Seth Kinast’s Blog

Okay, so it’s been a terribly, disastrously long time since I blogged. I actually disappeared from the Internet for several weeks due to a pressing need to concentrate on my studies, which caused some worry at ZetaBoards… thanks to those who cared enough to check in on me! But everything now is fine, and I’m back in action. I am in the midst of preparations to travel to Niger (Africa) next month; I applied for my visa today and got vaccinated for yellow fever. I still need to pick up a malaria prophylactic (Malarone) and complete a bunch of paperwork, but I’m on my way! I leave July 8 and return July 28. I’ll be working with a team of undergrads and doctors to minister to the people of Niamey (capital city of), Niger.

Almost as exciting is the progress of my computer build! I have every part ordered, and the final two (video card and hard drive) arrive tomorrow. I’ll be building over the weekend, and barring any DOA parts, will have my new computer done by Monday! In keeping with the Greek mythology theme all my hardware is named on, the new computer will be called Mercury; it’s silver and fast

I’ll be extensively documenting this build, mostly to please Scotty, but also this is my first scratch build. I’ve done plenty of upgrading and installation to Erebus, my six-year-old ABS machine, but it still came pre-built. One interesting note about my parts-ordering process is that I ordered pretty much every piece from a different company. I did this both to save shipping costs (find free shipping deals) and to get the best deal on every part. A side effect, though, is that I have a lot of useful information on different companies’ shipping habits and general post-order followup.

System Build 2007: “Mercury”

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo e6600. Only a few more dollars than the lower e6420, and plenty fast even if I don’t overclock it. I will overclock it
Bought from NewEgg. Free 3 day shipping, arrived in 3 days. Shipped the same day I ordered.
RAM: Buffalo Firestix PC-8000 2×1GB. This is the only piece of my build that I really should have waited on. I got it in February for (at the time) an amazing deal: $200, which was $170 cheaper than retail. However, shortly after, RAM prices fell off a cliff and you can get 2GB of decent Crucial or Corsair RAM for about $120 shipped. This is still amazing RAM… I just paid a bit more than I’d've liked.
Bought direct from BuffaloTech. $6 FedEx Ground shipping, arrived in 2 days. Shipped the next business day as I ordered after hours. They threw in a sticker and an ESD strap.
Motherboard: eVGA 680i A1. One of my two “splurges” in this system. I could have easily picked the lower 650i, but I loved the layout of this board, the option to do SLI in the future if I want, the dual Gigabit Ethernet, and the heatsink system on the chipset. I paid a little extra for the “A1″ version, which comes with a lifetime warranty. I like lifetime.
Bought from Amazon. Free 2 day shipping, arrived in 2 days. Shipped the same day I ordered. Packaged really nicely.
Video Card: eVGA 8800 GTS-640. The other splurge… eVGA got more of my money than they probably expected to! But this is really the sweet spot for price vs. performance right now. I waited until ATI released their dud HD2900XT, which dropped the price of this card by $75. Thanks ATI!
Bought from Buy.com. Free shipping via FedEx. Shipped the day after I ordered (whereas Amazon shipped the same day on the motherboard; I bought these two parts on the same day). Arrived in 3 days. Packaged extremely poorly, with no padding. No real damage since it wasn’t shipped UPS Can’t complain when I used the “Budget 7-9 Day Shipping” for $0.
Hard Drive: Seagate 7200.10 500GB. 500GB delivers the cheapest price per GB right now, even though 320GB would have done me fine for now. But you can never ever ever have enough hard drive space! Ever! If you have a few extra dollars and you’ve already bought more RAM, buy a bigger hard drive. It’s an investment for the future.
Bought from NewEgg. Free shipping via UPS. Shipped the same day I ordered, arrived in 2 days. Missouri must be just close enough to the NewEgg warehouse to make a difference (the 3-day shipping on the CPU was when I was in Norman.)
PSU: Corsair HX-620. 620 watts is slightly overkill for my needs. But it was only $20 more than the 520-watt version, and on something like a PSU, it never hurts to buy solid. In addition, using less of the available power means it will run cooler and more silently. Can’t hurt.
Bought from ZipZoomFly. Free shipping via FedEx. Didn’t ship until two days after I ordered, and arrived 4 days after that. Slowest shipping of any store (but a good deal on the PSU).
Case: Antec p180. A monstrous behemoth of a case, but very pretty and solid. It weighs almost 40lbs empty, as it’s solid steel. Apparently extremely quiet… we’ll see if it really is. Comes with three Tri-Cool fans that I’ll probably replace.
Bought from Frys. Shipped the next day, arrived in 3 days. Free shipping on a 40lb item is awesome.
Cooling: Scythe Ninja B & 5× Yate Loon DSL-12 fans. The stock cooling in this rig would have been fine, but for overclocking, I wanted something a little nicer. The Ninja works extremely well with the p180, and can even run fanless if you don’t overclock. We shall see.
Bought from Jab-Tech. About $6 shipping. Purchased first thing Monday morning and they had it shipped about 2 hours later! It arrived the next day in Joplin, wow!

If I had to pick parts over again, I really don’t think I would have done anything differently except the memory (and that only if the prices were the same). It’s a solid computer and I’m really excited to put it together!

Pictures soon.