For the past two weeks, Fr0stbyte has begun to take the shape of something that is begging to look like a working computer. Thanks to my job, and the many holiday shifts that I worked in the last month, I was able to buy the last pieces necessary for Fr0stbyte’s first boot: amongst which an LG DVD burner with LightScribe, the much awaited Intel Core 2 Duo e6750 with it’s heatsink, and a 320 gig Seagate 7200.10 16 mb buffer running off SATA.

Most of the parts I just bought at shops scattered around town on my school lunch break, but the delivery on my HDD was extremely long for something that didn’t even have to cross the border. I finally received it just a couple of hours ago, and it is now fully installed in my machine, and the whole thing is running XP Pro x64 edition. Here are the system specs so far.

Chassis: Thermaltake Armor Jr. Power Supply: Ultra X-finity 600 watt, dual rail, SLI compatible and energy efficient, 79.5% efficiency at peak load. Motherboard: EVGA 680i SE SLI, Core 2 Duo overclocker special edition. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo e6750 (Conroe), 2.66 Ghz, dual core, 1333 FSB, stock cooling Memory: Corsair XMS2 Twin2X PC2 6400 @ 800 mhz @ 4-4-4-12 2T, 2.125 volt (Tweaked voltages) HDD: Seagate 7200.10 320 gb, SATA, 16 mb cache, NCQ enabled Video: Oldass PCI 3d Voodoo :( Optical: LG Super Multi DVD Rewriter, w/ Lightscribe and SecureDisk, IDE So apart from the GFX card(s), cooling products and the screens, we could say that this build is pretty much complete.  I’ve been using this thing for only something like.. 40 minutes, and already I am feeling just the raw power that this thing has: even with a shitass graphics card, I get wicked mean response from Windows, and I just own the stress tests, even if I use my machine while the tests are on.

You might want to check out the unboxing galleries for my hard drive and CPU, as well as the assembly of my CPU.

The next step will be the purchase of the 8800 GTS, which represents a month and a half of salary at McD if all goes well, which will then be followed by a first 19 inch LCD, a mouse, another more powerful CPU fan, a keyboard, and then another 19” screen. Only then will I be able to call this rig fully finished.  Also, be expecting a shitload of epinions reviews for the next couple of weeks on all the hardware currently in my posession.