Another School Visit to Bridge of Don Academy

The previous post discussed a visit to Bridge of Don Academy for a workshop on how to build a personal computer. We visited the same school again today to meet with another group of students. The sun has been shining here in Aberdeen more or less all day, hence one couldn’t ask for better conditions to go on a short road trip (with a stack of computer parts in the back of the van of course)!

One can find quite a few videos of PC’s build within fish tanks, such as the one below.

One can find lots of useful hints tips and reviews on Linus Tech Tips youtube channel.

School Visit to Bridge of Don Academy

This afternoon we visited Bridge of Don Academy to give a workshop on building a personal computer. I have updated my presentation slides to include some videos I made a few months ago showing the process of building a PC. One can access a playlist of almost 30 videos showing this process from here. Some of the videos I featured in the presentation can be seen below. A selection of videos showing the unboxing of the featured components can be accessed from the following playlist. Further videos covering anything from roller coasters to scenes from Aberdeen can be seen at
http://www.youtube.com/dcdoolan
.

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Installing an Intel Core i7 3930K CPU on an ASUS Sabertooth Motherboard

This is a short video showing the process of installing an Intel Core i7 3930K Hexacore CPU on an ASUS Sabertooth X79 Socket 2011 Motherboard.

This is just one of a series of videos showing the developments of an Extreme Gaming PC Build within a Cosmos 2 Ultra Tower PC Case. This is one of two videos recorded at different angles showing the process. On a number of occasions during the year I visit various secondary schools to give a series of workshops on the likes of Xbox Programming, Computer Networking and of course Building a PC. Hence these videos should prove useful for the Build a PC workshops.

The following video is showing an alternative angle on the CPU installation process.

Corsair Dominator DDR3 32GB RAM Unboxing

Unboxing video of the Dominator 32GB DDR3 1600MHz memory modules from Corsair.

Intel Core i7 PC Build Components Unboxed Overview

A series of panning shots showing the unboxed components used in a PC Build within the Cooler Master Cosmos 2 PC Case. Components include the Intel Core i7 3930K processor, Cooler Master 1000 Watt Silent Pro 80+ Gold PSU, Corsair Dominator 32 GB DDR3 RAM, Corsair Force 3 Series SSD Drive, NVidia GTX 570 Graphics Card with 2560MB GDDR Memory & 480 Cores, ASUS Sabertooth X79 Motherboard, 2 TB Hard Drive, Pioneer BDR S06 XLB Blu-ray Drive and the Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler.

Intel Core i7 PC Build Boxed Components Overview

A series of panning shots showing the components used in a PC Build within the Cooler Master Cosmos 2 PC Case. Components include the Intel Core i7 3930K processor, Cooler Master 1000 Watt Silent Pro 80+ Gold PSU, Corsair Dominator 32 GB DDR3 RAM, Corsair Force 3 Series SSD Drive, NVidia GTX 570 Graphics Card with 2560MB GDDR Memory & 480 Cores, ASUS Sabertooth X79 Motherboard, 2 TB Hard Drive, Pioneer BDR S06 XLB Blu-ray Drive and the Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler.

NVidia GeForce GTX 570 Graphics Card Unboxing

Unboxing the Nvidia GTX 570 Graphcis Card featuring 480 Cores, 2560MB GDDR5 Memroy, 2 x DVI, 1 x HDMI and 1 x Display Port.

Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler Unboxing

As the title says the following is an unboxing video of the Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooler system. It’s a double rad with two 120mm fans. It comes as a sealed unit, so no need to change out the liquid coolant.

Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000 Watt PSU Unboxing

Unboxing video of the Modular Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000 Watt PSU. This series of Power Supply Unit is capable of exceeding 90% power efficiency under load. The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) is in excess of 100,000 hours. The PSU itself is 150 X 180 X 86 mm & features a 135mm ultra silent fan. If required its maximum capacity for output is 1200 watts. According to Amazon the boxed product weight is 3.7 kilos.

Unboxing the Sabertooth X79 LGA 2011 Motherboard from ASUS

The ASUS Sabertooth X79 LGA 2011 motherboard features support for the latest 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processors such as the 3930K. The motherboard is quite heavy & has an ATX form factor. It has multi GPU support in the form of both SLI and Crosfire. Capable of a handlying a maximum of 64GB DDR3 RAM spread across eight DIMM’s at 1866/1600/1333/1066Mhz. It features 14 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports, 4 x USB 3.0 on the back panel & 2 x USB 3.0 ports at the mid-board for front panel support. Storage comes in the form of 4 x SATA 6GB/s connectors, 4 x 3GB/s connectors 1 x Power eSATA & 1 x eSATA port.

Corsair 240GB SSD Drive Unboxing

Unboxing video of the Corsair 240GB Force Series SATA 3 SSD Drive. One can read up on the technical specifications of the drive from the manufacturers website. The SATA 3 interfaces runs at 6GB/s, it has a max sequential read speed of 550MB/s and 520MB/s for sequential write. The mean time before failure is rated at two million hours.

School Workshops at Oldmachar Academy

School Workshop visit to Oldmachar Academy today for workshops on Computer Networking and Building a Personal Computer. The workshops were given to a class of about twenty higher students. Oldmachar is about four & a half miles from the School of Computing at St Andrew Street. The Computer Networking workshop looked at the use of a switch to interconnect a set of laptops. Once IP Addresses / Subnet Masks were assigned the students were able then issue the command line command ping to test and see if they could communicate with other machines within their small LAN. With an active network in place we were then able to proceed to creating shares to allow for the sharing of files / documents, this was enhanced by mapping network drives and adding a level of security. We also took a look at FTP data transfer using Filezilla to upload to a server. A number of other things were also covered including DNS mapping. For the Build a PC workshop the focus was on assemblying a PC and testing it to ensure all was in working order.

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Irish Collegiate Programming Contest (IrlCPC)

I received word just a short while ago that the Irish Collegiate Programming Contest (IrlCPC) being hosted in Cork Ireland will be going ahead for 2012. This year the competition is being opened up to provide an additional category for postgraduate students and faculty members.

Teams can attempt to solve the problems using any of the main stream programming languages i.e. Python, C, C++, Java or C#. The undergrad level competition is based on teams of three students and a coach, all from the same University / Institute.

Registration is open until 24th February 2012. The competition will run for an entire day with registration beginning at 10:00 and the final awarding of prizes concluding at 18:00 in the evening. The competition itself will take place on Saturday the 24^th of March 2012.

One can see photographs of the 2010 competition available from here. You can also access last years photographs from here. If you are interested in setting up a team and joining in the fun then get in touch with me. To learn more about the competition take a good look at the IrlCPC site.

 

School Workshops at Bridge of Don Academy

Visited Bridge of Don Academy this afternoon to give two workshops on How to Build a PC and Computer Networking to a class of students studying for their Highers. The Academy is about four miles from our base at St Andrews Street in the city center. For the Build a PC workshop after a short lecture the students were able to break up into pairs assemble a PC adding components such as FFD, HDD, Graphics Card, CD Drive, Memory and so forth. Once completed the machines were then booted to see if everything was working correctly. The Computer Networking workshop started off by making use of a switch to interconnect a set of laptops. After this we went creating Shares, Mapping Network Drives, FTP with filezilla, dealing with secuity issues and the like before bringing the workshop to an end with some computer games running on our local network server which the students had uploaded to.

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