Sunday, December 23, 2007

My New Rig - Part I : Shopping

Well, in Delhi - where I live - we have this famous place called "Nehru Place" where we get all our components.    It's the pilgrimage we undertake when we have a requirement for a new PC. 

You need to understand that in India we do not have the likes of Best Buy or Fry's or any such specialized chain stores.  We have a Hong Kong style - China style? - bazaar, an array of stores so small that it cannot fit a compact car, teeming with people that tries to sell everything from software [pirated, of course] to sleaze to laptops to pre-assembled computers to full blown parallel processing marvels.

Yeah, I see you rolling your eyes.  Ok, I'm stretching it a bit but only the last bit ;).  And for those patriots, ok, we are the next US of A.  We do starting to have stores such as eZone that specialize in computer components.

The point is, when you ask for some component with a number such as D975XBX2, it's  most likely the shop in question would make a couple of phone calls to determine availability [to one of the shops in the same complex, of course] and say why don't I buy Asus P5KC.  It's the new in thing that the rest of the Delhi is buying [, you moron].

Another beauty is that you have to make your decision, in a jiffy.  You see, there will be people - at least a dozen - jostling with you, shouting at the shop keeper for a DDR 2 RAM or a Microsoft Ergo mouse.  The shopkeeper's attention span is usually less than a two seconds.  He'll be juggling two phones and a cellular phone simultaneously talking to his customers and vendors and showing off his parallel processing capabilities.

Bottom line:   I did dutifully accept the offer of taking an S975XBX2 instead of the asked for D95XBX2.

Here's my final component list:

  • A pirate's version of  Apple's cabinet with handles
    • I couldn't find the link where I saw the apple's design.  Will provide it later.
  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
  • SG975XBX2
  • Transcend 4 GB DDR II RAM [800 MHz]
    • 4 single pieces.  Surprise, Surprise!  The guy didn't have a 2 GB pieces of DDR II
  • No Graphics Card
  • No Sound Card
    • All the newer boards support 7.1 Surround which would suffice my needs.
  • Ethernet Card
    • Most of the above motherboards have LAN built-in

I purchased them about 3 weeks ago.  At last, got sometime to blog [with my darling daughter throwing things at me in the background].

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, nice plans! I've been considering my very first build and your's bears an uncanny resemblance to what I've come up with. For US$1200 scratch build, I really want the Intel Q9550 on the D975XBX2 775 board with 2x2GB OCZ 800MHz then do Vista Ult.64-bit OEM (and maybe give Linux a go too). The rest are cheap parts(480W PSU, Combo optical, generic case, single 500GB HDD). My budget precluded RAID-5 and the graphics card for now. Almost half my budget is that CPU--so yours must be cheaper. I'd be more than interested to hear how your build turns out and what other parts (tapes/ pastes/ wires/ connectors) you ended up needing and of course any advice for a novice like myself. Good luck!

destiny said...

Hi Vyas, can you post the part number of Transcend RAM that you bought for S975XBX2? I recently purchased this mobo with Transcend JetRam of part number JM800QLJ-1G and my machine doens't boot (for 2 weeks).

Regards
Sujoy

Vyas Bharghava said...

Thanks Jons... Yes, I did surmount the insurmountable and got things to work finally. :)

Vyas Bharghava said...

Sujoy, RAM is such a thing if you do not return it immediately, these guys do not take it back [I assume you're in India :)].

It could also be n-number of other things. Try one piece at a time, Try in some other machine and if you don't get it to work within hours of purchase, you better take your machine to the shop and ask them to have a look.

They usually replace your RAM if they can see you are genuinely in trouble. :)

Let me know what happened.