Warren Pickett
to Les, Laris,
I thought you might enjoy reading about Chris's
new computer, and seeing some pictures. Here's his description,
pulled out of a password-required blog with his gaming friends.
Jill and I leave in an hour to go to their superbowl
party, they live about 40 miles from us in Crockett, near
Farifield (not far from Berkeley). Best, Warren
Lester Pickett
to Warren, me, show details Feb 2 (4 days ago)
Reply
Impressive computing station! (And tidy description, too!)
Les
Chris Pickett
to Warren Pickett
Dad,
{this is a couple of months old}
Here is what you requested on my computer build. I copied the rest
of the family so you can see what a geek I am as well. As if you
didn't already know.
Chris
This is a thread on my build process for my new computer. Let me get
a few things out of the way up front. This is not an economical
computer build. I built this with top of the line components, many
of which just came onto the market within the last few weeks. I did
not build this computer just to play WoW, that would be foolish given
WoW's requirements. I built this party because I play all my games
on a 30" monitor at 2560x1600 resolution and with full eye candy that
is a lot of pixel pushing. I doubt I could play Crysis on high
settings at that resolution even with this computer. I also built
this to overclock. I like tweaking with my timings, voltages,
frequencies etc to get the equivalent of a $10,000 computer for the
low low price of $3,500 (about what this cost me). I also support
Stanford's Folding @ Home project that uses idle processors to
simulate protein folding. Basically when I'm not at my computer it
is being used for cancer research.
Ok, lets get started.
I ordered most of my components from Newegg.com. I have had great
experiences with them in the past and would recommend them to anyone
building a computer. This picture shows all of my components except
my Ram and aftermarket CPU cooler which hadn't arrived yet. Guess
which box cost the most? If you guessed the tiny brown one, you're
right. I'll explain that later.
I'm not going to list each component in detail right now but I'll
start by explaining that I was building a computer based off of
Intel's latest micro architecture. The chipset is LGA1336 and the
CPU is referred to as the Core i7 (code named Nehalem during
development). It is a quad core chip with on-board memory controller
(a first for Intel) and supports triple channel DDR3 memory, i.e.
this is the latest and greatest.
Starting the build process almost always starts with the case. I
went with a brand new case from Cooler Master, the ATCS 840. I have
previously built with Lian-Li cases due to their all aluminum
material and high quality of construction. This case by Cooler
Master basically brings them up to Lian Li's level as far as top end
cases go. This thing is a monster. You can't really tell its size
by the picture, but take my word for it. Here are a few pictures of
some of the features. Cooling was my number one concern since I plan
to push this chip to the edge of its limits. These two fans are
massive and almost silent.
The best feature by far is the removable motherboard tray. This is
awesome. It allows you to do a large part of the build without
dealing with a case being in your way.
Ok, moving on. The first step is to install the motherboard onto the
tray.
To install you basically put some risers into the correct slots in
the mobo tray and then put screws into the risers through the mobo.
The next step is installing the CPU. As I mentioned I went with the
Intel Core i7. I am no fan boy, but this chip is just the item right
now. AMD can't compete at the top end right now (coming from someone
with AMD stock :().
The Core i7 comes in 3 versions. The 920, 940, and 960 come at 2.66,
2.93, and 3.20 GHz respectively and cost 300, 550, and $1000
respectively. I went with the 2.66 GHz 920 with the intent of
overclocking it to 4Ghz myself. Here she is.
Here it is installed. Basically make sure you are putting it in the
right way and there is nothing more to it than snapping the little
lever down to hold it in place.
Now the stock cooler wasn't quite good enough for me since I wanted
to overclock to its limits. You will see what i chose in just a
minute. First step is to attach the cooler support system which was
designed for the 1336 chipset.
Next step is to apply thermal paste, my aftermarket cooler came with
some which will do just fine, and then place cooler carefully onto
the chip and attach it to the bracket.
Now you didn't think I would get a passive (i.e. no fans) CPU cooler
when I planned to overclock did you? Here she is with fans
attached. I put the stock cooler in the picture for comedic effect.
Also notice how tall it is. That is one of the reasons I went with
such a big case.
So of course I plugged both of the fans into the mobo in "CPU fan"
plugs and was ready to move on. I installed the sound card next.
