In part 1 of this ‘project’ I described what we wanted to build, a rough budget and what sort of hardware we’d be looking at for the PC that I was building for a friend.

This post I will tell you what we ended up with – Amazing how much things change and how budget doesnt really come into it once you are at the PC shop

Anyway, here we go. This is what hardware we ended up with (and why):

Gigatbyte GA-MA790GP motherboard – not sure why this particular model, but I have alway trusted Gigabyte and I just wanted to make sure that it had enough SATA and USB connectors. Bonus is thus it has onboard firewire and HDMI (may be normal these and I’m just ignorant of technology).

AMD X4 Phenom2 Quad Core CPU – Now this was not one of the latest and greatest but still a nice CPU (which a good price tag). 10X better than what he had.

HIS PCI-E 1Gig HD4850 Graphics Card – recommended by a workmate. The 512M version was $7 cheaper so … why bother

Thermaltake V9 case – now this is a nice looking case. I wanted to get a Sunflower brand case but they came with only a small PSU, so I thought I’d get my mate a decent case (without PSU) and he could then select what to throw in it.

Coolermatser Real Power Pro 650 Watt PSU – Man, this thing was heavy, and the box it came in had it’s own handle. For the price, it would want to have a heap on connectors and be prety quiet (later we were to find we were not disappointed.

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Build me a PC part 2

Synergy is a great program to control 2 computers with one mouse and keyboard. But it doesn’t appear to work with Windows 7. Is there any options? Well yes!

I found another program that works well with Windows 7. It’s called Input Director and works quite well – in fact I think better than Synergy does.

It certainly is much easier to configure, where you define a master and slave (in fact you can have many slaves), and can selesct what subnets (or individual hosts) you can accept connections from (on the slave of course).

Why do I always see MD5 next to a file when I’m about to download? What do I need to do with it?Is it important?

MD5 (Message digest 5) is used for a variety of things, but what you are probably interested in is that it can be used to verify the integrity of a file.

Why would you want to do that? Well, to see if the orginal file has been altered in any way (eg malicious code intserted into it etc).

How does it work?

Download the file as well the the MD5 has key (which will be a long string of numbers)
Grab a MD5 checker (such as the one here), and paste the MD5 key into this as well as point the checker to your downloaded file.
The checker will tell you whether the MD5 matches ie. you have an unaltered file. Simple!

Oh, for all you nerds that want to know more about MD5, have a read of RFC1321

Today (07/08/09) at 12:34pm and 56 seconds, The clock read; 123456789. i think it’s another 81 years before something like this happens again.

In case you missed it,

One of my friends wanted me to build a PC from scratch, with the parts HE wanted (rather than a pre built one). So I thought ‘lets blog it from the very beginning to the end’.

The challenge – a decent PC (not for gaming but one with a bit of grunt and the ability to run some virtual OS’s too)
The budget – about AUD$500 but as a guide only. There was room for movement (just as well)

So the research began. AMD or intel CPU? What sort of motherboard? How much RAM? What sort of graphics card? And certainly how big a power supply to run it all? And after the hardware was sorted out, what OS did he want to run?

After much deliberation, we decided on the following hardware (or very similar):

AMD X4 Phenom II 9650 CPU (the general consensus was a quad core of some kind)
Gigabyte motherboard
4Gig RAM
Sunflower case of some sort (a workmate told me they are pretty good)
ATI graphics card (at least 512M)
1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
SATA DVD burner

As far as the OS was concerned, my friend decided on wanting to run OpenSuse 11.1 as the main OS, and probably Vista X64 in a virtual image for the stuff he could not find Linux equivalents for.

So, off to the shop I went with him to buy all the gear.

Next post, I will share what harwdware we ended up getting and the total cost …..