A friend at work is interested in building their own PC, so I thought I would keep a pictorial log of my own PC-building experience to help them out.  Where better to host it than right here on the forum?  The primary build will probably occur in early March, but I'm going to be doing some research ahead of time so I figured I'd start the thread now.

Since I'm completely bored off my butt at work today (shhh!), I thought I'd start this project by posting my desired specifications for the Bobulator VII.  In case you guys are interested, here is a list of the previous Bobulators...

• Bobulator I - My first home-built PC, a Pentium 100MHz with 8MB of RAM and an Intel motherboard with integrated graphics and sound.  My uncle helped me assemble this beast!  I later upgraded the system to a whopping 16MB of RAM, which was my first solo PC mod experience.
• Bobulator II - An "upgrade" of the previous system, the Bobulator II was a Pentium II 233MHz system with 32MB of RAM.  I reused the case, modem, and power supply.
• Bobulator III - This was a complete rebuild and no old components were reused.  I built this system at the age of 15 after getting my first non-seasonal job at Wendy's, and I bought top-shelf components.  The case was a freebie craptastic Dell case that I got free from a friend of mine.  The Bobulator III was a 700Mhz Pentium III Coppermine, the last Intel processor I ever used in my main rig.  I built it with a whopping 256MB of SDRAM, although I later maxed out the motherboard with 768MB.  I installed a massive 33GB hard drive (the biggest available), a CD-Burner (4X!), a CD-ROM drive, and the first-ever hardware GPU, an nVidia GeForce 256 with 32MB of SDR SDRAM.  It took me three years to pay off that system!  I am still using the mouse and monitor I bought with this system, although the monitor will be replaced sometime between Christmas and the end of January.
  
  Here's a picture of the last moments of the Bobulator III.  When I disassembled it, I found a ton of dust that had gathered over the three years I was using it.
  
  
  
• Bobulator IV - This was probably my most ambitious (and expensive!) project ever, and the one that you guys are the most familiar with.  In our junior year of high school I rebuilt the Bobulator from scratch with all new components, including the now-infamous case.  I bought the case from 3DCool, a company that is now mostly-defunct and no longer sells cases.  I paid an exorbitant amount of money for the ultimate case, which included eight layers of custom baked-on automotive paint.  I also custom ordered a window on the side that is installed with weather-stripping designed for an automobile.  Windows were pretty revolutionary at the time. 
  
  I finished off the case with a 431w Enermax power supply (one watt more than Briney!) that is still in the Bobulator today.  Other hardware included a GeForce 3 Ti500 with 128MB of RAM, an Athlon XP 1700+, and 1,536MB of PC2100 SDRAM.  I also installed a new 16X burner and kept the old burner from the Bobulator III.  Here's a picture of the brand-spankin' new Bobulator IV...
  
  
  
  
  
  At some point, Spanky and I both bought GeForce 4 Ti-4600's with 128MB RAM.  When I pre-ordered the card at Best Buy, the retarded cashier let me keep the box.  I posted a picture on the craptastic forum we had at the time, bragging that my new card was better than Briney's.  You can see the pre-order label on the right-hand side.
  
  
  
• Bobulator V - This was more of a refresh than a complete rebuild.  I upgraded to a GeForce 5600 256MB, an Athlon 2200+, and two 160GB hard drives in RAID 1.  I also upgraded the fans in the system to dual-ball bearing Panaflo Highs and added two 5½" hard-drive coolers to my open drive bays.
• Bobulator VI - My current rig.  It's an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 3GB of PC2400.  I later upgraded the system by swapping out the PC2400 with 2GB of PC3200 and by replacing the Soundblaster Audigy Platinum with a Soundblaster X-Fi Fatal1ty (with 64mb of X-RAM!).  It's running four 80GB WD SATA150's on a Promise FastTrak RAID controller in RAID 5 with 128MB of ECC SDRAM.  Yeah, I still have more cache than Briney, even if he's got three times the storage space!

The Bobulator VII will be a big change.  Due to AMD's current lackluster performance, I'll be going back to Intel for the first time in nearly nine years.  My last Intel processor was a 700MHz Pentium III Coppermine.  Wow, those were the good ol' days!  I remember playing Unreal Tournament for the first time ever on that machine!

-b0b
(...remembers the good times.)

I made my first two purchases toward the Bobulator VII today.  NewEgg had an excellent deal on Western Digital 500GB SATA-3 drives, so I jumped one the deal and bought one.  I'll eventually add three more identical drives and put them in a RAID-5 array, giving me 1.5TB of storage with redundancy in case of a drive failure.  I bought the RAID Edition with 16MB cache, which offers a 100,000 hour operational life and can take the additional heat typically found in a RAID array.





I also bought a copy of Vista Ultimate - Signature Edition.  I found a brand new unopened copy from a PC reseller on eBay for half of the retail price, so I jumped on it.  He's from Chicago, so I can drive over there and strangle him if he tries to screw me over.  Here's a link to an Amazon page for the same product...

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Ultimate-Numbered-Signature/dp/B000M2WPI...



-b0b
(...may install Vista on his current rig just for the heck of it.)

Here's the next component in the lineup.  I just ordered this on Monday and it expect it to arrive today.



My 431w Enermax has served me faithfully over the years, but I think it is finally time to upgrade to a slightly larger power supply with SATA power and 6-pin PCIe connectors.  This unit, an Enermax 550w PSU, uses modular connectors to eliminate unnecessary cabling.  That should help improve airflow through the case.

It's also got a 120mm cooling fan with green LED's built in.  I'm not real sure that I'm going to be real keen on a green glow inside my case, but we'll see how it pans out.  If all else fails, I'll just do a little bit of surgery to remove it.

-b0b
(...paid a little less than $100 for it.)

prolly so he can pick and choose what power connectors he wants plugged in so he doesnt have 10 extra useless wires clogging airflow in his case.

yea that is pretty sweet, but i wonder, just how many connectors are there on that one? looks like 10?

I've got a lot of cables clogging things up, i need to twist-tie them.

I got my copy of Ultimate for 45 dollars.

hehe

computerjuvenile wrote on Dec 5^th, 2007 at 1:31pm:


Yeah, but my copy of Vista has Bill Gate's signature digitally imprinted on the front cover, so blow me.

Quote:


There are eight modular ports total.  If you need more than that, may I suggest the following power supply...

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM4MywsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

Any power supply that requires you to rewire your house gets a thumbs up in my book.

-b0b
(...some day!)

My case is heavy enough as it is without adding a gallon of water.  Besides, I've worked with computers long enough to see every single type of component fail multiple times, so I'm really not going to tempt fate by running water in and through a couple thousand dollars in hardware.

I usually only overclock by 10-15% on my hardware, so there is no need for water cooling.

-b0b
(...has considered it, though.)