Brand New Toy, Baby

Occasionally when I a fellow geek gets a new computer, there is the natural tug of curiosity which is sometimes accompanied by curiosity’s vulgar companion, jealousy.  Envious feelings can be especially strong when what they have is significantly better than what you have.

When said fellow geek actually builds a PC that is better than yours, the virtual gauntlet has been thrown.  That’s not a perfect analogy unless the geek is in your face being Smuggy McSmugMug about their new build.  Usually though, the geek is wrapped up in the joy of having the next shiny thing and could care less about what you’re feeling.  Hey man, when a gamer geek can play L4D2 with the settings maxed out, you’re lucky they even acknowledge your presence.

But there it is for you…that twinge.  The thought that you are hopelessly behind the curve and forced to play games that are already two years old.  In the interests of honesty, I felt the twinge when my friend Mark updated his PC.  Now, Mark did so because he wanted to play some PC games and really wanted a good experience and not because he wanted a new smoking machine.  For me…twinge.

It wasn’t just because Mark got a new PC that I wanted to upgrade.  Looking at some of the games coming out next year that I’m really interested in playing, I found that although I was doing okay on most components, I actually found that my CPU stats were out of date.  That seems ridiculous to me, but there it was.  Minimum specs were already above what I had on my current PC on a highly desirable game, which I should mention was not a high end, graphics punishing game.

I did the shopping, did the one to one comparisons, and found the nice middle road of price and performance.  In doing so, I thought I’d  break down the build and show you what goes into building a machine.  I have pics too, so even extra special bonus.  All parts here were purchased from that bastion of PC building geekdom, Newegg.com.

Here’s a pic of the packages that had arrived.

You might notice with close examination that there is no case.  There’s a reason for this.  I had an extra case sitting in the garage, and although this was an older case, it would serve just fine for transporting my “old rig” into while I would put the new parts into my perfectly fine case.  Let’s get to it.

Here you can see my old PC with the video card out and all of the power cables removed.  Also unplugged are the SATA cables, but nearly everything else would remain.  My thought would be that I would take out the motherboard complete with CPU and memory still attached and transplant as much as I could without removing every single part.  Memory, of course, is not a big deal but the CPU can be a bit of a pain to reseat.  Seeing I was not expecting many problems with it fitting into the other case, this seemed logical for me to do.  However, I ran into some other “things” that would make the transplant more of a bother than I  initially thought.

Not much to say here.  Everything is out except the DVD burner which was next and took only a few seconds to pop out of the case.

For the motherboard, I went with the ASUS M4A785-TD EVO.  Lots of letters which probably don’t mean much to most people.  Here’s the things that appealed to me as a PC builder.  Nice, clean layout.  Everything is clearly marked on the board, tons of USB ports on the back, lots of SATA ports, a Firewire port, good placement of heatsinks and bunch of nice features in the BIOS.  Not that I was planning on it, but this board overclocks nicely and I could really squeeze more performance out of every component if I needed.  One thing to note for those considering this board.  It does have on-board video which I thought was pretty nice and includes an HDMI port.  People not looking for a top end video solution might be pleasantly surprised with this feature.

Here we see the new motherboard in the “old” case.  You might notice the new power supply in the bottom left corner of the picture.  A few words on the PSU.  This is a Corsair CMPSU-650TX.  In the past, I’ve just thought power supplies were pretty much all the same.  This power supply changed my mind, not just with PSUs, but pretty much all components.  I’ll explain my reasonings further into the post for the other parts.  With this Corsair PSU, I was pleasantly surprised with the sturdiness, the ease with which it fit into the case, the little extras that were in the package like the case screws, the included cable ties, the packaging.  Everything was a nice experience rather than a “just enough” solution.  The extras meant a lot to me as a buyer.

Here we see the CPU mounted into the board.  The CPU I went with was the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2Ghz.  Yeah, I know.  Like the motherboard name, a lot of letters and numbers but what does it all mean.  Quite simply, this is one of their top consumer offerings right now.

I’ve been a long time AMD supporter and have not been disappointed with their offerings, so once again, I went with them.  I also like competition in the marketplace and AMD is really the only consumer CPU manufacturer besides the giant that is Intel.  While I could have gone with the better performing, and consequently more expensive Intel chip, AMD offers better bang for the buck.  The Phenom chip I purchased has four cores, the Black Edition offers easy overclocking and the price simply could not be beat in comparison to Intel chips.  I just simply wouldn’t notice the gains I would get from paying an extra $30 getting an i5 chip.  The cheapest i7 chip cost $125 more than the Phenom from AMD.  Does mean that I would get a comparable performance boost?  Not really.

