Geek Boy's blog
Sunday, January 04, 2009
New intel box
I just finished up building a new intel-based box from parts. This is the first time I've tried to assemble my own, rather than buying a whole one. However, my brother has made several machines out of Shuttle cases, and they seem to work well. All the parts came from newegg - here's what I got:
On the whole, it was incredibly easy to assemble - took about an hour. Getting XP and Vista x64 on it in a dual-boot configuration took a bit longer, due to hassles with the BIOS. It was flaky when trying to boot from the SATA DVD drive in AHCI mode. It either wouldn't boot, would blue-screen the installer, or would simply fail to recognize that there was a
- Shuttle SP45H7 barebones case
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0ghz processor, 65 watts
- 4 Gb Corsair DDR2 800 RAM
- Optiarc/NEC/Sony AD-7220S SATA DVD burner
and some other parts I had lying around, including a nvidia GeForce 8800GS PCIe video card and a 500gb seagate drive.
For both XP and Vista, I had to switch the bios to IDE compatibility mode, install, make some registry hacks and install drivers, reboot, switch the bios to AHCI, and then continue. Details are available here with more detail here for XP. Vista was much easier. I tried all sorts of things, trying to avoid having to do manual registry hacks, but once I got over that and did what needed to be done to the registry, then it went pretty smoothly.
Labels: pc windows intel shuttle barebones AHCI SATA
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