HOW DID YOUR 1ST BUILD GO

Took me about an hour to work up the courage to get a massive flat head screwdriver and use all my ****-weak 16 year old muscle to press the HSF clip over my new £300 1.2 Athlon Thunderbird. Rest of it is easy.
 
Spunkey said:
Took me about an hour to work up the courage to get a massive flat head screwdriver and use all my ****-weak 16 year old muscle to press the HSF clip over my new £300 1.2 Athlon Thunderbird. Rest of it is easy.
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Ugh... Socket A heatsinks... I don't know why AMD would do that to anyone. The fear!
 
My first official build on my own was probably:

AMD Athlon XP 1900+
256mb ram
MicroStar motherboard
ATI Radeon 9000 pro

Everything worked perfectly first time, but I had been assisting with PC builds for my Dad for a good number of years before.
 
I screwed the motherboard directly onto the case, didn't put in any mounting nuts, quite pleased that it didn't blow up, but needless to say it didn't work.

Had a Pentium 2, loved those old slot in CPU's.
 
My first build went great, but I can't take the credit as I was being taught to do it in college. The fact many of the components were knackered was beneficial because I had to do lots of testing by substitution just to get a working machine. Whenever I build a machine I still do it bit by bit, testing as I go, so by the time everything is in the case I know it is all working anyway.
 
Not great. The CPU (Duron 800MHz I think) was DOA.

There's nothing quite as gutting as getting all those shiny boxes, plugging it all in, and....nothing :(
 
Mine was a sempron 3000+ and Nvidia FX5500 (can't remember the other specifics). If I remember rightly it went well, outside of forgetting to plug the power switch on the case into the motherboard. Such a tiny connector, drove me insane for over an hour. Was great though, the feeling you get from building your first PC is amazing, really feels like you've accomplished something!
 
RJC said:
Quite good, it worked first time, only issue was the fan noise!
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My first build did not have a single fan. Intel 486DX33, Vesa local bus graphics, Vesa local bus I/O card, Soundblaster ISA sound card.

I drove miles getting all the parts, Internet shopping was not invented in 1993.
 
1st build was in January 2004, with a Shuttle barebones, hyperthreaded 2.8GHz, 1GB, 2 Raptors, Geforce 5600 VIVO, DVD-RAM which was all new, plus an old Soundblaster Live 1024 that I had kicking around. It worked from the word go.

2nd build was in September 2006. CPU (Pentium D 3.4GHz) was incompatible with the board, even though I did a spec-check on here prior to the build. It was my only bad experience with OcUK really, as I was getting conflicting engineers' reports between OcUK and 3rd party manu. Ended up having to get a different board for it all to work. Guess I should have checked with OcUK sales dept before committing to this one.

3rd build was in July 2009. Q9500-based PC, Geforce 7600 (yeah pants card I know) in an Antec Skeleton. Anyone remember that case? This build was smooth and worked from the word go. Sadly, had a house fire which gutted some of the ground floor including the PC. Was on the dole at that point too and needed a quick average-spec PC so went for an OcUK-built Shuttle with Phenom X2 550 and an HD4850.
 
Terrible. Built everything, started up, and jumped with glee that it was alive. Installed Windows, then wanted to reboot to change the boot order in BIOS. It never turned back on. After some testing found it was the motherboard (Asus Crosshair III) at fault, RMA'd it but OcUK found it was working perfectly and sent it back. So I decided to try again and behold... it was fully alive. Then after a year with a few crashes related to Hypertransport on the way the motherboard died again...

And here I am with my second build in my sig. Only problem now recently though is 4.4ghz not being stable anymore... so rolled back to 4ghz.

I have done other builds for friends and family and they seem quite rock solid stable as well.
 
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AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHZ
Asus A7V266
256MB DDR ram
60GB IBM 60GXP
FSP Sparkle 300w PSU
re-used an old nvidia TNT M64 32MB graphics card from a previous dell dimension.
17" monitor

All in a Globalwin 802 case

Bloomin' hard drive was DOA which was disappointing but it fired up ok first time
 
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Superficial - that 1.4 Thunderbird was an awesome CPU wasn't it! It totally owned the equivalent Intel CPU (Pentium 4 1.5) at the time in late 2001. Although my RAM was 512MB, I was still on the older PC133 version, so your PC was still probably faster. I didn't build this PC though - I just chose the parts and got a friend to build it. My next PC though in early 2004 I did build.
 
Superficial said:
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHZ
Asus A7V266
256MB DDR ram
60GB IBM 60GXP
FSP Sparkle 300w PSU
re-used an old nvidia TNT M64 32MB graphics card from a previous dell dimension.
17" monitor

All in a Globalwin 802 case

Bloomin' hard drive was DOA which was disappointing but it fired up ok first time
Click to expand...

They used to call those IBM Deskstars Deathstars for a reason you know. :p
 
Motherboard set fire!

Seller sold me a board with 2 header pins crossed over in transit causing a short. This was in 1997, and since always check for any shorted damaged pins!
 
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