Well I got home at about 5.30pm yesterday and after a little preperation I began work (At around 6pm). I finished work (With a little help from Scott) at around 10pm and have been tweaking, overclocking and installing software ever since!

Finally I have my basics setup, like Photoshop and was able to transfer my pictures of the build across from my Canon EOS 400D and resize them to a suitable size for uploading in Photoshop.

Before I started the build, I took some pictures of all the components in and out of their packaging, see below:

The first thing I did was placed the ram and cpu onto the motherboard, making sure that the two sticks of ram went into the same coloured slots to ensure dual channel mode.

Next up was to place the CPU Heatsink Fan, my Arctic Freezer 7 Pro. This proved trickier than expected… Mainly because I didn’t read the instructions until AFTER i had placed it! Meaning I had to take it off and resit it later (After this picture!)

As you can see, it’s on a slight slant in the above picture. That’s because I hadn’t fully secured it to the motherboard, doh! I found that out when I tried placing the motherboard into my case later on, and it almost fell off! A quick glimpse at the instructions though and I figured out what I had missed and fixed it (I hadn’t turned 2 of the screws!)

Then came the graphics card… Now… with other computers I have built, I usually put the graphics card after it’s all inside the case… But since this one was so big I thought it might be clever to place it whilst the motherboard was outside of the case… Please… If you learn anything from this post, don’t do that!

I ended up taking it off and replacing it once the motherboard was secured into the case.

To truly appreciate the size of this graphics card (And the HSF!) I took two pictures from different angles.

So after admitting defeat and removing the GPU, placing the motherboard into the case (And after an hour of trying to fit those damn fiddly little screws that secure the motherboard to the case), I placed the GPU back in.

Then came the power supply… I wish I had learned from my last build and put this in before the motherboard… Fitting it required taking the ram out, unscrewing the USB/FireWire/Headphone unit that was attached to the top of my case (For quick access usb etc) and gently sliding the 1000W Modular PSU past my precious components. Which worked quite graciously in the end!

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of me fitting the PSU and wires. But anyway, the wires were pretty simple to connect, as my case has quite a lot of space to work with.

So, bearing in mind its not the tidiest build ever (Meaning, the cables are still pretty wild, but not as bad as they were in my old pc!), it was fun to do, and the end result is a very impressive PC!

So that’s it!

I overclocked my Q6600 to 3.2GHz and here are my current specs.

Asus P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP @n Motherboard
Intel Q6600 2.4GHz @ 3.2GHz (400×8)
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU HSF
4GB OCZ 1600MHz Gold Edition DDR3 RAM
PowerColor HD 4870 512MB GPU
Hi-Power 1000W Modular PSU

Windows Vista Experience Index: 5.7 (All out of 6)
Processor: 5.9
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 5.9
Gaming graphics 5.9
Primary hard disk: 5.7

So overall, I am absolutely over the moon with this system, and for £750 it’s an absolute bargain!

Thanks for reading!