A system is born

Hello

Well after several hours of assembly, I have my system running now. I thought at first my PSU was DOA when I first tried to start the system. I turned on the black switch on the PSU and wondered why nothing happened. It turns out, I needed to press the power on button in the front of the case. .

Well everything is running now, however, the temperature reading is not very encouraging. its 43C on idle.

Here are the parts I put together:

GA8knxp
2.4C
Geil DDR4200
(2) Maxtor SATA 160GB 7200RPM 8mb cache
ATI 9800pro
Mitsumi 1.44mb floppy
Lite-on 52x-32x-52x
Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480W
Vantec 92mm Tornado
SLK-900U

The next step for me is set the HDs as Raid0 via Intel's ICH5R, install the software and dabble in overclocking. Feel free to throw tips my way. By the way, This forum is really great on educating a newbie like me Thank you.

congrats... yup the simplest things get you sometimes

about those temps are you using the stock heatsink with some type of thermal paste?

The idle temp when I first booted up the system was 43C, with about 77 F ambient temp. I took the heatsink and cpu apart. Reapplied the Arctic Silver Ceramique according to the instruction, reseated it on the CPU. After that the idle temp was around 40C with the same ambient temp. I'm using SLK-900u with vantec tornado 92mm 119cfm fan.

oops, sorry should have seen that... how thin is the layer? my slk with a 50 cfm panaflow is around 33C on a 2.8C

really thin, hazy finished on the heatsink. A blob of paste on the CPU. I did not spread the paste evenly on the CPU, following the instruction on how to apply the paste according to the Arctic Silver website.

Carbonlung said:

A blob of paste on the CPU. I did not spread the paste evenly on the CPU, following the instruction on how to apply the paste according to the Arctic Silver website.

Click to expand...

thats your problem. On the heatsink you should have rubbed all the paste off after rubbing it in with a plastic bag or something. On the cpu it should be a paper thin (or thinner) layer spread very evenly. That "blob" is too thick and causing high temps.

actually i've learned a ton of stuff browsing this forum...i think it's really a great place for a newb to go.

Well my system lived and died,
Time of death: 12pm September 13, 2003.

Its a 2k plus dollars of paperweight all because of one damn nut inside the case.

Actually, it was running fine with the nut in the pc (I didn't know it was in there) till this afternoon when the pc was nudge a little bit. It lost power and I cannot power it back on again. I'm hoping that its only the PSU. I made a U jumper (somebody in the forum directed me to a website on how to test PSUs) for the 12V line so I can power up the PSU without connecting it to the case; but it did not power up.

i hope a new psu fixes your problem

did it short something?