Computer building

edited May 2011 in Tech
Right. So I said I'd do this and...then I didn't. Or rather I did but I was struggling to keep things short enough not to get a bunch of "tl;dr".
So I'm just going to stick to my own computer build to start out here.

So when setting out to build my computer I had some goals in mind. Specifically, I wanted a computer that was small and portable, but large enough to contain (and keep cool) virtually any desktop parts I might desire.
Furthermore, it had to be quiet. I wasn't about to build some fire-breathing gaming machine. I generally don't overclock and I don't play games like I used to. My games aren't very new. Still, I'd prefer to have a powerful system with excess performance. Just because I don't need it now doesn't mean I won't find some way to put it to work.

Case
======
That stated, a good place to start in this project was to pick a case. On that not I've been considering the Qmicra for a long time. It's like the little black box that could or something. Frightfully expensive for a bare case and not terribly conductive for a quiet machine, but the heart wants what the heart wants I guess.

With that out of the way, I needed to consider actual hardware. I needed a mATX motherboard. I wanted to go AMD for this round on the processor, and I've been running ATi graphics for a while and would prefer to stick with them.

Processor
==========
The processor came to be an easy enough choice with AMD's launch of the Phenom II. These aren't exactly on level with Intel's Core i7's, but they are still pretty good and can be easily combined with a fairly low cost but good quality motherboard, and cheap RAM. I went for the gold and grabbed the top 940 model. 4 cores of 3Ghz goodness. But, I wanted this to be a quiet machine and these certainly aren't the coolest runnig processors on the market.

CPU Heatsink
============
The solution to this problem was a large after-market heatsink. A big part of the draw of that Qmicra case was that it's just big enough to support some very large and potent heatsinks. I debated on these for a while and eventually settled on a ZEROtherm ZEN FZ120. It's a good performer, the price wasn't too horrible at the time, and most importantly I could adust the mounting direction. Many of these big heatsinks can't be orientated in the direction I wanted on an AMD processor.

Graphics?
=========
For graphics I had a bit of an issue. The Radeon HD 4850/4830 cards were quite interesting to me. I'd strongly consider them, but they were a bit power hungry. It'd be a real pain to keep them cool without being a little noisy. Word on the net, however, suggests there is an impending launch of a graphics card model similar in speed coming up in about another month that should run a good bit cooler. This would be exactly what I was looking for, so for now I'm holding off here. What this means is I'll be looking for a motherboard with integrated graphics for the short term.

Motherboard
===========
This isn't so bad really. AMD and nVidia have some surprisingly compitent graphics chipsets available, and most mATX motherboards tend to come with onboard graphics anyway. Ultimately I came across the BIOSTAR TA790GX XE. What luck was this? It's one of 2 mATX boards that have AMD's 790GX chipset. It doesn't support crossfire like all the other 790GX boards I've seen, but I'm not really interested in a dual graphics card setup anyway. I'm worried about keeping just one card cool! This has AMD's finest onboard graphics core, and their latest southbridge chip which has an interesting feature that supposed to improve overclocking of the processor. I'm not an overclocker but I may try to abuse this sometime and try undervolting.

RAM
=====
Next up: RAM. I don't put much stock in performance memory. I just don't think it pays off. Also, DDR2 800 (PC 6400) is dirt cheap. I got 8GB. G. Skill brand. Why not? I was planning to go 64-bit anyway. What more is there to say? It's RAM and it get's the job done.

Hard Drives
==========
Next consideration: Hard drives. I didn't want to skimp here. I wanted speed and I wanted capacity. Also, again, quiet if I can. The thing to take note, hewever, is that cpacity and speed don't necessarily have to come in one neat package. On that note, I turned to Western Digital and got a 300GB velociraptor. My OS and applications are installed on that. Additionally my computer is home to a spacious 1.5 terabyte Green drive. Not fast specifically, but large and also from a family of hardrives known to be pretty quiet. The velociraptor also has the potential to be quiet, but is mounted to a big chunk of metal that amplifies all of its vibrations. If I man up and decide to void my warranty I could possibly remove that and mount it differently.

