The Saga Continues

I received the Ultra case from Tiger Direct on a school day. Ho hum. I have to wait till after school before I can do anything. But after school I dig in. I find the sparse instruction book and proceed to install every single mounting pin...whether it be for a mini ATX of a full. But finally it was all in. I now have a clear sided case that is so big it takes up a good 1/4 of my school desk. I was so happy...for a while. Now came the incessant need again. I WANTED MORE!!



I now order a single blue/blue UV Cold Cathode light and install it, but with a tiny modification. I remove one of the 5 1/4 in drive bay covers and take my dad's drill press and promptly cut out a hole for the switch. Now I have LIGHT!! Well it wasn't quite the effect I was going for. Firstly a green mATX motherboard and a cheesy looking heat sink really do not look that good bathed in blue or in UV, for that matter, and second, there just wasn't enough light. The case still looked like a voluminous cave. Yuck. So what do I do? I order another. This finally sets the case right, but not the board. Like the dentist said, "Its gotta come out".

Blue Cold Cathode Light

Now really I didn't purchase a new board purely on aesthetic reasons. I will say that it was on the list of look-for's, but it wasn't the highest priority. I was actually looking for three things. Affordibility, Upgrade-ablity, and SLI capablity. And I found it. I went to Fry's on the way back from work one afternoon and had my mom and brothers sit in a car on a humid Houston day while I looked around. (It was actually their choice) The board was an ASUS P5N-E SLI with a nVidia 650i chipset, 1333mhz FSB capable, and SLI capable, not to mention that it supported Core 2's . Intel Core 2 Quads, to be precise.

Asus P5N-E SLI

Beyond the board I purchased two Antec blue LED 120mm fans for intake and outtake on my case and a stick of Kingston DDR2 6400 memory.

Antec 120mm Blue LED Fan

Now this whole system, as it was, depended on one thing - my aging Pentium 4 processor. Somethings never go as planned...

Sometin' For Fun

Somethin' for fun...aka a hobby. You know I just wanted to build custom computers. Like the biggest, baddest, custom lookin', heat producin', gaming machine. Well I did. The problem was I couldn't stop. I have now made a small business out of the whole thing. It all started with the PC I was given for my 16th birthday. It was the best computer in the whole house and I treasured it. It was a Gateway with a tiny micro ATX board that had a PCI 16x slot on it (which I thought was the coolest thing because of the graphics card potential) and a Pentium 4 3ghz processor. A few months after that I entered a gaming clan called ECO which got me into a favorite game of mine, Day of Defeat. I soon found that my on board graphics couldn't handle my insatiable need for gaming. So what did I do? On my 17th birthday I was handed $100 by my parents to do with what I wanted. I headed down to a Best Buy and purchased a Nvidia 7300 GS graphics card.

It was 2006 and I was cruising down gaming lane. Till I hit a snag. "Dear Daniel, I am running out of memory. Please donate out of your savings for more" said my computer one day. Well really it said. "Error. Out of Memory" but it might as well had. I was hooked and spent $70 on a 1 gb of DDR ram. Now thinking I was set for the next couple of years, I tackled harder and harder GPU crunching games, till my poor GPU fan screamed. (Well it was more like my parents screamed at my attentiveness to my computer rather than my school. But we all know that song)

2007 has rolled around and my computer has been bettered with a SATA 160GB HD to correct a misconceived notion that my original hard drive was going out. (Heck, my OS was ganging up on me, but, well, it was Windows) Now a new idea struck - What about a new case?. During this time my CPU was undergoing heat problems (which was later corrected by a clean out of the heatsink and fan) and I convinced myself that more space was in order for better ventilation. So taking my hard earned summer job money, I purchased an Ultra Gladiator Case.

And so begins the saga of Blu Flud, my very first custom computer.