Well I finally got around to building my college computer (the day before I move in). The parts I bought all from newegg.com, and it’s a slightly different configuration from what I previously posted. The entire build took about 1 hour, from start to finish.

PARTS:

• DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard – Retail
  
• Rosewill TU-155 Black 0.8mm SGCC Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 400W(20+4 pin) Power Supply – Retail
• SAMSUNG 16X DVD�R DVD Burner With 5X DVD-RAM Write and LightScribe Black ATA/ATAPI Model SH-S162L – OEM
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM
• Kingston ValueRAM 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model KVR400X64C3AK2/1G – Retail
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Dual Core Processor Model ADA3800BVBOX – Retail
• eVGA 256-P2-N554-AX Geforce 7600GT KO 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card – Retail

[I was going to write a story about how I put it together and everything and it was going to go here. However I lost interest and you would probably do the same reading it. Therefore you can just look at the pictures here]

Finally done with the hardware, I went on to trying to set up the software on the machine. I decided on the name TULIP for reasons only some of you are meant to get – dont think too hard about it if you dont.

My first attempt at installing Windows XP proved unsuccessful (the installation phase after 1st restart happened twice for some reason, and then after auto-login, explorer failed to load). I realized the media was faulty, and proceeded to burn another copy of the disc. After trying installing with the new media, I ran into problems after booting which I eventually pinned down to the memory having issues. After doing a little research I realized that the LanParty motherboard was not liking the ValueRAM I had fed it. I was forced to make it run single-channel at 333MHz, which I was NOT happy about.

Even though it installed with the RAM at 400MHz, it was a corrupt installation, so running at 333MHz still resulted in system instability. The answer was to start from scratch (this was at about 10PM), re-installing Windows with the RAM at 333MHz. This went flawlessly, and within minutes I was running on a stable system and installation.

It’s working very well – quite snappy and all. Running BOINC on it shows it performs considerably better than the VPRM2660, but that’s not saying much. Because of that memory problem, an upgrade for the memory (probably to 2 or 3 GB, but this time with the right speed) is in order. A new power supply would be the next thing on the list….