As promised in Part I, here are some pictures during the assembly of the computer. Some of the images required touching up in GIMP - sharpening and some color level correction - because of the low light condition in which they were taken in.

The separate components before assembly. All neatly packed in their respective boxes. Boy did I end up with a lot of unwanted plastic and boxes which brings into mind - how much did these companies spend on packaging (and how much did I had to pay for them)?

This is the case that would house my new computer. ATX case, nothing special.

The Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. It’s an E6300. It’s dual-core, sports 2MB L2 cache, runs at 1.86GHz which was later overclocked to 2.8GHz. A whooping ~1GHz increase in clock speed. It’s a fine time for a overclocker to buy a computer :)

The same CPU housed in the motherboard - a Gigabyte GAPP965-S3. Intel’s new Socket T has a few nifty design to prevent wrong installation of the CPU. For example the CPU no longer has PINs (no more bend PINs, yay!), there are notches on the CPU and socket to prevent misaligned installations - it won’t installed if aligned wrongly. It also has a shim to avoid the slightly annoying incident of crushed processor (yeah, I’m being sarcastic here). Overall, the installation was easy enough.

The aforementioned motherboard. Sports the usuall array of connectors - USBs, SATA, IDE, PCIe, PCI slots - plus a few extras - gigabit LAN and optical out for audio, and some extra connectors because of the 8-channel audio. All of which, I do not use - I have WiFi at home and I don’t have any high-end audio equipment. I got the board because of its overclocking potential. You can also see the Intel heatsink installed. Not visible is the Core 2 Duo CPU, covered by the heatsink.

Some dual-channel DDR2 800MHz RAM goodness. Necessary for the 400MHz bus I’m gonna use to overclock my CPU. I could’ve gone with a set of cheaper 667MHz sticks but I want to minimize risk. Failure to overclock RAM is known to cause some nasty system instability and unlike the CPU, they don’t fail immediately so it’s harder to detect. And it sucks to have an overclock fail because of RAM.

Higher resolution pictures available in my Google web album. Ok, that’s it for now. I’ll post some more pictures later on in Part III.