Also, I grabbed a DVD burner. This...really isn't very exciting or interesting. Cheap and fairly standard fare.

Power supply
============
Of course I needed to power all of this. For that I went ritzy and got a Enermax MODU82+. I have an enermax power supply in my old Dell machine and I can rarely hear it over the roar of the one other fan in the system. Note, that other fan isn't abnormally loud. This power supply? Quieter. Much quieter.
It also has modular cables which will be handy in a small case. Less cable mess.
Notably, a lot of power supplies these days come in massive wattages. Do you need 1.2KW of power? Yes? No. No you don't. Not even close. You could power 5-10 computers with that much power. Don't be fooled.

Fans
=====
Beyond all this there are a couple other things. I got 2 fans. Scythe slipsteams. Well liked by the people at silentpcreview. If these guys like it, you know it's quiet. In fact, many of the parts I've listed have been reviewed positively there.

TIM (Thermal Interface Compund)
=====
I also got some good quality thermal interface compound. This is some goop to paint onto the processor and that big heatsink I got to help the heat transfer from one to the other better. The typical standard here is usually Arctic Silver 5, but I went with some stuff from Zalman that is apparently about the same quality. It also had a handly little brush to literally paint it on, so I went with it.

SO, this got long anyway. Sorry. And no pictures. I still need to get a camera. Questions or comments are welcome. Yes, there are probably many spelling/grammar errors. I will come back to this and answer questions and add some more info. Yes, there is more. Be afraid.
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Comments

  • edited April 2009
    I love this thread. I'm going to be referencing this a lot, because I don't know much about building computers.

    I will have more questions as I start collecting the parts, but here's what I have for starters.

    1. Hard drives: Would you recommend getting just one hard drive and partitioning it, or is it better to get a separate hard drive? Like, put all your OS stuff and programs on one hard drive, then put all your video games, music, etc on another?

    2. Parts: Being in the land of China I can potentially buy much cheaper Chinese parts. This usually implies lower quality for lower prices, but do you know anything about this? If I want to save money, are there some parts where I can skimp and buy Chinese versions?
  • edited April 2009
    Huh. Eric might like this thread too! He's built himself quite a few very nice computers over the years, and he might have a few ideas to offer. But then, I dunno; he always says he's gonna come here more often to post, and I tell him that he should but then he never does!

    I'll try to get him to look at this thread, he might have something to contribute. I certainly don't though!! I know diddly squat about computers, so I'll be one of the kids here learning from what other people say :)
  • edited April 2009
    I can testify to the awesomeness of the green drives. My work has an external one that runs 100% silent and totally cool. Its usually cold to the touch, which is really impressive considering we're doing video editing from those hard drives and its usually really warm in our tiny office crammed with 6 computers.

    I suppose its also worth noting that with Windows 7 coming in a few months, now might not be the best time to build a new computer. Isn't Intel also releasing a new line of processors soon?
  • edited April 2009
    What effect would a new line of processors have on the current processors? Would they drop in price? I am not interested in having the best possible processor, because I probably won't use all of it. I'd like to have a really good one, but I don't want to spend the extra cash on marginal improvements to speed just to say it's top of the line.
  • edited April 2009
    This is what I did for my new computer I built not more than two weeks ago:
    Feel free to ask why I chose what I did. Notably, the hard drive and the fans that came with the case (and in the power supply) are extremely quiet. At base noise levels in my apartment sometimes I can't even tell if the damn thing is on without looking at it.

    I'm also running a recent release of the Windows 7 beta (64-bit), which I highly recommend over Vista (and XP, which is really starting to show its age) and will probably be buying legit when it comes out. No one should be running 32-bit OSes on new computers anymore anyway, almost all of the processors in the last year can run 64-bit and you've got any more than 2 gigs of RAM you're probably wasting some if it.

    This thread in SH/SC on the Something Awful Forums was extremely useful, most of the choices I made were because of that thread, and they helped me really tone down what I was picking out of newegg at random.


