See previous post:  http://www.filearchivehaven.com/2011/04/02/new-computer-in-the-works-part3/

The computer has been assembled and is currently in beta mode.

N82E16827136178	DVD BURNER LG | GH24LS50 LS %	1	21.99
N82E16814500118	VGA ZOTAC|ZT-72SE250-HSS 7200GS RT	1	24.99
N82E16820231422	MEM 4Gx2|G.SKILL F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT	1	78.49
N82E16812189196	SATA CABLE LINK DEPOT|SATA-39-90B R	3	1.99
N82E16813130290	MB MSI 870-G45 AM3 R	1	74.99
N82E16820227542	SSD 60G|OCZ OCZSSD2-2AGTE60G R	1	129.99
N82E16819103921	CPU AMD|PH II X4 840 3.2G AM3 RT	1	109.99

Above is our list of new parts.  As you can see things are a bit messy now.

Well it continues to get messy anyways!

The build is fairly straight forward.

From the picture above, the Motherboard was added, The SSD (Primary) drive and the 7200 RPM (Secondary/DATA) drive.

The Lightscribe drive was added to the front bay.  It did require a small modification to the drive to ensure disks stay in place.  In went the CPU, Heatsink, and Memory without any hiccups.

And last we connected all of the power connectors.

Assembly of the beast.  On next goes Office 07 & Win 7 64bit.  But I didn’t stop there, oh no.  I ordered some new SATA cables that are green and connect straight without the bend.  This should make me feel better about the SATA cables.  And I ordered a better video card, this one was a temporary to tide us by and make sure everything worked.

New video card that was ordered:

Assembled product above.  The boot time was about 8 seconds on average.  The Windows Index only shows a 3.5 – because of the video card.  Hence the new purchase.

Final word of caution!  Careful if you get this motherboard, it doesn’t connect well to either PSU that I have.  I had to forcefully connect it and it felt like the motherboard would likely break in some cases during this connection.

But, for about 500$ we got close to target!  8 second launch, we wanted 7 seconds.  SSD we got that, Lightscribe we got that, way too much RAM – we got that.

I suspect with some tweaks I can get it to boot in 7 seconds or less, but the final step is getting that Windows Index up at 7.

Processor:  7.3

Memory (RAM): 7.3

Graphics: 3.7

Gaming Graphics: 3.5

Primary Hard Disk:  7.2

-l