Desktop build for building and playing games

Well, I spent my month's gross salary on it.

Ordering from germany cut the price by ~30% and ordering through company cuts another 24% or so of VAT. So, buying it locally from salary would make it cost 1.6 times more + side costs of the salary, another 27%, bringing the price factor to whopping >2.0 ...

 

Apparently it really takes more than 2 months to buy a computer.

First, struggle with the bank for two months to get the fucking payment card delivered to you and have the company credit card they delivered to random stranger 1 month late killed.

Then I needed the german store to give me a VAT-free invoice. It took them nearly a week to get back with it, after several calls to Germany. I'm so lucky they at least spoke good english, but... They never delivered an actual invoice, they merely sent me an email stating the VAT-free sum. So I had to actually save that email and put it in the electric bookkeeping as a document for the payment and note "invoice will be delivered with shipping".

Just so it wouldn't suddenly start looking too easy, the following day after I sent a message to the german shop where I stated that I had now payed the whole sum in advance, they send me a message saying "we can't see your payment on our account so we're cancelling the order in 3 days".

Soo... I had to get back to them and explain that 1) I wouldn't be so late but it took them so long to tell me how much exactly I had to pay and 2) the bank transfer is an international one since like they can see they're delivering to another country. It takes extra bank days for international transfers to get through and nothing moves over weekends. 3) I already told them I had made the transfer so it would be nice if they didn't cancel my order and find out the following day I had paid it 5 days earlier (the payment day is included in transfer details).

This shit feels like I'm trying to get a permit to build a nuclear reactor rather than just 'casually buying a computer'.

 

that seems like to much work.

 

Now I'm trying to see if the germans are going to accept to wait until the money transfer shows up on their account before they cancel the whole order (releasing all the components some of which have once more run out of store)...

 

Surprise. The german store is not responding to my request for not canceling my order before the money has had time to show up.

Sigh. Also the order manifest looks a bit wrong. They said they changed it and the sum changed but I can't view the changed manifest anywhere..

 

Ah, finally a confirmation that they've switched in the right card, 970 with windforce cooling and that they'll wait until the transfer shows up on their account...
Finally I can sigh and relax... I hope..

At this time I also told them to assemble the whole thing on their end because, I've spent all my energy just trying to get everything sorted out and I really don't want to come up with "oh, this is wrong Ram" or "shit, I can't install Win" when it gets here. I just want it to plug in and start working. I think I've already waited long enough...

 

Confirmation received, UPS is now shipping it. It should arrive soon.. Soon I will find out if they have assembled it and installed windows or if it'll take 3 additional days to get it running.

Either the case it feels like I've won a long uphill battle with this. Until the computer is at my door, it's unassembled and memory blocks are of wrong type or whatever.

 

UPS delivered the computer today, I tried to fix an issue with my router not picking up signal from the ethernet port in the fuse box.

Turns out there's no infrastructure modem present so I need to buy an ADSL modem for that, for myself. On top of my router.

Also, because of all the fucked upness with bank, work and so I accidentally forgot the power supply from the final order (after the first order got canceled because our bank screwed up).

So, the computer arrives and.. no power supply, but hey - at least windows is installed and so. Drive to a store, buy a power supply and install it and while at it, I thought I was clever and installed all the old hard drives from my old desktop since they total 1.5 TB.

Then I try to start it.. Nothing. I try one more time and then I realize that the monitor is set on 'analogue' by accident. So, I switch it on digital and guess what, computer's complaining (in german) that windows wasn't properly shut. I try to start it normally and it says (in german) that it encountered an unexpected error.

So much for the convenience of pre-assembled computer. My life is a testimony to Murphy's Law.
Before I get it to work the graphics card will probably explode or something like that.

 

Ah, the Windows was merely an OEM(spelling?) pre-install one so it wasn't fully initialized - and when I attached another hard drives with one having XP on it things went awkward for the poor computer and it didn't know what to do.

Detached the extra hard drives and everything worked just fine.

 

If the extra HDD is old enough to have XP on it, then it probably has jumpers that need to be switched to slave. Otherwise it will try to boot first. I can't remember if the new SATA HDDs still have jumpers or not. I haven't done a multi HDD system in awhile

 

Yup, they got jumper slots. My OS drive is SSD one and I can't afford to get terabytes of SSD and since I already had quite fast and reliable storage worth of 1.5T I thought of utilizing it.
And hell if I'd find actual jumpers at this time and age. I actually installed most utilities and then switched the SATA cables back, again it tried to boot XP and failed. So I randomly took one SATA cable out (not remembering which was which, since I'm such a pro anyhoo) it now went straight to W7... But.. the drive that was left connected was the one with XP on it... lol'd. That's so windows for you.

Guess I'll just erase the boot sectors from both of those extra drives (and obviously mistakenly from the W7 drive) and then it'll all work out.

I still can't get over the fact that it wouldn't boot up with the 'extra storage' drive attached but it worked perfectly with XP OS drive connected. Sigh.

Well, guess I'll need to google how the jumper is set and then try to make one myself and blow it all up.

Edit:
holy fuck. Boot to 'everything loaded and fully idle' takes 24 seconds. Nice. It was like 3-4 minutes with the old one.

 

The old HDDs should have jumpers in them, they'll just be set to slave. Also, IIRC your SATA sockets should be numbered, and they will boot in a certain order. So if you want the Win7 to boot first put it on a lower number than the other two.

 

Actually, accessing older parts of my brain memory, I kind of thought that the old drives jumpers were all about their RAID configuration with no jumpers being no RAID.

And yea, I tried to put W7 drive on top of boot order the first thing I did, but it didn't help. But for some reason it worked when I only had XP drive as extra drive connected.

 

Also, ridiculous default setting of using 40% of my 128gb drive for swap file, rollback points and so on..

Tip: switch those things for mechanical drives if possible. Constant swap files etc. mean loads of IO operations which wear down SSD drive a lot faster. Also, rollback (restore) points and such don't need fast access speeds. They're best placed on 'storage' drives. Also, all temp files and such that aren't essential for being really fast can be displaced from SSD, further reducing drive weariness.

None of this is an issue if you make regular full clones of the drive and have no qualms about buying new drives now and then. Of course placing certain things like temp files on slower drives could slow down operation a little bit.

What I dream for is 3+ SSD's on RAID5 setup. Only 1 drive is 'redundant' and the more drives you have the better efficiency the setup has. What's best is that if a drive fails you can fully restore everything since any data is on two drives. It also increases performance with parallel usage but obviously not above SATA bandwidth, I can't remember the exact limits for SATA2 since I didn't get the chance to worry about getting a RAID controller and multiple SSD's.