It's alive! Alive, I tell you!

How's that for drama?

At last, this past Sunday, Mr. T and I finally had the time and all of the components to assemble Jennifer's new PC. In the previous blog I put down all of the hardware that went into the box, so I won't bore any with the details [*again!!]). We had enough time to get it up and running, and get Win7 Pro installed on the SSD. We have one more component to install, a third 120mm cooling fan that will exhaust directly over the CPU. At that time, we'll also hook up the HDD (which was not playing nicely with the SSD during the build), and take care of cable management, as well as installing Microsoft Office and the usual suite of security applications.  

The fan.

Mr. T  secures the mobo.

A funny anecdote from the office: one of my coworkers- Frank- is also a dyed-in-the-wool geek gearhead and gamer. When I showed him these pics and told him the speeds and feeds, his reaction was quite precious- "Dude- don't even try to tell me you built a gaming rig... for your wife!"

Well, yes we actually did. On the day I announced that she was getting a new box, she was quite concerned- the last couple of refurbs we purchased have been real duds. When I told her that we were going to build it, she seemed somewhat relieved, especially since it would be up to date. And, she wouldn't have to hack any more cases to install a power supply to support a video card that is needed to play Civilization V!

We all were very pleased with the lack of noise output from the ThermalTake NiC F4. According to the manufacturer's website, the dual 120mm fans will move up to 79.283 cfm (cubic feet per minute- sorry, I don't have a metric equivalent for cfm); fan speeds can be firmware controlled, and noise is 18.0/30.2 dBa. According to Industrialnoisecontrol.com, 30dBa is really quiet. From my very limited experience, this box is stealthy quiet. I'm guessing that even after we install the final 120mm exhaust fan that this is going to be one quiet machine. Apart from the previously mentioned software installs, HDD hookup and burn-in, this box is locked, cocked and ready to rock! Pi Day update- I had hoped to deploy this box on Sunday, March 16, but I just checked the tracking and it most likely the fan won't arrive until Monday at the very earliest. We've discovered that when we order things, we usually get them very late in the day, so if it does arrive on Monday, it won't get installed until Tuesday (I work nights, as you may recall). And- I still have software to install!

In other news, I've taken a break from Facebook games and am using the time saved to work on the database. I think March 11 was the "official" start of my break, so that makes this Day 5. I'm not off of Facebook completely, just skipping the games (which probably accounted for 90+% of the time I spent there). I'm a bit excited about the upcoming 100th post- when I started this I didn't really think I had the discipline or tenacity to carry it this far. I guess when that happens I'll finally be able to publish a Top 10 list of posts.

That's all for now- speeds and feeds will probably be updated on or about blog entry #100.

Until then, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.