Simon Butcher

New computer

Posted
Comments 4

The new kit!

I've been holding back from buying a new PC for quite some time now. Actually, it's been years. My main PC has been a Toshiba Satellite M70 (1.6GHz Pentium M, 2GiB RAM, 60GB HDD, surprisingly good speakers, and an annoying DVD drive which cannot be flashed with RPC-1 firmware). It's a great little laptop, even today, and aside from the low-end GPU and slow HDD, it runs really well.

This poor thing has travelled the world with me, but it's about time I upgraded. For several projects I've been needing a lot more processing grunt, RAM, local storage, and (eventually) desktop real estate. Today most of the stuff has arrived, and it's taken so long because I've been very picky about what I wanted in the build. It's been a long time since I've built a PC, and a few people have asked me to show them the build…

Inside the Nexus EDGE caseAside from performance, the machine had to be quiet. Really quiet. If I could avoid using fans, I would, but that would mean compromising on performance. “Silence” begins with the case, so after much debating I settled on the Nexus EDGE, a case made from thick steel and aluminium, built in sound absorbing foam, but plenty of ventilation so any fans can be large, slow and efficient. It also looks quite reasonable, and has boat-loads of space inside, which will be important for the goodies I want to cram in there!

The rear of the Nexus EDGE caseUnfortunately the case is lacking a few more card slots on the rear for the motherboard I was originally hoping to purchase, but with three 140mm fans and an opening for an additional 120mm fan the ventilation, the easy to remove air filters, and the sound-proofing was too good to pass up. One further downside to the case is that the screw-less fastening system for the card slots doesn't exactly accommodate double-slot cards, like the newer graphics cards, but a little bit of reworking can solve that.

Nexus RX-1K PSU mounted inside a Nexus EDGE caseThe 140mm fans that come with the case are a little on the cheap side, but they'll do for now. They can be PWM controlled at least, which is nice. While ordering the case, I gave up trying to sift through marketing material and settled on the Nexus RX-1K 1kW power supply, which exceeds my power budget for the build by about 300w. The nice thing about this model is that it comes with modular connectors, so any cables I don't need can be unplugged from the unit to increase airflow through the case.

The PSU comes with a self-regulated 135mm fan which is pretty hard to hear. Under some basic load testing, the PSU seemed to perform as specified by Nexus, getting just under 12V into a 900W dummy load, so I appreciate their honesty. The PSU also comes with a rubber mount which helps dampen any vibrations.

Intel i7 980X boxI decided to head down the Intel route rather than sticking with AMD based on their ability to chomp on heavy loads. I settled on the Intel i7 980X 3.33GHz 6-core hyper-threaded CPU rather than the (significantly cheaper) AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2GHz 6-core CPU, based on the fact that I'm often a very heavy multi-tasker. It'll be out of date next week by some standards, but it'll last me years.

Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboardTo suppose this beast, I chose the Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard. Actually, it was my second choice as I'm hesitant to buy Asus products, and as expected the BIOS is buggy and their support is appalling, but it's still a fairly solid motherboard once you avoid any over-clocking or excessive power saving settings.

The north-bridge on this board runs painfully hot (and I'm not overclocking this system), and Asus clearly knew this was a problem because they supply the board with a reasonably pathetic heat-sink which can be swapped out with an included heat-sink and fan. This little tiny fan is a noisy piece of junk, and I can't imagine it would even survive very long before it became noisier. Consequently, I'm not using it, and I'll be watching the temperatures carefully to see if I should use a better heat-sink.

Prolimatech Megahalems Rev. B boxThe stock cooler that comes with the CPU surprisingly isn't too bad, but when the load gets higher it tends to whine a little. To keep things quiet, I bought the Prolimatech Megahalems Rev. B cooler, which is complete overkill for the CPU but it means the fan driving it can be large, slow and quiet. Unlike other coolers, it's within the weight tolerances (slightly heavier than the stock cooler from Intel), leaves just enough room for my RAM on this motherboard, and most importantly it fits in the case!

Megahalems mount under motherboardMounting a cooler this heavy required a bit of extra work before the motherboard could be mounted in the case, which is new to me! Sorry for the bad photo, but I figure it would help someone out as I wasn't able to find any details as to whether it was going to be compatible or not.