    X, you probably overdid it on the RAM. There's not much harm in it, since the stuff's so cheap, but I've talked to several people who have a lot of ram in their computers and in most cases they've never seen more than 3 gigs or so in use. If you're doing heavy photo editing or video editing I suppose it will come in handy, but for regular use and gaming, it's a bit of overkill.

    Of course, I'll probably buy two more sticks of RAM eventually too, so who am I to talk.
  • edited April 2009
    Serephel wrote: »
    What effect would a new line of processors have on the current processors? Would they drop in price?

    More than likely. I have no idea when they're actually being released though. I haven't built a computer in 3 or 4 years now and mine still runs everything I throw at it just fine, so I haven't been keeping track.
  • edited April 2009
    The only new line I know of coming from Intel would be the Core i5. These are just a scaled down version of the Core i7. This new architecture of processors is more beneficial to servers than desktops though, so don't expect anything special. I'd complain that Intel is introducing another new socket that won't even stick around all that long as I understand it, but Intel has a history of making new processor lines that require new motherboards to function, so whatever.
    I say forget waiting. If you wait for the next big thing that's only a couple months away, you'll be waiting forever.

    RE: Hard drives.
    Storage needs can vary a lot. Who am I to tell you how to organize your data? As stated above, I have my OS and games/applications on a fast drive and have a not so fast, high-capacity drive for backups, media, documents, and generic data like that. The OS is in it's own little partition, but that's really for convenience so I can reformat that small partition to reinstall the OS without wiping out all my other data.
    I will say that I feel it's good practice to run more than one drive. You can keep important data on more than one drive so if one fails, your data isn't lost. Alternatively there are various things that can be done with RAID arrays, but I haven't gotten around to messing with that type of stuff so I won't go into it.

    RE: 8 Gigs of ram
    It's more than I need, but not more than I can find a use for. It's just a ramdisk and/or a couple virtual machines away from having some use. Also, Vista has superfetch which caches a bunch of data it figures I might use to the ram, so it's already loaded if I do need it. Regardless, I'm in a position to spend pretty freely on my computer, so it's a sorta poor example of "bang for your buck". Hamelin, your computer is certainly a better example of that.

    RE: Cheap Chinese stuff
    I...don't know. What kind of knock-off hardware do they even have? On an individual component level, a lot of the basic stuff like processors and hard drives would probably still have to come from much the same places that the rest of us get it. As for the other stuff, well, Chinese capacitors have a very apparent reputation and it's not a good one. I wouldn't trust too cheap of a power supply or motherboard. Powersupplies can die and drag most of the parts in a computer to the grave with them, and motherboards with issues can be a real headache. An overly cheap graphics card doesn't seem like it'd be very helpful at all, and if ram prices are anything like they are here, it's hardly worth bothering with cheap knockoff stuff if it even exists.
    A cheap case and maybe fans maybe?
  • edited April 2009
    Yeah, I was trying to get a good balance between price and power. Considering I can run every game I have including Far Cry 2 (it came with my video card) at maxed out graphic settings I think I'm pretty good for quite a while with this thing.
  • edited May 2009
    I have a question that hopefully one of you tech-savvy guys can answer. My laptop died as I mentioned in the contemptible hate thread, so I want to save the hard drive and use it as an external hard drive. What do I have to do for this? Just by a case and stick the hard drive in there? How complicated is it? I was wondering if there's some sort of website or something that shows me how to do it without completely ruining my hard drive. Thanks OBers!
  • edited May 2009
    I did this exact thing with my laptop hard drive for a little while during college. You just need to buy an external case that is the right type (PATA or SATA) for your hard drive. Then you remove the drive from the laptop (remember to take off any extra plastic pieces or pin adapter things that might be on it) and put it in the case. I don't know about directions, but it's not really that hard. Like with anything like this though, handle with care.

