And still nowhere near as good as velcro.

Man, this is the first I've heard of these velcro ties. I'm so out of the loop..

I'm still waiting to reap the reward from my dissolvable duct-tape patent.

Well, building my pc was a surprisingly easy affair. Took me about 3 hours including a lot of procrastinating between stages, with an additional 30min or hour to tidy up the cables (included a bunch of unplugging and replugging.)

The Cooler Master HAF 922 is a really, really awesome tower. I'm glad I went with it instead of the lesser HAF 912.

PC booted up without issue on first try.

Huzzah.

Sweet. You should post some pics. Also some benchmark results when the gtx680 is installed.

Will do! Just need to get my hands on a decent camera... I never realised just how bad the ipod touch 4's cameras were. Yikes.

The GTX680 was shipped out of California last thursday through Purolator Ground, so it might be a while yet. I'm hoping this week but something tells me I shouldn't hold me breath.

How'd the windows install go?

Windows installed fine, its the activation that's still up in the air. Once the gtx680 is in, I'll try to activate with my old OEM serial. We'll see where it goes from there. Worst comes to worst, I'll order an OEM from newegg.ca for 109.99$.

That would make this a whole lot easier to look at.

(Yes my heatsink is just wedged in there, don't judge me.)

Got the vid card last night, huzzah. Behold Jeptron. Again, I love the CM Haf 922. A 10" vid card seems so tiny inside it. Cables could be a little cleaner but I think it'll do for now. Next time I open it up I'll take some time to clean it up.



Damn this thing flies. Runs Skyrim, The Witcher 2, and Crysis 2 (Hd tex + dx11) on ultra, 1900x1200

Nice! Looks very clean and organized inside.

Cables look great, nice build!

Thanks guys! I sure loved the experience. Wish I could build one a week!

So now you got Windows set up?

Yarp! Everything's working great!

I'm envious. I want to get back in to gaming (Portal 1 & 2 convinced me that there are still new games being made that are worth playing) but I can't currently justify the cost of building a new machine & this iMac 9,1 is nearly worthless in that department. I'd sell my current machine to raise a little cash but the wife wants to keep using it as a media station (it works rather well for that--we're running Plex). I do have an old iPhone4 & an iPad1 that I'm probably going to get rid of though, so that may contribute to the effort.

I hear you. I wasn't in the best of situations to buy another pc, and really, I didn't really NEED to per se. My old pc still runs most games great, most even maxed out.

But Caroline has been dying to get her hands on her own PC for some time now, and I've been looking forward to playing PC games (notably MMOs) with her ever since we started dating 3 years ago. We both agreed that it was really a now or never situation. Soon we'll be saving for a house, and we're planning to have kids in the coming years, so these may well be our last few years of "freedom". We had the money to pull this off now (she bought my old pc for 750$, including screen and all peripherals, which helped me get my new PC for 1600$. Like I told her, for 750$ she couldn't come close to my old PC. Really, it was a steal at that price. But I wanted to do that for her and had the money to pull this off.

So this is likely my last machine for a while to come. heheh. I wanted to go all out.

You know you can run XBMC on just about anything, yea? (XBMC is what Plex ripped off and tried to make better, and failed miserably)

You can run XBMC on any of the following:
Windows
Mac OS X
Linux (There's even a LiveCD)
iPad (Jailbroken)
Apple TV (Jailbroken)

So yea, if you wanted to, you can replace it easily with just about anything.

I'm aware of XMBC but haven't tried it (at least not since the old Xbox days). Plex was merely the first one that I tried & it seemed to do everything that we needed well enough that I just didn't bother with anything else. I almost ditched it in favor of Boxee or XMBC because PBS suddenly stopped working but they fixed it with an update before I made the attempt. This iMac is a bit dated (2009) & it really does function well as a media station (since it's an all-in-one, it takes up very little space, which is important for us because we're currently living in a studio apartment, the Bluetooth keyboard makes a decent enough controller & the design is very "minimalistic" so it blends in well). The main problem is that I want my own computer, not just something that I get to use when my wife isn't watching Dexter or when my daughter isn't watching Beauty & The Beast. I think that I'll probably just wait until June/July when we get a new, bigger apartment & figure out something then.

I do think that Ubuntu TV looks nice but I don't think it's out yet.