There were two main reasons to build this computer. Damian’s laptop, a hand-me-down almost 8 years old, had been showing signs of impending failure for some time. No surprise, he runs it 24×7 and the heat has physically damaged the finish on his desktop. And Pam, who plays Sims2 on her relatively recent desktop-replacement laptop, had been grumbling for a little more oomph. A plan was laid and by Christmas each would have their upgrades.
The Core i7 CPUs were just hitting the shelves and I briefly considered going that route. The on-board memory controller, new for Intel, meant new motherboard designs and chipsets. With reliability (not to mention my wallet – the i7s are kinda pricey today) in mind I chose the Core 2 Quad Q9550 instead. Well-supported, I’ve heard of folks pushing the 2.83 GHz part to 4 GHz and beyond. Cooling is always an issue but I didn’t want the hassle of liquid systems so an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro was added to the list.
The Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DS3R motherboard has been getting excellent reviews for its tweakability and DDR3 memory support so it was added to the list. Everyone knows that memory is king. I started with two sticks (4 GB) of Corsair 1333 Mhz DDR3. It’s an easy no-loss jump from there to 8 GB. And if swapped for 4 GB parts, this board will hold 16 GB so there would be some headroom left for the future.
The next choice was the GPU. Wow, things had come a long way since I last paid attention! After an evening of digesting reviews a choice was made: the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 from EVGA. The 896 MB NVIDIA-based unit turns in solid performance for the price and also has some potential for tweaking later.
Key to user satisfaction is a good monitor choice and one in particular has always stood out: the HP w2408h. 24 inches of HDMI, 5 ms, high-contrast saturated colors with a native 1920×1200 resolution. Sometimes you’ve got to just swallow hard and go for it, and this was one of those times. Pam would be delighted with this monitor, and that’s what I was aiming for.
The rest of the component choices were rather pedestrian. A DVD-RW drive for loading stuff, a Western Digital SATA drive for holding stuff, a Microsoft wireless laser mouse for pointing at stuff, and a WLAN card to avoid a new cable run. A nice-looking, well-built Antec P182 case would hold all this nicely with plenty of room for expansion. Oh, yeah, and an OEM 64-bit Vista Home Premium. Y’know, buying a copy of Windows always leaves my stomach a bit unsettled and this was no exception – not to mention that this would be the first Vista box in the house. Well, at least it shipped with SP1…
A bit of back-of-the-envelope power analysis called a power supply of 650-700 watts, so a BFG Tech ES-800 was added to the list. (This PSU would end up failed in less than a month, hmmm, more on that in a future entry.)
The final order was placed with Newegg and soon the components were coming in. Between these and other Christmas shipments our UPS driver was becoming a daily visitor!
Physically, the build went quite uneventfully, easily even, thanks to component standardization and that well-designed Antec case. Oh, there were the usual share of driver issues, a BIOS change or two, a few ‘trial’ Windows installs, stuff like that, but nothing that couldn’t be handled. Vista reported a base score of 5.9 for every subsystem, the highest available as this is written.
Pam named her new rig Thor. Then the machine-shuffling got started in earnest.
Overall I’m pleased with the result, but there have been a number of… interesting… things that I’ll talk about in subsequent entries. Like that failed power supply, for one. Stay tuned.
