New PC build - It's alive!
Here are the specs for my recent PC build:
- Antec P182 Gun Metal Black PC case
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1333MHz FSB
- PATRIOT 2GB kit (1gb x 2) PC2-6400 800mhz, 4-4-4-12, 240-pin DDR2 DIMM w/heat spreader x 2 = 4GB total
- EVGA LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Mobo
- EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready
- PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W, single 12V rail 60A, 80 PLUS Certified
- SEAGATE 500gb Serial ATA-300 HDD, 32MB buffer
- LG Blu-Ray & HD DVD Serial ATA Internal Reader / DVD Burner
- LITE-ON DVD Burner
With the exception of the PC case, I purchased all my components from Mwave.com. They are very comparable to Newegg in terms of pricing but they are more local to me and feature a will call pick up which I like and in-store support. The in-store support actually came in very handy as you will read about below.
Now, if you made it this far, I assume you have at least some interest in PCs. If you don't care about why I chose the components that I chose, just skip on down to the last paragraph but I personally find it very interesting in understanding what led a person to purchase what he or she decided to purchase. So hence, a somewhat long write up from here on out.
My PC from 2004 was as loud as a vacuum cleaner during a full load and fairly noisy during idle. So this time I really wanted to build a "quiet PC". The Antec P182 comes with three layer "sound deadening" panels for the sides and front door and three 120mm fans with three adjustable speeds (mine actually came with a few extra spare fans due to known fan issue on early production models) so I installed 2 fans at the top rear to draw heat from the CPU and Northbridge, one in front middle to draw heat away from the GPU, and one in front of the PSU to draw heat away from the HDD. The fans are very quiet at the low setting and even though I have four fans running, the overall system is much much more quiet compared to my old PC. What is also a nice design feature is how you can stash cables behind the motherboard panel which really improves the air flow as well as making a much cleaner looking layout inside the chassis. And another unique feature of this case is that the PSU is mounted at the bottom of the chassis and not the top.
I had debated whether to go quad core or dual core since they are both currently similar in price but the quad core runs at a lower clock frequency. I ultimately chose to go dual core since my primary application is gaming and dual core is arguably better for this type of application. The "Wolfdale" (45 nm) E8400 hit my price-to-performance target so I went with it. The fact that the Wolfdale's are based on the 45nm process and thus draw less power and less heat and therefore the cooling fans produce less noise is a nice plus. A few months back, I thought I was going to wait for Intel's next gen Nahalem architecture, but in looking at the 2009 roadmap and given what I wanted to do today, I didn't feel the wait was worth it.
I read a lot of praise as well as some rants about EVGA's 780i based motherboard but I felt the good outweighed the bad. I suppose I could have saved a few bucks with the 750i chipset instead of the 780i but I figured it was not too much more and just went with the 780i. There really isn't a whole lot of performance difference between the two. So yes, I admit it was not a real data driven decision in this instance.
The time I didn't spend in scrutinizing the motherboard I made up for in selecting the GPU. My short list was 1) dual Nvidia 8800 GTs in SLI 2) AMD/ATI HD 4870 3) Nvidia GTX 260. Long story short, the power draw of the 4870 vs the GTX 260 made me rule it out. A pair of 8800 GTs can in fact beat a single next gen Nvidia GTX 260 and the 8800 GT SLI pair is in fact cheaper but I really wanted a single GPU card that was fast enough to run the game Crysis at high res and high setttings but also have the option to go SLI later on if I wanted to. A $40 MIR on the GTX 260 made the price gap small enough vs the 8800GT SLI set up to push me over the edge. If you look at GTX 260 card, you will notice how big it is. That's because it is freakin' big! So big in fact that I could not mount my hard drive in the middle chamber near the front of the chassis. I guess with these latest gen cards, you no longer see the PCB anymore. Just all solid plastic housing which is kind of cool as it gives it a nice, rugged feel.
For the RAM, I played it safe and only went with what was approved on EVGA's site. So while I originally wanted 2 x 2 GB sticks, I ultimately went with 4 x 1GBs from Patriot with 4-4-4-12 timings which are pretty fast. I am still using Win XP Pro so the OS is only seeing 2.7 GB. I am just not ready to go to Vista yet.
This is the first build where I budgeted for the PSU as a seperate unit. I've seen a number of cheap PSUs go bad that I now know not to skimp on this component. I like PC Power & Cooling's single 12V rail design and the beefy 60A rating. And it's 80 Plus certified and the PSU does live up to it's "Silencer" marketing. Despite what Nvidia's official SLI certification site says, I should be able to add another GTX 260 GPU in the future if I want to.
Hard drives are always relatively inexpensive. I tend to stick with Seagate for their overall performance, low noise levels, and 5 year warranty. For a fleeting moment, I thought about going Raid 0 but it wasn't a priority for me and it would have broken my budget. However, I am considering a future upgrade to a pair of WD 300GB VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM SATA drives if the price is right.
