Ben’s Blog

Our latest innovation: http://www.achallengerapproaches.com

As you can probably see, I’ve changed the theme of this blog after nosing around the Wordpress themes website and spotting this one. I haven’t much else to say here, except that I have purchased a legal (!) copy of Warcraft 3 and The Frozen Throne, and am running a GHost++ hosting bot on moose2. If you play on europe.battle.net than you might come across me.

I’ve also got my Rubik’s solve time down to 1:04.

This is a direct continuation of my previous blog post on the building of moose2

The new PSU arrived about a week after Scan found fault. With great excitement, I opened the new one up. I plugged everything in, pushed the “On” button…

…aaaand fail, like before. It wasn’t exactly the same problem, but it was the same kind of thing. This PSU was packaged up swiftly, and returned, like before. The difference this time was the Scan found no fault in their testing. To cut a long story short, we came to the conclusion that there was some sort of bizarre incompatibilty lying somewhere in the time that it takes the capacitors in the PSU to charge up. Scan weren’t happy with this explanation though, as as far as they were concerned, the PSU worked. After some significant shouting-down-the-phone-at-gourmless-customer-support-people, we managed to get a full refund. I ordered my second choice of PSU, a Corsair HX620w, from Ebuyer.

This PSU arrived (no photos, sorry), and was duly installed. It worked perfectly, and has nice black ribbon cables which made cable management easier. Well, that and the cable ties I forgot to put back in the box of the old one…

With the PSU working, moose2 was officially complete. However, just driving two 17″ screens seemed like a waste of his graphics processing power, so I decided to save for a new monitor. I decided that I either wanted a 22″ or a 24″, and a few threads on a technology forum that I haunt helped me make up my mind. I opted for this, a Yuraku VA 24″. Technically, because it is a VA screen (better colours and viewing angle than the TN panel in most screens), because of its size I should have paid around £350 for it. However, because of various influencing factors (not great build quality, a slight lottery as to whether you’ll get a good one), it only cost me £170 shipped. It is awesome, and I love it.

I decided to install the Windows 7 beta, and I love it. It is awesome, and much much better than Vista (not better than Linux though =)). It has the perfect shiny:speed ratio. This /does/ mean that I have a virtually unused copy of Vista lying aroung, but I’ll find a use for it. I shall finish this post with some beautifully purty pictures:

I will be starting my GCSEs at school next year, and as such my year are currently in the process of choosing our ‘options’. This hasn’t posed much of a problem for me, but I thought that I’d put them up here:

• Maths
• Statistics
• English Lit.
• English Lang.
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Biology
• French
• German
• Electronics
• History
• Music
• RE/Philosophy/Citizenship/Whatever you want to call it

That is quite a lot of GCSEs (13 if you didn’t count). It isn’t as bad as it initially seems though - RE lessons are compulsory, and although I will be doing less than most of the year as I’m doing triple science, I will still get the option to take the exam if I want to. I’m far beyond the required standard in music and maths, and I’m not expecting the other subjects to be too difficult. Still, I am expecting the next two years to carry a significantly heavier workload than I’ve been used to.

On Christmas day, there were a couple of big, heavy cardboard boxes under the tree for me. They contained that big heap of parts which I have gone through in a previous post. That afternoon, I got down to building him.

The build itself was quite entertaining - even though I did know how to do everything, I’d never actually done it before. Nevertheless, everything went smoothly, apart from the installation of my processor cooler, a Thermalright TRUE Black. This thing is simply massive - first of all, you have to put a backplate under the motherboard so that the heatsink doesnt snap the motherboard in half. Then, you have to put a little widget through the legs of the heatsink, open it out and attach the heatsink to the backplate using it. Next, you plug the fan clips into the cooler, and clip on your fans. If you don’t do this outside the case, it is basically impossible. At this point, I screwed the motherboard, complete with processor, cooler and RAM into my case. This was where I had a bit of a problem.

As the computer-inclined amongst you will know, a motherboard has two power connections. It has the main ATX power connector, which is a massive plug with 24 pins (20 for older computers), but nowadays it will also have a secondary connector, which will either have four or eight pins. This provides extra voltage to keep the motherboard stable.

The problem I had was that the eight pin power connector on my motherboard was covered by one of the fans on my cooler. There was no way I could get the plug in without taking the motherboard out (which wasn’t going to happen, as the standoffs which keep the motherboard in the case were slowly wearing away - more on that later). I ended up having to remove one of the fans on the cooler, plug in the power connector, and then spend literally twenty minutes trying to get the fan back on without being able to see it properly. I did manage in the end, though.

With that done, I proceeded to plug in the graphics card, disk drives and the rest of the power connections. Holding my breath I pressed the ‘on’ button…

…aaand FAIL. The motherboard was refusing to turn on. On the helpful built-in LCD screen, I was getting a code 88 - this means that basically anything could have gone wrong. It just means that something is wrong, but the motherboard doesn’t know what it is. I spent the rest of Christmas day trying *everything*. Changing the slots that the graphics card and RAM were in, changing the graphics card and ram, clearing the CMOS, changing the processor cooler…

Still, I got nowhere. Needless to say, I went to bed not a happy bunny. Over the next few days, I continued to try all of this again, and spent hours bending over an open computer case. By the end of those few days, I had put it down to the motherboard being faulty.

The next day, I came across a forum topic saying that the power supply I have doesn’t work with this motherboard. This sounded like complete rubbish to me: all powersupplies output the same voltages in the same way. Some are just shinier, more stable or more energy efficient than others. However, it did give me the idea to try changing the PSU - I didn’t think that anything could have gone wrong with it though, as all of my case fans span up. I’d even managed to boot the motherboard once - but it stopped working soon after that.

With the power supply replaced with a donor, I tried again. It worked! He booted up several times in a row. I swapped the original one back in, and it wouldn’t start again. I’d found the problem. With the donor PSU sitting on top of the 5 1/4 inch drive bays (I hadn’t taken out the broken one) and the side panel off, I installed Vista and Combat Arms right there, and played Combat Arms for an hour or so. After that, I screwed everything in and moved him to his new home. We sent the PSU back to scan for testing, and just yesterday they updated the RMA tracking page - they found a fault. This means, hopefully, that I should have it next week, so I can get him completely finished!

He is working now, albeit with a lower wattage PSU than I’m completely comfortable with. Still, I’ve done some overclocking, and reached 3.6GHz (!) stable on my Q6600. I shall post more speed statistics in the next installment of the build log. I’ll finish this post off with some nice pictures of the (almost) finished product.

moose2 from the outside

moose2 from the inside