    In my case I have an older laptop drive which is of the old PATA sort. Some of these type of drives I've seen use a little adapter thing on the pins to convert it to a sort of cartridge slot type connection. This adapter would fit very tightly so it might not seem like it would come off, but it does. Just be careful not to bend the pins.
    If it's a little bit newer and uses the SATA interface, it probably won't have any thing like that to worry about.
  • edited May 2009
    Hopefully the reason your laptop kicked the bucket wasn't because of the hard drive.
  • edited May 2009
    Not at all, the motherboard just decided that it didn't want to live anymore. Thanks for the answer! I also would like to salvage my RAM and video card... It's an Nvidia Geforce, a 550 I think. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to put it into my desktop right? It's processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo.
  • edited May 2009
    kukopanki wrote: »
    I also would like to salvage my RAM and video card... It's an Nvidia Geforce, a 550 I think. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to put it into my desktop right? It's processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo.

    Laptops and desktops have very different inputs for memory and video cards, so you will not be able to salvage those for a desktop sadly.
  • edited May 2009
    Well, ususally no. Some desktop motherboards used laptop style soDIMMs instead of the usual desktop parts. These are rare though, and usually mini-ITX or smaller in form factor. So, Deku is probably spot on. You might be able to put the ram in another laptop, but the graphics card is unlikely to be useable in another system.
  • edited July 2009
    Windows 7 is on the horizon. I'm interested in this. I'm currently running Vista as a bit of a trial period, but that will end before the month does and I'll be buying Vista, but it seems I now have the option to buy vista and get a free Windows 7 upgrade with it. Not a bad deal. Still, I exclusively use the windows classic theme. starting with the XP style GUI, new stuff has been nothing but horrible abortions that throw a lot of useless options at me I don't give a crap about and hide half the stuff I actually want to get at.
    Knowing this I hear some doubts about the existence of a classic interface in Windows 7. Yet from a hardware perspective there are things I want that would be best served by 7.
    What then do the people here know and/or think about Windows 7?
  • edited July 2009
    Windows 7 is an amazing step up from XP, and worlds better than Vista. I've been using it for months now, and I used to be a Windows Classic theme purist but I honestly have to say that the AERO themes work great. I don't even bother organizing my start menu anymore because there's a search bar right in the main start menu that'll pull up any program you have installed by typing up the name.

    I hope this finally kills XP, it's old and I'm sick of it and everyone needs to move on with their lives. I will be buying a copy of Windows 7. Don't buy Vista, they are already selling preorders for Windows 7 you will just waste your money. If I were you I'd find a torrent for the Windows 7 Release Candidate (since it's kind of difficult to get it from Microsoft right now) and install that as soon as possible. Make sure it's the x64 version. All the keys Microsoft gave out for it are multi-use and are valid until halfway through 2010. I have spares if you need one. This is completely kosher. If you don't do an update install, use Windows Easy Transfer to transfer your user profile and shit from Vista to 7 (you'll need a second hard drive or some blank DVDs or something), it works amazingly. It even gives you a list of software you had installed and checks them off as you reinstall them.

    It's not bad at all, what sorts of things are you specifically worried about?
  • edited July 2009
    I'm not really worried, just curious. I'm already sold on 7 for the technical purposes. Specifically superior handling of SSD's that it should have.

    Currently I see no reason to get the release candidate. I already have Vista installed, it's just not registered. It's functioning as a demo, which will end soon enough and I need to get myself a copy proper so I can change the code and register it without disrupting a thing. Add to that, I can get Vista with a free upgrade to 7 for a similar price to just a Windows 7 upgrade. It seems like a no-brainer to me. It doesn't get any simpler or less disruptive. There is nothing truly wrong with Vista, so I see no reason to try to avoid it.

    As for the classic stuff, I use classic to feed my desire for extreme minimalism. Something Vista fucked up already with it's inability to customize the folder window interface which is pretty godawful, but I forgive it anyway for its technical benefits and overall technological progression. Still, unless Windows 7 allows me to remove a lot of buttons and parts of the UI I find redundant or useless, I won't like it for the UI.
  • edited July 2009
    Well, this is what a Windows 7 explorer window looks like by default:

    7computer.png

    That blue bar near the top is context sensitive, it'll have different options if you are say, in a folder that is full if images.

