Computer building
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.
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.
Comments
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?
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
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?
- CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
- GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3L LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
- MSI N260GTX-T2D896-OCv2 GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
- CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX 520W ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply
- COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black Aluminum Bezel , SECC Chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit:comment retracted, thanks google!
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
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.
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.