I could have told your this a week ago, but I was too busy testing out my brand new PC.
So yes, I finally got all the parts and I managed to build my system and get it to work on first try. After half a dozen calls, a formal complaint via e-mail and a call from the PC store, the postal services finally delivered the package on Friday, eight days later than they should have. But at least they delivered. I still hadn’t received my CPU cooler or my audio card, but I decided to start building anyway using on-board audio and the Intel stock cooler.
It’s pretty scary when you unpack the motherboard and the PSU and see all those colorful and tiny cables you have no idea what to do with. The motherboard manual, the case manual and the PSU manual all described the building process in slightly different ways so I decided to go with my gut feeling and that seemed to go rather well. The hardest part was fitting those damn front panel connectors. They’re tiny, they all look alike and they have positive and negative pins which require precision, but these pins are located at the side of the board where you don’t have any room to navigate and where everything’s hidden by the case so you can’t even tell what you’re doing. I managed, though. The P182 case has these handy hard drive compartments you can slide out of the case and mount separately, which was handy, and there’s also room for cables behind the motherboard so you don’t get all the cable clutter potentially blocking your fans. It’s a neat case, it looks all smooth and black, but it’s fucking heavy, which I guess is the only negative thing I can say about it.
The rest of the building process was relatively easy. I just plugged everything in, turned on the power, wished for a miracle and hurray, nothing exploded, everything worked. The software part wasn’t hard at all. For now, I installed Vista Ultimate x64 which has given me no problems whatsoever (yet) and which so far is not worse than XP no matter what people say. The UAC thing does make your feel like you’re being considered an idiot, though, so since after years of Windows-experience I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, I just decided to shut it off so it’d shut the fuck up. I haven’t had any annoyances or driver problems since. I’m still thinking about installing some flavor of Linux at some point, but I’m sorting other things out first.
Coincidentally, one week after I finished building, the postman came by with that other package that went missing for a month (the audio card and CPU cooler). I plugged in the audio card right away (the difference is very much noticeable, hurray for high-def audio) but I’m going to wait a while before replacing the CPU cooler. Apparently I’d need to take out the motherboard to mount it, meaning I’d basically have to start all over again. I just don’t feel like reconnecting all those tiny cables again.
Performance-wise, I can finally run Bioshock (very) smoothly, even at 1920×1200 resolution with all options maxed out \o/ I can also play strategy games like Company of Heroes or World in Conflict without getting frustrated because I can’t aim my cursor straight because of the low framerates \o/ I can even run Crysis (which came with my graphics card) on higher settings at 1920×1200, though it brings my PC down to its knees in some places (though from what I gather, no PC in the world can run Crysis on max settings smoothly yet, so I’m not worried). (A Crysis review may follow shortly since I finished it today.) Oh, and Neverwinter Nights doesn’t feel so fucking horrible anymore.
I can also watch high definition porn movies without any problems now. On my old PC I had to limit myself to 720p, and even then some movies wouldn’t run. Coolness.
Conclusion: my new PC is awesome.