Results of PCBuild

[davea33]

After many months of reading this board I finally ordered the parts and built my first computer yesterday. First, I'd like to thank everyone on this board as you do an amazing service to people building computers. Although I do not post, I appreciate all the little nuggest I pickup from here.

I did this with a friend and we ordered the exact same parts. Part list is at the end of this message. When we tried to install Vista Ultimate, but the OS could not find the drivers for the DVD/CD-ROM player. Googling for the error message gave us all sorts of scary things to try out. The DVD player came with a red cable so we thought oh cool, plug it into the red SATA port. I was very nice of them to color code things for us. Wrong! And one of our HD came with a blue SATA cable so we plugged it into the blue SATA port, wrong again. We finally figured out to use the black SATA ports by actually reading the MOBO instruction manual.

I had a second issue, which was strange, because my friend did not have it (again we are building we the exact same parts). Once I entered the serial # of Windows Vista Ultimate, the OS could not recognize any of the drives. I flipped the SATA cables of the DVD and hard drives to exactly match my friends. Still same error message. I then unplugged the second hard drive and everything worked. After the OS was installed and everything seemed to be working I plugged the 2nd HD SATA cable in and the OS recognized it.

Everything is awesome right now. Now that my system is up and running, could anyone recommend any diagnostic/testing/benchmarking/burn-in software to ensure my system is truly stable and performing as exepcted.

Again many thanks to all those who contribute to this board.

Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Perpendicular Recording) ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 520W Power Supply 100 - 240 V UL, CUL, CE, CB, FCC Class B, TUV, CCC, C-tick - Retail
Intel BOXD975XBX2KR LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor – Retail
CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Desktop Memory - Retail
SAPPHIRE 100196L Radeon X1950PRO 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Video Card - Retail
COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black Aluminum Bezel, SECC ATX Mid Tower
LITE-ON Black 16X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 16X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD Burner with

[blue60007]

The issue you had with different SATA ports might have to do with what is controlling the ports. If you plug drives into a port that is controlled by a 3rd party controller (versus the native Intel chipset controller) you have to install the drivers for that controller. Otherwise, that looks like a nice system :)

I usually like to just fire up something intensive (games, etc.) and see if the system remains stable. Otherwise, there is a program called Orthos (http://www.overclock.net/downloads/138142-orthos-v20060420.html) to stress the CPU and Core Temp (http://www.thecoolest.zerobrains.com/CoreTemp/) to watch the CPu temp.

[perkster]

memtest is good to test your memory is in right and working fully.