PC Info

Ok guys, I've been playing Skyrim all day today, and even though I only get about 25 FPS on the lowest settings and 800x600, I've been having a blast. Now it's time to stop procrastinating and write a post about my long awaited computer.

Elite 430 Case

AMD Phenom II and GSkill Badges

No cable management whatsoever, I'll try to fix it when I get my GPU.

OK so that's pretty much how it looks, now let's take a look at the performance, which I value way over looks.

So the CPU came stock at a dual core 3.2GHz, but I easily unlocked the disabled cores and overclocked to 4.2 GHz. However temps were reaching 56C Idle, so I brought it down to 3.6GHz, for now. At the end of this month I'll be getting my Cooler Master Hyper 212+, so I will probably go around 4GHz at most, just to be safe. 

The voltage seemed a bit high, but everything is stable so far.

Why you should buy a Black Edition Phenom II

It is so easy to overclock! Just by changing the multiplier in AMD overdrive, increasing the voltage slightly and messing around a bit, I overclocked in a heartbeat.

That's it, I just increased that Multiplier Slider, and bam, 3600 MHz

Now, what I absolutely despised about building my computer.

1. Installing Windows 7 was hard to do, I had to connect the IDE cable from my old desktop and power them both on, and put the old one on top of my new one, because the IDE cable wa a bit short. I can't really blame that on anything besides my not wanting to buy a CD drive. 

2. The Windows 7 disk I burned, did not work, I had to change down the burn speed to 1x, reburn it, and it finally worked, although it took a while to burn it at that speed

3. Drivers

3a. Could not connect to internet at all; had to download LAN drivers from my motherboard's website from another computer and bring it to the desktop, but even then, only wired works, gotta figure that out before I move my computer away from the router.

3b. I had to install the AMD Graphics drivers 3 times before they finally worked. But they were easy to use, and I had no games to play while using it, Skyrim was downloading, so it didn't even really matter.

3c. The mouse suddenly stopped working, had to connect it to my laptop, and reinstall the drivers to get it functioning again, but not without 3 restarts

4. Headset didn't work, when I plugged it into the headphone jack, only the headphones worked, and only the microphone worked when I plugged it into the mic jack. Might be something wrong with the headset, but I have a spare webcam I used for a mic

Other than that, I'm loving my computer! I can play Team Fortress 2 without any lag, and on lowest settings I'm playing Skyrim at 20-30 FPS. Boot times are faster than what I would expect of a 5400RPM drive, but then I guess it will be dramatically improved when I get an SSD. 

One thing is that, it's sometimes loud. Just at random some of my fans start picking up more speed and get louder. There was one 10 second period where every fan was going faster than intended, and it sounded like a jet engine, but that never happened again, and these random speed increases seem to have stopped for now.

What's left to buy:

• GPU, 99% going to be Sapphire 6850
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Heatsink/Fan
• Coby 2.1 Speakers
• 23" 1080p monitor
• Crucial M4 64GB SSD
• Either 500 or 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD once prices drop
• Another stick of 4GB GSkill RAM, if it seems like I need it
• Better Keyboard and Mouse, I can survive with the mouse, but this keyboard's going to give me carpal tunnel soon because of its shape
• More games!
• A Lamborghini

Alright hope you guys enjoyed this long post, gonna be writing a lot more long posts like this soon.