Prolimatech Megahalems Rev. BAt 790g, this thing is so heavy it tends to make me a little worried given that the motherboard will be vertical in the tower case. For the insane, two fans can be strapped to the Megahalems on either side, but I only needed one. I settled for a Be Quiet! SilentWings 120×25mm PWM fan which provides so much airflow at low RPMs that even under reasonably high loads the heat-sink is just a bit warms to the touch.

Corsair 4GiB DDR3 1333MHz C9 RAM sticksWith RAM so cheap these days, I decided to go with six sticks of Corsair 4GiB DDR3 1333MHz C9 XMS3 RAM, giving 24GiB of RAM at the cost of a negligible performance hit. I may regret buying Corsair products again, but I haven't had a problem with the RAM.

The CPU, Cooler, and RAM installedAside from this stuff, I am using a temporary graphics card (with a so-so GPU), and have bought a Corsair Extreme Series X256 SSD for my system drive; however it failed after the first 15 minutes. After returning it, I received another one which failed after about 25 minutes, and the third one failed after 10 minutes. Funny, Corsair doesn't sell these anymore, and I won't buy Corsair ever again, and this has been replaced with an Intel X-25M G2 160GB SSD which is fantastic.

A good graphics card and new monitors are on hold for now, and two Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB hard drives (which will be in RAID-1) are still on backorder. I managed to track down a brand new LG GGW-H10L Blu-ray/HD-DVD combination drive, which while it fails to burn dual-layer BD-R discs it is a pretty good all-rounder drive, and can allow me to exploit the cheap HD-DVD movie market now that that little war is over.

More to come!


Categories Geek Toys

Comments

  1. Personally, When i went to get my SSD for my work laptop; I was going to get an OCZ drive, and was convinced at the store that they actually had quite a high fail rate, and ended up getting a 128G Crucial M4 Drive. (i saw a So far performance has been stellar. But in regards to Corsair, there are some things I would always continue to buy of theirs. # RAM # PSU Their PSU's are great with the level of modularity they have, allowing you to not have excess cabling just sitting in the PC. They may be a little bit dearer, but it's all I'm buying from now on :-) And i Haven't had any RAM/PSU's fail from them so far (and the oldest PC i have with Corsair parts is almost 5 years old!) Now that you have 24G of RAM, you should consider using some of your RAM as a RAM drive; as you will see great performance, especially in high-write/read scenarios, when stuff normally exists on non-SSD drives. (I assume you still have some data on Non-SSD's! Haven't tried it myself, but apparently RAM drives can provide a lot of benefit to gaming, tho I don't recall you being the gamer :-) p.s. i saw this on amazon the other day, and had to resist from buying it ! http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch-Solid-State-CT256M4SSD2/dp/B004W2JL2A/ref=pd_cp_e_0 M4: http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CT128M4SSD2 PSU: http://www.corsair.com/power-supply-units/professional-series-power-supply-units.html

  2. (Author)

    If I'm honest, the X25-M is as fast as I need it to be (but more importantly I went for it for the reliability figures, and reliability with SSDs is something that's being watched very closely). For day-to-day use the RAM is beautiful as cache. I haven't seen a need for a RAM drive since the mid-90s, and I think if it's necessary then the software is shit. I've seen a lot of daft recommendations to put the swap file on a RAM drive to speed up performance, but clearly people don't understand what the swap file is actually for. When editing photos, videos, etc., I tend to chew through the 24GiB faster than you'd expect. The two WD 3TB drives in RAID-1 are surprisingly fast considering their rated RPM (they're Caviar Green drives, mostly because they're bloody silent and consume very little power), but they were only ever designed as a repository for large files (backups, a few VM images, old raw scratch files, etc.). They'd run better with a proper RAID controller of course, such as one with a decent battery-backed cache, but the on-board Marvell controller is doing _okay_ for now. I keep things pretty neat and tidy, so despite the SSD being 160GB I still have more than enough room if I need a big file with decent performance. I'd put the SSD in RAID too if I could find a RAID controller that is affordable, has very good performance, and _completely_ supports TRIM. I have a UPS for the machine too, so I can take advantage of write caching with slightly less risk. Corsair pissed me off with their RMA policies and their inability to admit a problem. I wasn't surprised at all when the product disappeared from the shelved, but wasn't actually recalled publicly. That's not the way to treat your customers. ... Why do I feel like I'm back on IRC? :)