    7crumbs.png

    Here's what a folder looks like. Every folder leading up to it in the address bar is clickable so you can quickly go up into a higher folder. That sidebar with all the pinned folders and stuff, the contents of that never change from folder to folder. I always hated the XP sidebar for that.

    Here's my desktop with the start menu open:

    http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/1049/7menu.jpg

    Notice the icons at the bottom. The ones that are highlighted are open, the ones that aren't currently don't have windows open, but are pinned so I can open them quickly.

    7seach.png

    Typing in the name of anything in that search bar will first bring up hits from programs in the start menu, then searches from indexed locations. I don't even bother looking through the start menu when now I can just hit the WIN key and type a few letters in.

    I also like how they made the system tray work.

    7task.png

    Honestly, I'm really serious about how much I like the interface. I've used Vista (passingly, I never ran it as an OS but I've used computers with it a bit) and not only does everything just run snappier, it feels a lot more intuitive, I haven't once gotten pissed off while messing with stuff because something wasn't working in the way I expected it to like I did in XP ALL THE TIME.

    Oh, and that little rectangle at the lower right of the screen shows the desktop if you hover over it. There are a lot of little UI things like that, like windows snapping and resizing to the screen when you drag them to the edges of your monitor.

    Microsoft really REALLY improved how Windows manages RAM and stuff like that. I believe 7 even has a lower system requirement than Vista did. And it took like... 25 minutes max to install, it was quick. I was surprised how fast it installed.
  • edited July 2009
    I like the look so far.

    Edit:comment retracted, thanks google!
  • edited July 2009
    Oh, and the ability to cycle wallpaper is built right in. I haven't even changed the default wallpapers that came with the OS because they are all great.
  • edited July 2009
    I'd like to take this opportunity to plug Newegg.com. They've got some of the cheapest prices for computer parts and software, and they have reliable reviews from other buyers. They also sell platform games.
  • edited July 2009
    You are one elaborate spam bot, missy.
  • edited July 2009
    I almost only buy computer parts from newegg. It's rare that I'll get anything anywhere else.
  • edited July 2009
    Yeah newegg just recently revived my PC's gaming side for about $70

    They don't have it up anymore but I ordered a BFG (essentially Nvidia) 9600GT for $69.99, and It usually retails for around $150-$200

    Hell, I'm playing Crysis like nothing with this, and easily cranking 50+ FPS on ultra settings in WoW
  • edited July 2009
    I'm a spam bot, now? Cool.

    Anyway, yeah, we rebuilt my husband's comp recently for less than $300. Priced elsewhere, it would have been more than double that, after deals and rebates.
  • edited July 2009
    Heh. Thanks for the pics. Probably beneficial to some. I'm already familiar with much of it, and Vista has a lot of the same stuff. I'd reiterate though that I'm NOT fond of the UI. Everything is simply too big and less customizable than XP was. I miss a lot of the tricks from XP (classic. The default in XP was even worse than Vista. Yuck.)

    I'll be getting Windows 7 anyway though, because XP is simply too old. I can agree with that. XP doesn't even support my hardware ( I need 64-bit, and I wasn't about to use XP64)

    Also, the only part of my computer not from newegg is the case and that's only because I'm a kinda crazy.
  • edited July 2009
    This gives me a small amount of hope for the future. I still use XP and I want to get a new computer in the near future, but I really wasn't into Vista. 7 doesn't look all that bad from what I've seen here. I'll have to look into it more.
  • edited July 2009
    Hey, if you haven't bought Vista yet X'o, newegg is selling copies of Vista that come with an upgrade voucher for Windows 7, I believe for like ten dollars more than Vista sells for by itself.
  • edited July 2009
    Well, I haven't yet, 'cause I'm a lazy dork like that, but they've been selling those for a while. I was planning to pick one up, I just gotta decide which version I want.
  • edited July 2009
    Hey, how do you set up dual monitors? Do you need a special video card or software, or is it nothing more than changing a setting somewhere? I can get some good looking Chinese monitors for cheap, and I was thinking about getting one.