Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Well, got all my parts from newegg (they rule) last friday and assembled my PC. Everything was smooth sailing. I have to say, I love my case. It's a perfect Small Formfactor (SFF) case and the fact that it takes a miniATX mobo means it's future proof which is nice. If I were building another desktop or media center PC I'd buy my next case from SilverStone.
You can see a very grainy photo here:
Two words sum up my experience. Intel Rules! The motherboard and processor installed w/o any problem, the instructions clearly indicated what goes where (all the front panel pinouts for USB etc) and the features are great. I have Gibabit Lan, 1394, 8 USB 2.0 Ports, 4 RAM slots, 1 PCIe x16, 2PCI and 1 PCIe, 4 SATA ports with RAID, and 1 IDE port.
The best part is that the BIOS defaulted to support S3 standby (that's a first for me) and what's even better is that it worked. This thing is flawless. Thank you Intel. Plus the BIOS doesn't have 1000 options that I don't need or care about. It's very simple and basic. I'd also add that Intel provides a Driver CD that takes care of installing every single driver that I need w/o any intervention on my part. It can even check the web for updates. Sweet.
Anyway, this thing looks great, is quieter than my Laptop (I have no case fans running, just the CPU fan and PSU on silent). At some point I will need to replace the stock Intel CPU fan, as those things are always worthless. Need to investigate more.
I really don't see why I'd ever shy away from Intel CPU/Mobo combos. This is now my 3rd and I've had nothing but positive experiences. I only wish I had never bothered with the Shuttle/AMD combo, but if I hadn't I never would have found this setup.
Update: I got some questions about how much this all costs. Here is my invoice. This gets you everything you need except hard drives (I already had two 200GB hard drives in a RAID-1 array).
Total cost was $937. Figure with 2 200GB drives another $250.