  3. Haha (or should I say 'heh') :-) Swap in RAM! That's... that's quite the dumbest thing I've heard ;) The biggest improvement I've seen statistically of running things in RAM (as a RAM drive), is with seeing games running on one. Load time for disk based content (loading levels, etc), can improve up to about 50%, depending on the game. Downside, is you spend a-lot longer getting the game *into* RAM. Might not be as big of an issue, if you are playing only a single game at a time. Intel > * definately tho, i do agree. I think the only problem with SSD's at the moment, is the life of them is still far to short than what I ideally want. 3TB's? nice, if they were purchased at the time of the PC, I can only imagine they set you back a pretty penny! I'm waiting for the price of 3TB's to get down to reasonable (Thailand floods have affected that), before i update my 1.5T's to 3T's (the jump to 2T's wasnt worth it. I did get 2T drives for my Microserver last year tho (A HP N36L, nice little machine); so that starved off my lack of disk space for a while. This isn't quite IRC... yet ;) Do you twitter?

  4. (Author)

    Not being a gamer, I don't really see the need, but in my eternal struggles with Microsoft SQL I've certainly experimented with a variety of RAM drive solutions (mostly for the parallel temporary database files for when running databases in snapshot isolation on machines with a silly number of cores), but I've always come back to not really wanting to use system RAM as a drive because it always ends up performing better as a read cache. With Windows 7, Microsoft finally got it about right. Actually the 3TB drives were some of the cheapest parts, coming in around €370.14 (about €20 more than the SSD was). I couldn't resist! :) The drives even came with a little SATA controller each because of "compatibility issues" (I'm obviously not booting from them, but I guess some people might need the HBA), and there was a lot of hysteria about compatibility at the time. There probably still is, I just don't pay attention, and it's nothing new to me. I remember when I got my first 200MB hard drive (not knowing what to do with the abundance of space), and it wasn't compatible with my BIOS at the time (the BIOS had no ability to enter "type 47" or "custom" disk parameters, requiring not a flash but a new ROM chip to arrive in the post). I remember when I got my first 800MB hard drive (not knowing what to do with the abundance of space), and it wasn't compatible with my BIOS at the time (appeared as 504MiB, so had to run a shitty TSR from OnTrack which would trap interrupt 13h and fix the translations). I remember when I got my first 6GB hard drive (not knowing what to do with the abundance of space), and it wasn't compatible with my BIOS at the time (worked as a 3.94GiB drive, had to rewrite the EEPROM to allow LBA instead of CHS geometry). I remember when I got my first 20GB hard drive (not knowing what to do with the abundance of space), and it wasn't compatible with my BIOS, Windows or DOS at the time (worked as a 7.8GiB drive, needed another interrupt 13h hack). I remember when I got my first 250GB hard drive (not knowing what to do with the abundance of space), and it wasn't compatible with my BIOS or my controllers as to the time (appeared as a 128GiB disk, needed to get a new HBA). I remember when I got my two 3TB hard drives (not knowing what to do with the abundance of space), and incredibly, they worked, first time. I've managed to dodge a lot of the other "disk barriers" along the way, and I was happy that these drives had no problem what-so-ever. Anyway, if you're looking for cheaper 3TB disks, look for external disks that use the drives (be careful to avoid those which are actually two 1.5TB disks inside) - I found one model which was using the exact same WD Caviar Green 3TB drives in a USB enclosure that was selling for _cheaper_. I wanted to go for quiet and low power, which is why I spent a little more, but if that's not a concern then it's certainly much cheaper just to get a bunch of 2TB drives. I'm not too concerned about the reliability of the SSD drives - I think the MTBFs are unproven. I'm backing mine up on a regular basis just in case, but with all of the fancy wear-levelling stuff in there I'm not as concerned as I used to be. Besides, with no need to thrash the SSDs with defragmentation or other maintenance, and my page file is on my 3TB drives (it never really gets hit anyway), most of the data on the drive is "static" (OS, program files, etc). BTW, I don't "tweet", I don't "face", and I don't "plus" or whatever you kids say for these new-fangled things. _Get off my lawn!_ pre. * pickle has joined #chaty * ChanOP sets mode +o pickle ‹pickle› Better now?

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