I've come this far - Hey, I want to be able to watch Blu Ray and HD DVD too! The LG dual format reader does in fact play back both Blu Ray and HD DVD. The GTX 260 came with a DVI male-to-HDMI female adapter. I can see my Windows desktop on the plasma TV upstairs but when I tried playing back an HD DVD this morning, I received an HDCP error which I am not sure why at the moment since both the GTX 260 and my TV are HDCP compliant. I need to research this issue.
It wasn't easy to get my set up up and running. I seem to have bad luck when it comes to getting things to work right the first time. A week ago I spent all of Saturday physically putting the PC together. Upon power on I had hard time passing POST - sometimes I could get to the BIOS but most times I was stuck in POST. As you can imagine this was extremely frustrating since I checked and re-checked every component and made sure it was properly installed. A nice feature on the motherboard is a two digit LED display of the POST code. It allowed me to better isolate the possible issue, reference the manual for a description and go on the forums to kind of narrow down the issue. But long story short, I ultimately had to take my PC back to back Mwave. According to the tech (Hector), I had bad DRAM. I found it hard to believe that all four of my DRAM sticks were bad at the same time. But even I tried to boot with one stick of RAM at a time and couldn't pass POST. Hector also replaced the motherboard and PSU. They may or may not have contributed to the problem but Hector got my PC up and running and saved me a LOT of time with the trial and error and RMA hassles so I obviously was not going to question whatever he did. In fact I have nothing but praise for Mwave's service overall. Hector gave me regular status updates and updated my Windows XP to SP3 and updated my BIOS and drivers to the latest versions. He went beyond just getting my system to work. As another footnote - there is a good reason why Antec provided those extra fans. It turns out the chassis fans that were pre-installed were flaky (known issue) and if they were plugged in to the PSU, I would often not be able to see my monitor display upon boot up. When I replaced the "bad fans" with the spares, my system would boot up fine every time. I am still appalled by how many issues I ran into with this build! It really is amazing.
So here is the final box with everything installed without any sign or indication of the time and effort that went into it.
I actually didn't know Mwave offered custom build and troubleshooting services until -after- I had ordered everything, picked up the parts, assembled at home and ran into my issues and then went on the forums where some guy had posted a link of Mwave's support services. Maybe I am oblivious but to me, these services were not advertised well on their website. If I had to do it all over again, I'd definitely pay to have Mwave build it for me. Don't get me wrong, PC building can be fun and challenging but it can be very very time consuming when things don't work as they should as in my case - if you ask me, it's well worth the cost to have the same vendor do the entire system build who can easily isolate any issue and easily replace any part as needed.
- Antec P182 Gun Metal Black PC case
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1333MHz FSB
- PATRIOT 2GB kit (1gb x 2) PC2-6400 800mhz, 4-4-4-12, 240-pin DDR2 DIMM w/heat spreader x 2 = 4GB total
- EVGA LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Mobo
- EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready
- PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W, single 12V rail 60A, 80 PLUS Certified
- SEAGATE 500gb Serial ATA-300 HDD, 32MB buffer
- LG Blu-Ray & HD DVD Serial ATA Internal Reader / DVD Burner
- LITE-ON DVD Burner
With the exception of the PC case, I purchased all my components from Mwave.com. They are very comparable to Newegg in terms of pricing but they are more local to me and feature a will call pick up which I like and in-store support. The in-store support actually came in very handy as you will read about below.
Now, if you made it this far, I assume you have at least some interest in PCs. If you don't care about why I chose the components that I chose, just skip on down to the last paragraph but I personally find it very interesting in understanding what led a person to purchase what he or she decided to purchase. So hence, a somewhat long write up from here on out.
My PC from 2004 was as loud as a vacuum cleaner during a full load and fairly noisy during idle. So this time I really wanted to build a "quiet PC". The Antec P182 comes with three layer "sound deadening" panels for the sides and front door and three 120mm fans with three adjustable speeds (mine actually came with a few extra spare fans due to known fan issue on early production models) so I installed 2 fans at the top rear to draw heat from the CPU and Northbridge, one in front middle to draw heat away from the GPU, and one in front of the PSU to draw heat away from the HDD. The fans are very quiet at the low setting and even though I have four fans running, the overall system is much much more quiet compared to my old PC. What is also a nice design feature is how you can stash cables behind the motherboard panel which really improves the air flow as well as making a much cleaner looking layout inside the chassis. And another unique feature of this case is that the PSU is mounted at the bottom of the chassis and not the top.
I had debated whether to go quad core or dual core since they are both currently similar in price but the quad core runs at a lower clock frequency. I ultimately chose to go dual core since my primary application is gaming and dual core is arguably better for this type of application. The "Wolfdale" (45 nm) E8400 hit my price-to-performance target so I went with it. The fact that the Wolfdale's are based on the 45nm process and thus draw less power and less heat and therefore the cooling fans produce less noise is a nice plus. A few months back, I thought I was going to wait for Intel's next gen Nahalem architecture, but in looking at the 2009 roadmap and given what I wanted to do today, I didn't feel the wait was worth it.
