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…
Aside 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!
Unfortunately 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.
The 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.
I 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.
To 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.
The 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!
Mounting 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.
At 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.
With 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.
Aside 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!
