HOW DID YOUR 1ST BUILD GO

Soldato
Joined
29 Oct 2002
Posts
4,140
Location
London
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.

lol - oh don't as i was typing that list i was getting teary eyed. i remember trying the pencil trick and getting nowhere with it!

yeah it was a good first build
 
Soldato
Joined
29 Oct 2002
Posts
4,140
Location
London
They used to call those IBM Deskstars Deathstars for a reason you know. :p

lol yeah - a lot of people tarred the 60GXP with deathstar brush but the 60gxp had quite a standard reliability rating on storage review - now the 75GXP THAT was terrible. still the damage was done and after a couple more models IBM bowed out of the HDD game and sold to hitachi.

the replacement 60GXP lasted a good few years as i recall but did eventually die.

God i really feel old looking at that list!
 
Associate
Joined
16 Aug 2012
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166
Location
York
The first computer a put together myself was back in 2000, i'd grown sick of going to my grandads to use his computer i wanted to make my own, i can't fully remember the PC specs much but it was close to this:

512MB RAM
9200 ATi card
AMD (I believe) 1.9GHz Single core

Thats all i remember. Its went well though as id practiced on putting stuff together but not a full build. Never cleaned the system in 8 years though haha so that was a huge mistake. My mate took the cover off and blew the dust and i think it shortened his life by a few years.
 
Caporegime
Joined
14 Dec 2005
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28,071
Location
armoy, n. ireland
My first build, (atlon s939 kit) went very smoothly. My most recent i7 920 build wasnt just as smooth. Put it all together, turned it on to be met with a black screen. Turned out to be the ram was in the wrong slots. A pretty simple silly mistake to make tbh.
 
Commissario
Joined
17 Oct 2002
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32,996
Location
Panting like a fiend
My first PC build went fairly well, apart from from memory) there being no mouse at first.

IIRC I'd set one of the many, many jumpers wrong:p (from memory the IO card alone had about 40 jumpers, some of which had to be set correctly in relation to 2-3 others, so changing one could require changing multiple others at the same time)

The first machine I upgraded was even more fun.
A 486 sx to 486 DX4 100, on a motherboard with no manual, having to prise the CPU out (before the wonders of ZIF sockets you had to gently ease the CPU out, either with a special tool, or a small flat bladed screwdriver sort of lifting one side then the other a tiny bit at a time).
Then having to break the bios battery clip, as there was a bios password*, and no reset jumper, then soldering it back on.

People who start building PC's these days really don't know how much "fun" it used to be before Plug and Play became standard, and worked :p


*The base unit had been bought at an auction of bankrupt stock cheap.
 
Associate
Joined
22 May 2011
Posts
16
a 286 build back in the day

was very difficult getting the irq dma set properly if i remember rightly.

plug and play makes this stuff easy.
 
Soldato
Joined
29 Aug 2010
Posts
7,824
Location
Cornwall
The first PC I built was while working in a computer shop, so it wasn't actually mine and I can't remember what it was. Guessing I must've had supervision though so it probably went fine. I do remember back in those days having to set the CPU frequency and multiplier using jumpers. Barely understood what I was doing so that was scary!

These days it'd be hard to get things wrong if you tried (well, ok maybe not). In the old days you really had to know what you were doing!
I remember when motherboards (Gigabyte I think) started using sliding switches instead of jumpers for setting up the CPU. I thought that was an awesome idea!

Oh and then there were SIMMs instead of DIMMs...

And ISA...

And IDE cables before they put notches on so you had to align the red stripe with pin one. And the panasonic (?) floppy drives that were the opposite way round to everyone elses...


Mind you to this day I seem to be able to connected the HDD LED the wrong way round more often than the right way!
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Feb 2010
Posts
3,720
I guess my first build didn't go too well.

After spending months reviewing and buying exactly what I wanted for every component, it came together rather nicely.

