Setting Up The Rig

As promised, here’s the setting up of the components I bought from Nehru Place for my PC.

Refer to the previous post for the complete configuration.

Early morning, I begin to assemble everything. Here are all the parts together.

Open up the HAF cabinet box, which comes well packed with thermcol support and plastic wrapped all around. Great for preventing scratches while opening.

The HAF 912 Advanced cabinet came with one 200mm black fan on the top for air out, one 200mm red LED fan on the front for air intake , and one 120mm black fan on the rear for air out. The HAF series cabinet is best known for their great air-flow and this one had support for many more fans. All the necessary tools and nuts and bolts and clips for cable management were present in abundance inside the box itself along with the USB 3.0 controller already installed on the front.  Also present were the things for the tool-less technology and a SSD cage.

    

I swapped the front red 200mm LED fan for two 140mm blue to increase the airflow and also because I preferred the blue light which went well with the motherboard lights.

Installed the holder pins in the cabinet for the motherboard and turned to the Power Supply Unit.

Corsair Gaming Series 700W PSU. Perfect for overclocking and running 2 high-end graphics cards which I intended to do in the future.

The PSU had all modular cables with almost all types of connectors and it also came with clips for cable management.

It also had inbuilt 3-coloured LED lights which changed from Blue-to-Red-to-White-to-Off with the touch of a button present on the back of the PSU.

The mother of the system, The Motherboard now. Intel Extreme Series DZ68BC.

Though ASUS and GIGABYTE had better BIOS featured and allowed higher over-clocks, the Intel motherboard was much more stable when overclocked.

This one came with a bunch of UV-protected SATA cables, some normal SATA cables, A WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 EDR module among other necessary things.

Based on the Z68 architecture, it had support for the 2^nd generation Intel i-series processors and also the new 22nm processors with the new BIOS update, SLI as well as Crossfire, 10 channel output(7.1+2), upto 32GB of DDR3 RAM, SATA 6.0Gbps et al.

It had a 2-digit display which showed different POST codes and is a boon for troubleshooting, a blue LED skull which would turn on along with the PC and red LED ‘eye’ which would blink as and when the hard-disks were accessed!

          

Intel’s Enthusiast Team claims this to be a beast machine meant for gaming and overclocking and I totally agree.

The Intel i7 2600k @3.4 GHz was my choice for the processor. The ‘k’ meant that the processor had an unlocked clock multiplier so the processor could easily be overclocked with adequate cooling setup.

The basic difference between the i5 2500k processor and the i7 2600k processor was that the later had Hyper Threading. Both have 4 physical cores so this has no effect on gaming performance which makes the i5 better for gaming but the 4 virtual cores on the i7 make video editing and rendering a breeze.

Corsair Vengeance two 4GB DDR3 RAM sticks at 1600 MHz

The large heatsink helps a lot in heat dissipation and these are perfect for heavy gaming and video rendering.

The cooling setup. Intel stock coolers have been great for normal usage but never sufficient for overclocking. My previous Q6600 had a great stock cooler which still works to great effect.

But I planned to overclock so liquid cooling was my choice.

The Corsair Hydro Cooling H60 came with a pump, a 120mm radiator and a 120mm fan.

The H60 guide instructed to install the fan and radiator in push-configuration, but I decided better and installed the fan and radiator in push-pull configuration with the fans that came along the H60 and the cabinet.

Hope you guys enjoyed reading this much. (to be continued...)