Final Week

It was the final week of my internship and I have to say. The experience was fun while it lasted. I thank Rick Estrada and the whole MyTek team for letting me intern at their company. Last Saturday, I was able to build my desktop after gathering the parts the Saturday before that. This is a picture of the parts I bought.

That mat over there is a grounder. It makes sure any stray static will not fry or toast the processor while I connect it into the motherboard.

For my GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), I chose the EVGA GeForce GTX 960. This thing is a monster when it comes to cooling, performance, and power efficiency. It has a Memory MOSFET
Cooling Plate that reduces temperatures up to 11 Celsius (51.8 Fahrenheit) and Straight Heat Pipes to reduce GPU temperature by another 5 Celsius (41 Fahrenheit). It also has fans which turns on when the GPU hits 60 Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) and from my experience with the desktop, I can play Skyrim with ultra settings and the fan does not have to work as hard. Best of all, the fan delivers more air flow with less power so it doesn't take too much from the GPU.

I used the Intel Core I7-4790 Haswell Quad-Core. The reason why I chose the i7 rather than the i5, which was sufficient enough to handle a gaming desktop, was so I can take advantage of its hyper-threading capabilities. Since I'm going to attend University of Utah for their game design program, hyper-threading is important because it allows the computer to multitask. Tasks like 3D rendering and video editing are great examples. 

I chose the Gigabyte brand from the others because of its durability, aside from its ability to support my 4th generation processor.

I chose the Antec VP-450 450W ATX as my desktop's power supply.

I chose this Antec ISK 600 to be my case, mainly because it would be easy to carry around, which is why I did not get a tower sized case. Though I lose the ability for easier modifications; the inside is spacey, but from all the parts I got, it unfortunately doesn't have any more room left.

Instead of choosing whether to use fan or water cooling. I choose both using Corsair Hydro Series H75 to cool my CPU. Best part of it all is that the loudest sound the fan will make is 31.4 dB, quieter than a whisper. It also has copper plating in the bottom which draws in heat, making it able to transfer heat from the CPU into itself while the liquid cooling itself chills it down.

For my RAM (Random Access Memory), I chose the Patriot Signature Line for its storage, auto/self refresh capability, and its heat shield. One of the problems I had to make sure to take account was cooling, if you notice, I made sure most of my parts can withstand heat. Each one has 8 GB of storage, giving me 16 GB in total.

For my Storage Memory, I chose the AMD brand Radeon R7 which stores up 240 GB.

I chose not to include an optical drive inside of my desktop, but instead I have this. It connects to my desktop via USB. It helped me download the Windows 7 Operating system and other updates.

I chose Windows 7 instead of Windows 8 because I find it better just keeping things simple rather than have the Windows 8 interface start up like my laptop does. I barely even use the applications the Windows 8 has to offer.

The rest of the photos is just me building the desktop to completion.

Week Nine

Once again Rick tried helping us be confident on our public speaking skills last Tuesday. Personally, I would prefer not to speak out loud to an audience, especially a presentation. Did you all know public speaking is actually second in terms of most common fears? Knowing this fact now actually relaxes me. Before we started our day in the office, Rick told Rohan and I that we were going to present our research projects without the aid of a power point in a coffee house. Lots of thoughts rushed in my head as I was worried what might happen if I messed up. To my relief, we were just going to present outside where it was relatively empty; it was the weekday so most were either at work or at school. When it was my turn to present, I was surprised by how much I improved: mumbling less (the wind blew occasionally so I had to raise my voice), standing straight, and had my thoughts organized.

Week Eight

So far this week has just been focused around honing our presentation skills, especially Tuesday. Rick encouraged us to try to convince and engage our audience. Anyone can do research on any of our projects, but what makes them special are the methods we use. Sure, we could have just followed through from research or articles in the past, but even the little modifications that we implemented are still worth noting. Other than that, he also advised us to maintain eye contact to the audience with a comfortable posture. After Rick advised us, we were assigned to make a list in Excel for new clients with their first name, last name, email address, phone number, street, and zip code. When that was done, we emailed the list to him and went on to prepare about six desktops for one of MyTek's clients.We had to update the computer first before downloading LogMeIn; this is so MyTek can easily access the client's computer to make any changes or guide them if they had a problem. Then, once it finished, we had to create a new user on the desktop and also enabled Microsoft Office with a key pass, both of which would be used by one of the client's employees. On Thursday, we went on to MyTek East and were allowed to use the whole day to work on our Senior Research Project. The wifi in the office was down, but at least I had my phone just in case I need to look something up.

Week Seven

Rick brought us to Phoenix NAP; a data center containing hundreds of servers from multimillion dollar companies such as COX kept safe by high-level security systems and ex-military personal. Thanks to Mike Berry for being our tour guide throughout the morning. The cables that powered each server were suspended along the ceiling. Each server along a row were aligned in order to keep the heat to one side, letting the ceiling vent it out while cool air was blasted from the bottom. They of course had a generator to power the whole set up, but in order to keep the servers from shutting down, they had another to back it up. If that fails and somehow all forms of electricity were shut down, a 24 hour fuel generator quickly turns on. All the servers contain information that are valuable to each individual company, if the servers shut down, money is potentially lost. The best thing about Arizona for data centers is that fact that natural disasters rarely happen here. Sure the cooling price might be steep, but that cost is a whole lot better than losing millions all because of nature.