than XP ever thought of being. And I have been using CS2 with it the whole time and never had a problem. I have the 64 bit version and Lightroom really screams.

Click to expand...

A common complaint of Vista was the fact it is much more demanding on hardware than XP, but that is the evolution of Windows.  Vista was almost universally shunned by IT shops because it offered no productivity advantages over the very well settled-in XP and would have been very risky to implement on a large scale.  Jokes were being made in the IT community about how quickly SP1 for Vista rolled out the door.

MS finally realized they had to do a lot better - Windows 7 might fulfill the promises made for Vista.

The little Acer L100 with a dual core and 2 gb of ram was an absolute dog with Vista on it.  Linux has to be 50-75% faster.  I also loaded 64 bit Linux (CentOS) on it and I was amazed at its speed.

Please don't misunderstand - I'm no big fan of XP.  I am a big fan of Unix, Linux, BSD, etc and Mac OSX.  I use XP because I need to run Adobe products and I don't want to spend a small fortune on going all Apple. 

I am amazed you can run CS2 on Vista - good deal!

Have a question for anyone using Mandriva. I've been following this thread and decided to give it a try. However, I have a wide screen monitor and the tool bar with the clock etc. does not show up when using Mandriva, but works OK with XP. Any ideas?

Haven't built any systems for about 3 years now, but used to build quite often for resale.

Thanks,

Merrill

Hi Merrill,

Haven't seen that particular problem, but I've only installed Mandriva on two boxes. 

First thing is to check for errata.  I have found a lot of display problems deal with X issues (not unique to Mandriva.)

Between the Mandriva wiki and the Mandriva forums, you should be able to figure it out.  If not, register for the forum and post the question - I've had to do that on a couple of occasions.

73 de wb5tht