One thing you may notice is that I went with a stock case fan and heatsink.  Like I said before, I don’t plan on overclocking the chip as of yet, so why sink an extra $50 into a after-market CPU cooling solution if I don’t have to?  All of the reviews I saw said the heatsink/fan which came with the chip would do the trick.  Good enough for me.  Other than the off center branding on the top of the fan, everything else about the cooling fan and heatsink seemed solid.

Somewhat ironically, I don’t have a photo of my video card, an HIS Radeon HD 5750 with 1GB of on-board RAM by ATI.  I took a risk here seeing that HIS is a relatively new player in the video card scene, but the reviews on this manufacturer have generally been positive.  I went with the HD 5750 for the good reviews on it’s performance in comparison to other cards.  At it’s price point, it should be a value card, but the performance and features really stand out.  It has a lot of upside, beating other cards handily in it’s price range.  It will also will do DirectX 11 when it comes out, something a lot of video cards cannot promise and which will save me from an unnecessary upgrade in the future.  Another upside is that if I wanted, I could buy another card and put them into Crossfire mode.  I know this is a lot to go on just by the reviews from other people, but I felt relatively safe with this choice.  Out of all of the parts, this one was the hardest to choose.

Hard drive is not really worth talking about as I got a standard 320GB.  My media actually goes on either my external hard drive or a 1TB drive I bought for just that purpose.  The DVD player…meh.  Hardly worth mentioning.  The memory purchased was 4GB of G-Skill memory.  Again, nothing to get too excited about.  Not like the next photo, anyway.

Yes, I know.  I’ve railed against Windows and Microsoft many times in the past, but there’s two reasons for this purchase.  First of all, Windows 7 will see all 4GB of my memory.  That’s no small thing.  In fact, the first upgrade I will do in the future will be to fill my other two slots of memory and go to 8GB which Windows 7 will see and use.  The venerable Windows XP just does not have that sort of memory capacity and we are in the days of cheap RAM.

Secondly, I blogged about this before.  The game support for Linux just isn’t there.  I don’t like it and I’m not a fan of supporting Microsoft just because of it, but I like my PC to play games.  I’m taking out one frustration for what is supposed to be something enjoyable.  There are two things here that are a problem with gaming on a Linux platform.  First, the audio drivers/codecs just have not caught up.  I’ve been watching that scene from a distance, but it still seems that they are not making significant strides toward providing a good audio experience.

The second reason, which I lie squarely at the feet of developers, is their continued practice not using common tools which can be easily ported to different systems.  Back in the day, games were written in C.  Simple to move a game from one system to the next because it didn’t matter what platform you were on as long as it could run the standard C programs.  Now, it’s a big issue.  Take LOTRO, for example.  It’s a game that runs fine on other operating systems with a few bugs–I don’t know what it is written in, but I know that it works for the most part.  The program launcher is written in .NET though.  Why?  Seems like a stupid way to shut out part of your potential audience.  I really don’t want to think that this is some idiotic way of kissing up to Microsoft.  But I digress.  Let’s get back to the build.

When I fired up the PC, good things were happening.  Believe me, there’s a little drop of your heart when you fire up your PC and what you expect to happen doesn’t and you begin to catalog in your head what possibly could have gone wrong.  Luckily, no problem here.  The BIOS came up and after entering time and date, everything else seemed in order.  I booted it up, loaded Windows 7 and got to my desktop in about forty minutes.  Not bad.

It seemed snappier, quieter and ironed out some strange bugs that were beginning to irritate me on the XP system.  I don’t have too much on the system now as I haven’t moved over my games from Steam.  I did load up LOTRO (which if the guys from Turbine are reading…seriously, it took me almost three hours to download the updates for the game–can you spell “frustration”?) and it looked gorgeous.  Silky smooth animation, fast load times and a beautiful looking game.  All of that meant that my video card was working great, my CPU was easily keeping up and the memory I loaded was chugging along quite nicely.

I mentioned earlier about how I was impressed with the power supply and that I saw this in other components.  Mainly, this build was a breeze because the main parts were quality built.  The ASUS board had a lot to like in the layout, the labeling, the pin assignments…everything was put together in a way that had the builder in mind.  Same could be said for the power supply and the case (a Cooler Master Centurion 5) which all in combination, made this an easy build.  They all cost a few dollars more, but the satisfaction in the ease of building made all the difference to me.  All other parts are pretty much plug and play, so if you can get these three right, you can certainly save yourself some frustration.

So, to my geeky, PC building friends out there…I guess my own gauntlet has been thrown.  I won’t mind if you feel the need to out-do me here because I’ll be too busy drooling over my new box, playing LOTRO, killing zombies or taking care of the dog.