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The 3rd party cooler I chose for the Graphics Card is made by Zalman, a company renowned for making good quality cooling products for computer parts. This particular model can be fitted to a wide range of graphics cards. There’s a good review of it here. http://www.silentpcreview.com/article769-page1.html
For the Graphics card cooler to be effective, there should be a good conductor of heat between the Graphics card & the cooler, so I used the same Artic silver 5 paste on this cooler installation. After following the instructions, (you need a Philips head screwdriver to do the job) the graphics card now looks like this. After initial testing, the temperatures of the card have lowered by over 20 degrees Celsius, so the cooler is doing its job well. The cooler fan is powered not by the graphics card itself (as the stock cooler was) but buy the motherboard as it has a compatible power plug.
The next step is to fit the graphics card onto the gaming rig motherboard. The graphics card fits into a slot called a PCI express slot, it is different from the other slots on the motherboard because it has a catch to hold the graphics card in place. it is also held in place by a thumbscrew (please note this fitting is from the 1st time I fitted the graphics card onto the motherboard when the stock graphics card cooler was fitted, the procedure is almost the same apart from powering the 3rd party cooling fan.) Before going onto the next step, connect the motherboard tray fan to one of the 3 pin fan connectors on the motherboard. (saves doing it later, & this is not applicable to PC cases that do not have removable motherboard trays)
The next step is to fit the power supply into the case. For this PC build, I used the power supply from my previous PC builds, a Seasonic S12 430 (430 being the maximum power output in watts) In my opinion, the most important part of a PC is the power supply & should not be skimped upon. Buying a £10-20 non-branded power supply to power a Computer worth almost £1,000 is asking for trouble & is like the standard interconnect leads with a £1,000 hi-fi system! I chose this particular power supply because it was (at the time when I bought it in late 2006) one of the quietest power supplies on the market & had a number of good reviews. For independent power supply reviews, go to http://www.jonnyguru.com/ or http://www.silentpcreview.com/article226-page1.html
The power supply in this instance goes in the back of the case at the top (this is usual in most PC cases, some cases the power supply goes in the bottom.) with this particular case, the power supply goes in the left hand rear side of the case. The next step is to install the hard drive. The hard drives in this case are new, one is a Western Digital Caviar 320GB 2.5” model for laptops, I bought this for 1 reason it can be ‘bungee modded’ see the next page for details. A bit on the small size storage wise for a hard drive these days, but it suits my requirements. I can record TV programmes on this PC if I want to as I don’t watch a lot of recorded TV these days. The main hard drive on this PC for the operating system is an intel X25M 80GB solid state drive. It is the latest in PC tech. This type of drive can access data a lot faster than conventional hard drives, it runs cooler & has no moving parts making it (theoretically) more reliable.
A conventional hard drive spins very fast during use, when fitted inside a typical PC case it can generate a lot of noise & vibration, which is not tolerated as far as I'm concerned! Happily, there is a cheap & easy way to fit a hard drive inside a PC case to reduce the vibration & noise made by a hard drive, called a ‘bungee mod’. How I fitted my hard drive using this method is shown on the bungee mod page.
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