The Video Game Revue

OCZ + Asus M2N = No Good!

The parts for my new PC arrived today and I spent the afternoon assembling the thing. The first minor issue that I ran into is that my Antec Sonata II case doesn't seem to have come with any drive rails for the 5.25" drive bays. That's annoying, but not really a show-stopper; I put my DVD drive in the bottom bay and used a screw to "sorta" secure it in place.

Then I hit a real show stopper: one long beep followed by two short beeps when I tried to power up. It turns out that my Asus M2N-SLI mobo is not playing well with the OCZ ram kit that I got, which appears to be a common problem. I stuck some generic 240 pin 533 MHz memory in there for now just to confirm that the rest of the system is working, and so far, so good. I'm going to try and exchange the OCZ memory for some Corsair stuff.

There are two other minor kinks with the rig. Firstly, I've noticed that the 450 W power supply that my Antec case came with is actually kinda meager for a big GPU like the BFG GeForce 7900. I will likely upgrade that to a 600 W power supply in the near future. Secondly, there is a fan somewhere in that case that is making a hella lot of noise. I'm not entirely sure if it's the CPU fan or the GPU fan, but I've ruled out the case fan at least. I may end up buying a better socket AM2 fan in an attempt to quiet things down a little.

For now I'm going to work on getting software set up. I also have a pretty nasty cold at the moment, which is slowing down the computer setup process a great deal. Still, I'm making hefty progress here; let's just hope that the problems I've encountered so far are the bulk of the trouble that I end up going through. Jinx!

posted by Parappa @ 4:11 PM