Monday, November 9, 2009

My experience building Nehalem based system and Windows 7

Hello all,

Intel EPP had a nice combo deal. A Nehalem 3.xG processor, DX58SO mother board an Intel 160G SSD for only $758. I couldn't resist but buy that baby. The SSD is still back ordered and i waited couple weeks before knowing that. So i headed to Fry's and bought myself the other missing pieces of the puzzle.


  1. Antec 902 gamer case
  2. Antec Earth watts 750W
  3. Crosair CAS7 6G DDR3
  4. Hitachi 1Ter SATA
  5. Intel MOBO Combo
  6. ATI Graphics x16 PCIE
Total Cost was ~ $1200.00

The installation was very simple and easy. The case looked really cool, with nice cool blue lights, clear case to see components inside. The power supply is also very efficient, and it appeared to turn off fans when system is idle. Pretty quite for having 4 fans on the case, not including the power supply fan and the fan on the Graphics card!!!

Antec, Nehalem


I tried the Windows 7 premium to start with. The installation was a breeze, didnt have to select anything and it also went pretty fast. Had 2 real issues that iam not able to resolve yet.

  1. I had a download from MSDN going, but system apparently got suspended as if no activity was there.Not sure how that happened, with all the interrupts from network still happening but the system thought there was no activity. My download was stuck at 57% and never made progress until i moved my mouse around.
  2. DVR/CD writing isnt possible. There was some silence, absolutely no writing happened, and then it gave me some hex error code (didnt write that down) and said a problem happened when the write happened.
Tried Imgburn and it also failed. Not sure if this is a drive issue (since same drive worked fine under Linux. Searching via google, it turned out many people have got the same failures with Win7.

I need to play with the ultimate edition next to see how the media capabilities work on Win7. Thats an exercise for next week.