Black Velvet

After a year of consideration, I finally built my own computer. I had hoped to build one over Christmas break, but I was too busy with finals to research parts and such. Towards the beginning of May, I got serious again about building a computer and ordered the parts within a week. All of my parts came from Newegg. Here are my specs:

• LIAN LI PC-7B plus II Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
• GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard
• EVGA 512-P3-1150-TR GeForce GTS 250 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
• Rosewill RP600V2-S-SL-S 600W ATX12V v2.01 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready Power Supply
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Deneb 3.0GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM2+ 125W Quad-Core Black Edition Processor
• mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
• (3x) Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
  
• Microsoft JUA-00003S Black USB Wireless Optical Desktop 700
• ASUS VH242H Black 23.6" 5ms HDMI Full 1080P Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 1000:1 (ASCR 20000:1) Built in Speakers
• LG Black 22X (CAV) DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD+R DL 22X (CAV) DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe
• ENCORE ENLWI-N IEEE 802.11b/g, IEEE 802.11n Draft 2.0 PCI 2.3 Wireless Adapter Up to 300Mbps Data Rates 64/128-bits WEP Encryption WPA, WPA2 WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK

The three 500 GB hard drives form a RAID 5 array. A blog will soon follow on my lovely experiences installing the RAID controller drivers with Windows XP. I also have plans to install Ubuntu, which is the main operating system I will use. I set Black Velvet up to dual boot into XP so I could play games.

I named my computer "Black Velvet" because it is entirely black, except for the blue glow from the power supply. It is also a song performed by Alannah Myles.

The major driving factor for me building a computer is the fact that my laptop is about three years old, and is no longer able to fully meet my needs. For one thing, I had to use a special cheat when playing The Sims 2: Free Time to prevent my game from crashing to the blue screen of death, due to the insufficiency of my graphics card. The Sims 3 released June 2nd. Releases from the development team made it very apparent this edition would be highly graphics intensive, so I knew I would need a new computer to even attempt to play it. The second driving force for building Black Velvet is: I am a computer science major. I tend to lean more towards the programming side of computer science and haven't had as much exposure to computer systems. This has been a great learning experience. If something is wrong, I am the one who needs to fix it. Not to mention, I spent around $1100 for the entire thing, but in turn have gotten a computer 10x better than one bought from a retailer.