[Build Complete] Nerys - $400 total, upgrades still in progress but DAMN she's good.

I've waited for this day for a long time. Since about 2003. I finally got lucky enough to build a rig that I considered worthwhile enough to spend on and upgrade. I think if I do it right and budget properly, I can make her into a force to be reckoned with. I'll give you guys a little bit of backstory before the linky linkies.

A buddy of mine and I were discussing my dream rig during a summer class. Well a little bit ago, he built my dream rig, save for a few changes to choice of brand (AMD instead of nvidia). He told me that he had a bunch of old computer parts laying around and if any of them worked, I could throw whatever was there together and keep whatever he had. I was ecstatic. He gave me just about everything I needed. A pentium 4 computer (which was complete crap and didnt have a single useful thing besides some extra wire and a nice P4 keychain) and a bunch of miscellaneous parts that somehow were supposed to become a new computer.

As I dug through the carnage of computer parts he gave me, it quickly became apparent that there wasnt much that would work. As it turned out, the only things that DID end up working were the processor (THANK GOD), the PSU (although the fan broke, my fault), and a single 120mm case fan. Everything else (GPU, dvd drives, sound card, motherboard, RAM) was either broken or incompatible with the new parts.

So without further ado, here is the build log for Nerys. I named her after Donna's most hated blonde coworker from Doctor Who. If you dont care about the severe difficulty and hardship it took to get her up and running, simply click through the pictures. Otherwise, I've provided a reasoning behind why I bothered including specific pictures in the album.

TL;DR: I hope you guys enjoy!

PS: Also, I still need to add a 120-256gb SSD, nothing fancy as I only have SATA 3gbps ports and I dont think i'll be upgrading the processor/mobo on her. I'll also be upgrading the cooling to an H100 and some nice silent fans, plus adding strategic acoustic foam here and there. I might also might swap to WD Caviar Blacks instead of green and use these 2tb's as externals, but this machine will eventually just be a file server and that means the mobo/cpu combo wont work well the way it is right now anyways. So basically I havent thought things through that far yet. I have 2tb of space in software RAID1 right now, and I can turn it into 4tb of space later if need be, plus i'll be backing up all my media to DVD for archival (like anime and movies and such) for peace of mind. just incase you guys are intersted or want to give me tips and pointers. This is my first desktop after all, and knowing things in theory is vastly different than actual practice.