It was predominantly a gaming rig but I'm a guilty gamer and can't spend more than 15 - 30 minutes on anything. Everything played splendidly and I became a graphics junkie. This quick burst gaming played perfectly into hiding my RAM and VGA mismatch, since it was an intermittent problem that only became blaringly obvious with heavy gaming.

After realising I had a problem I warranty replaced the motherboard, RAM, VGA, HDDs, PSU... everythig bar the CPU to no avail.

In the end I bought my 470 and never saw the issue again. To be honest, this and so many driver issues seriously jaded my ATI experience and I don't think I'll ever go back to them again.

There's nothing you can do to check if there's a mismatch between the VGA and RAM either (and yes the RAM was on the compatibility list with my mobo). Terrible really.
 
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Soldato
Joined
1 Jul 2009
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2,659
It was fun, only problem was I put the RAM in the wrong slots and couldn't work out why it wouldn't work. Thanks to help on here I got it sorted.
 
Caporegime
Joined
29 Jul 2011
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In acme's chair.
I plugged the front panel USB connector into the firewire header and burned out the firewire chip :D

I was also running the RAM in single channel for a while because I didn't realise which slots i had to occupy.

Also i connected the power LED to the header the wrong way round.

Oh, and when i used the lian-li PSU clamp, it bent my PSU.

A few months later the watercooler died and i had to get it RMA'd

Now the motherboard is suffereing from hoardes of the notorious Asrock overclocking problems.

Apart from that, everything went fine :p

So i suppose you could say... Not well?
 
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Soldato
Joined
7 Feb 2010
Posts
3,720
On my second build I went completely nuts with the cable management and managed to trap a cable on top of the CMOS RESET button. With that depressed the system wouldn't even flinch when the power button was pressed.
 
Soldato
Joined
20 Apr 2004
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2,510
Location
Portsmouth
My first build went smooth from what i remember, was a AMD Athlon (Barton) with a ATI 9800pro (Best card ever!) that was back in 2002/2003. All of my rl mates were proper PC nerds, so i got some help.

The 2nd build was a nightmare though, i did this on my own. It was a AMD Athlon 64 (San Diego) with a Nvidia 7800GT back in 2005. Putting the thing together went smoothly, but when it came to powering the machine on, it would not boot! I remember i got home from work and from the minute i got indoors i spent all my time trying to get the machine to work and gave up around midnight. I lost sleep that night because i couldn't stop thinking about it, it was the most i have ever spent on a PC. The next day after work i decided to take the CPU back to the shop for an exchange for another CPU. When i got home i installed the CPU and i was getting the same issues, turns out i didn't plug in the atx 4 pin power cable into the motherboard that powers the CPU which was a new requirement for AMD Athlon 64.

That machine was a beast! R.I.P. :(

edit: here is that said beast! Was housed in a ugly Antech Lanboy case

Picture17.jpg
 
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Associate
Joined
14 Jul 2004
Posts
1,778
Location
England
mobo screwed to case - check
PSU to mobo - check
ram in - check
cpu (socket A amd) in - check

Lets juts boot it up WITHOUT the HSF just to see if it POSTs before adding in more bits.
Press power.... hear a small pzzfftt, then nothing, then the whiff of something burning.

Moral of the story, HSF is not an accessory to make it "more stable", and no, only 30s without a HSF will not be ok.
 
Associate
Joined
22 May 2011
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1,445
Location
Edinburgh
My first ever build never worked. Wouldn't boot.

Destroyed me.

Luckily the company I bought it from picked it up (all the parts were from there) inspected it and found the Mobo to be faulty. Swapped it out for me there and then :)
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Oct 2011
Posts
11,884
Location
Melbourne, Australia
My first build went well, wasn't that long ago either, 18 months.

Only problem i had was with the damn case: CM elite 360. Never really had a prooblem until i came to install my SSD and reinstall windows. My SSD boot wouldn't connect to the internet, even though the HDD boot did. Strange. :)
 
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