It was kind of a lazy day, but I did manage to unbox Blastoise’s mobo, CPU and RAM and got those seated. One thing’s for sure… you remember when I got the Yoshi Car and it was very very blue? Well, Blastoise outdoes THAT. His motherboard pieces are blue. His RAM sticks are blue. The box his CPU came in is blue, as is the one for his video card… and, of course, he’ll be packing a Blu Ray drive and his case has blue lights UP THE NOSE. Save for the case selection, this was all unintentional but stupidly hilarious– yeah, blue’s my favorite color, but it’s not like I went and picked the parts based on coloration.

Also, Asus wins the effing universe. They bundle this widget with their motherboards, a “Q Connector.” Fellow system builders will know what I mean when I say that front panel wiring is a BITCH, especially if you have big fingers: you poke and stub them trying to push those stupid front panel wire heads into place and risk bending the pins and it’s just… the least fun part about building boxes because if you don’t boot the first time you have to rip it out and… yeah, it’s just not fun. The Q Connector pretty much renders that moot, as it’s a detachable widget that lets you attach the front panel wire heads much more easily and then you drop the thing where it’s supposed to go, like the consolidated USB wire heads. I’d wanted things like this for YEARS, and, well… let’s just say I’ll be using Asus motherboards for future builds. :) Seriously, that widget just eliminated the most frustrating part of system building, and if Blastoise doesn’t boot on the first go, I must really suck! XD

Oh yeah… as much as I’ve historically hated Intel-based systems because their heatsinks are jerkfaces and don’t install nicely? This has to be the easiest Intel heatsink install EVER. Well, this IS Blastoise, after all… he has always been easy when it comes to these things.

I ran out of daylight, so I’ma do the rest tomorrow. Looks like that’s where all the “heavy lifting” parts come in– the PSU, the video card, the drives… and that damned I/O panel, though I heard that’s been fixed, too. Hopefully I’m not too lazy, ’cause I really would like to have Blastoise back. I have Snowschemes to do!

…

…you know… now that I think about it, didn’t I build my first box around this time? That’s right… Synergy 1.0 for brendala in ’06. Part of it was a “take that” at mother, who didn’t think I could actually build a box, and the rest was to save Bren from a crappy old computer. And, uh… this was also how I learned that I have crap for temperature shift tolerance, as I got a nasty head cold after everything was finished (because of going back and forth between my cold house and Bren’s heated house several times in the span of a couple days). :P