Sobtanian's old blog. Still full of goodies, why don't you stay a while.

Friday, April 27, 2007

The new hard drive, case, and psu

It all started with vista. XP was happily chugging along on my 36gb raptor, which I've dedicated just for the O/S and any programme installations (not games though).
With vista, 36gb just isn't enough. The O/S is big and with the programmes installed, it was getting tight.

So I thought I'd get a new hard drive. As I refuse to use anything other than Western Digital, I ordered a 150g RaptorX, those sexy drives that have a see-through cover.
Now to display the drive you need cases that have a drive bay sideways, and a window obviously. After loads of looking around, I decided on an Armor Jr from Thermaltake.

And since I was changing the case, I thought I'd get a new power supply. I liked Wolf's Thermaltake Toughpower because of it's cable management system, so I bought a 700w Toughpower to go with the case.

After about ONE MILLION problems installing everything, and I mean turning the PC on once and smelling this horrible burning smell (no clue what burnt, but it was because I'd jumpered a power connection - don't ask), and loads of other problems like forgetting to install the PSU so I had to uninstall everything to fit the damn thing in, and so on and so forth....... it's finally all installed, and I think everything is ticking perfectly. I hope. Windows has installed ok and I need to install tons of drivers, which I can't be arsed with at this moment.

The case is great, it uses cool screw-free rails to install the 5.25 devices, and some screw-free clips to install cards (but to be honest I screwed the gfx and sound cards in, I'm not trusting a piece of plastic!). It also features a useful frame that holds 4 hard drives in, and the screw holes are fitted with little plastic rings to reduce vibration and noise. It also has five 5.25 bays, one of which is at the very bottom!
Problem is, when you install the RaptorX in it's display position, it totally blocks the hard drive cage! The solution is to move the cage into the space of 3 5.25 bays (hence rendering them useless for 5.25 devices). As such, I had to lose a dvd burner (I didn't really use 2 drives to be honest, so I'm not bothered about it that much), but I also had to remove the abit uGuru panel (that displays time, temps, voltages etc). I miss that a lot actually, so tomorrow I'm going to order one of these ;)

Watching the RaptorX work is really scary. The needle jumps around so fast I keep thinking it's going to break. Or scratch the surface. I tried to video it but it was too dark, so I'll try again tomorrow.

I leave you with some crappy out of focus pictures (I'm tired :p)





3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hello ;

beautiful case i my selg got
http://hi-techreviews.com/reviews_2007/3DAurora570/Index.htm

infact i loved it that i got2 silver and black
the psu is remarkable, igot truble with mine , the 800gtx i told u about consumes 75 X 3 wats thats 225 wats !! stupid
and thanks indeed for all the info
and 1000 mubrook
salam
yazan

SoB said...

yes, the 8800gtx has 2 pci-ex connections, so the minimum psu for it should be 500w at least
700w is enough for me, mainly cos I don't and will not use sli, cos it sux :D

and how is the gtx going with you? awesome ha? it really is great

now that htg has an xbox too, and you know all about it, it's gonna be great all of us playing!

i'll come on xbox live today, hope to catch you there. salam

ThE RuSsIaN WoLf said...

Congrats man.
you will enjoy thermaltake's product from now to the point that you'll be addicted to them.