These days a lot of mobo's come with "on board" sound. This one
takes it to the extreme by adding in a Creative Sound Blaster Supreme
X-Fi card. Also, ignore the fact that the CPU cooler fans are
showing as off, I actually did this before putting them on.
As far is install goes this is a cake walk. Just find the primary
PCI-X 16x slot (blue slot closest to the sound card in above
pictures) and plug it in.
So this was basically the extent of what I could do outside of the
case. Before putting the mobo tray into the case I decided to
install the other case components.
If you look hard you can see a black flat plastic piece under the
power supply. That is a dust filter to prevent dust intake. The
case has dust filters on almost every fan inlet. They are easily
removable and cleanable.
Next up is the LG DVD RW/Blu-Ray Combo drive. I didn't intend to get
Blu-Ray but when I was buildilng I found this drive for $90 at Newegg
and figured it was worth it over a $30 DVD burner alone. Installing
this is as simple as pulling off a faceplate, sliding it in, and
pushing the button from the inside of the case which locks it in
place.
Now to data storage. Remember that expensive brown box I mentioned
before? Well here it is.
So what is it? It is an 80Gb Solid State Disk (SSD) drive.
Basically it is 80 Gigs of hard drive in the form of flash memory
instead of a spinning magnetic disk like a typical HD. Some of you
may have heard of these before and even seen them from other
manufacturers. The problem is that until this one was released they
have all been terrible performers. I won't go into the gory details
here, if you want to know what I am talking about read this.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403
So bottom line is I got the Intel X25-M. 80Gb of storage for $600.
I know, sounds like a lot. If you want justification read the above
article, you will see why I got it. What's that you ask, was it
worth it? So far after having used my computer for 2 weeks or so I
think it was worth every penny. My computer starts up in about 25%
of the time my old one did, maybe even faster. Switching
applications is super fast, loading WoW happens in seconds etc...
Just please don't go buy a OCZ or Samsung SSD on the market right
now. They use a bad controller chip that makes them worse than
normal HDs.
Here it is installed. I had to rig it up kinda ghetto since I didn't
have an adapter and it is so much smaller than a normal HD.
Obviously 80 Gigs isn't enough to build a computer with alone. For
data storage I went with a 1TB Western Digital drive. Nothing
special here except that it is 1 terabyte :). My plan was to install
Vista 64 Ultimate on the SSD along with WoW, and put all my music,
pictures, movies on the hard drive. If you look close in the
installed picture you can see the SSD above it and see just how small
it is comparatively.
By this time my RAM had arrived and I could install that. I went
with 3 sticks of OCZ DDR3. At 2 gigs each that is 6 gigs of RAM
total. As I mentioned earlier this mobo is triple channel, so you
need 3 sticks to get the triple channel performance.
The only thing left at this point was to connect all of the
components and do the best cable management possible. This was the
end result of mine. Not the greatest, but not bad overall.
So here is the end result. This CPU brings back Hyperthreading for
Intel, which means each core can process two thread at once. So in
Windows this shows up as 8 CPUs. How glorious is that?
Here is where I game. That is 3 computers total. My new one running
the two big monitors. My laptop, and my old desktop with a 19"
monitor I had laying around. I know you like my desktop picture, it
is a motherboard chipset with the oh-so-fitting "geek" in the center.
Here is the main setup. I play on the 30" at 2560x1600 resolution
with the 20" on its side for 1200x1600. So when i drag windows
across they don't change size or aspect at all, they both show things
the same.
Currently I'm running at 3.6 Ghz. I can get to 4Ghz easy, but when I
did and ran a benchmark that filled all 4 cores to their max the temp
went to about 84 C, which was a little hot for my liking. I will
probably go back to 4Ghz since I will never use all 4 cores at one
time, but I just haven't done it yet.
I hope you enjoyed reading this. This was my first attempt at
documenting a computer build, so not really done as well as it could
have been. If any of you are considering building your own computer
I would recommend it. I taught myself just by reading things like
this and have been doing it ever since. If you have any questions
let me know.
I do have one update though. Since I wrote that I did speed it up a
bit. I keep it at a stable 3.8 Ghz running around the clock with 4
Folding @ Home CPU clients running and 1 Folding @ Home GPU client
running. If I decide to play a game on it I turn off the GPU client
(since it causes a little stuttering in game if I don't) but keep all
4 CPU clients running with no apparent impact on the computer.