I read a lot of praise as well as some rants about EVGA's 780i based motherboard but I felt the good outweighed the bad. I suppose I could have saved a few bucks with the 750i chipset instead of the 780i but I figured it was not too much more and just went with the 780i. There really isn't a whole lot of performance difference between the two. So yes, I admit it was not a real data driven decision in this instance.
The time I didn't spend in scrutinizing the motherboard I made up for in selecting the GPU. My short list was 1) dual Nvidia 8800 GTs in SLI 2) AMD/ATI HD 4870 3) Nvidia GTX 260. Long story short, the power draw of the 4870 vs the GTX 260 made me rule it out. A pair of 8800 GTs can in fact beat a single next gen Nvidia GTX 260 and the 8800 GT SLI pair is in fact cheaper but I really wanted a single GPU card that was fast enough to run the game Crysis at high res and high setttings but also have the option to go SLI later on if I wanted to. A $40 MIR on the GTX 260 made the price gap small enough vs the 8800GT SLI set up to push me over the edge. If you look at GTX 260 card, you will notice how big it is. That's because it is freakin' big! So big in fact that I could not mount my hard drive in the middle chamber near the front of the chassis. I guess with these latest gen cards, you no longer see the PCB anymore. Just all solid plastic housing which is kind of cool as it gives it a nice, rugged feel.
For the RAM, I played it safe and only went with what was approved on EVGA's site. So while I originally wanted 2 x 2 GB sticks, I ultimately went with 4 x 1GBs from Patriot with 4-4-4-12 timings which are pretty fast. I am still using Win XP Pro so the OS is only seeing 2.7 GB. I am just not ready to go to Vista yet.
This is the first build where I budgeted for the PSU as a seperate unit. I've seen a number of cheap PSUs go bad that I now know not to skimp on this component. I like PC Power & Cooling's single 12V rail design and the beefy 60A rating. And it's 80 Plus certified and the PSU does live up to it's "Silencer" marketing. Despite what Nvidia's official SLI certification site says, I should be able to add another GTX 260 GPU in the future if I want to.
Hard drives are always relatively inexpensive. I tend to stick with Seagate for their overall performance, low noise levels, and 5 year warranty. For a fleeting moment, I thought about going Raid 0 but it wasn't a priority for me and it would have broken my budget. However, I am considering a future upgrade to a pair of WD 300GB VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM SATA drives if the price is right.
I've come this far - Hey, I want to be able to watch Blu Ray and HD DVD too! The LG dual format reader does in fact play back both Blu Ray and HD DVD. The GTX 260 came with a DVI male-to-HDMI female adapter. I can see my Windows desktop on the plasma TV upstairs but when I tried playing back an HD DVD this morning, I received an HDCP error which I am not sure why at the moment since both the GTX 260 and my TV are HDCP compliant. I need to research this issue.
It wasn't easy to get my set up up and running. I seem to have bad luck when it comes to getting things to work right the first time. A week ago I spent all of Saturday physically putting the PC together. Upon power on I had hard time passing POST - sometimes I could get to the BIOS but most times I was stuck in POST. As you can imagine this was extremely frustrating since I checked and re-checked every component and made sure it was properly installed. A nice feature on the motherboard is a two digit LED display of the POST code. It allowed me to better isolate the possible issue, reference the manual for a description and go on the forums to kind of narrow down the issue. But long story short, I ultimately had to take my PC back to back Mwave. According to the tech (Hector), I had bad DRAM. I found it hard to believe that all four of my DRAM sticks were bad at the same time. But even I tried to boot with one stick of RAM at a time and couldn't pass POST. Hector also replaced the motherboard and PSU. They may or may not have contributed to the problem but Hector got my PC up and running and saved me a LOT of time with the trial and error and RMA hassles so I obviously was not going to question whatever he did. In fact I have nothing but praise for Mwave's service overall. Hector gave me regular status updates and updated my Windows XP to SP3 and updated my BIOS and drivers to the latest versions. He went beyond just getting my system to work. As another footnote - there is a good reason why Antec provided those extra fans. It turns out the chassis fans that were pre-installed were flaky (known issue) and if they were plugged in to the PSU, I would often not be able to see my monitor display upon boot up. When I replaced the "bad fans" with the spares, my system would boot up fine every time. I am still appalled by how many issues I ran into with this build! It really is amazing.
So here is the final box with everything installed without any sign or indication of the time and effort that went into it.
I actually didn't know Mwave offered custom build and troubleshooting services until -after- I had ordered everything, picked up the parts, assembled at home and ran into my issues and then went on the forums where some guy had posted a link of Mwave's support services. Maybe I am oblivious but to me, these services were not advertised well on their website. If I had to do it all over again, I'd definitely pay to have Mwave build it for me. Don't get me wrong, PC building can be fun and challenging but it can be very very time consuming when things don't work as they should as in my case - if you ask me, it's well worth the cost to have the same vendor do the entire system build who can easily isolate any issue and easily replace any part as needed.
posted by baconandeggs at 1:30 AM
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