white noise

Yet another box from newegg at my door today. This time it was the CPU and DVD burner. For the CPU I went with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+. It’s a dual core, 64 bit, 2.2 GHz (stock), with a meg of L2 Cache for each core. The included heatsink is actually a nice unit, too – we’ll see how it performs soon. My goal is to overclock this to 2.4 GHz that the 4800 chip runs at (which is $170 more).

Also in this shipment was a Lite-On DVD Burner. It’s 16x for DVD+/-R, 8x for dual layer, and 48x for CD-R. Oh, and it does Lightscribe direct disk labeling. A sweet buy at under $50.

Both items pruchased at newegg.com

One more component showed up today, a 80 GB SATA 3Gb/s hard drive. It’s the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and has a 8MB cache and NCQ. Sure, I would’ve prefered a 16MB cache, but those jump up in price a fair bit. This little guy should be nice and speedy for the OS and core applications. I’m still debating whether to pick up another one for RAID 0 or maybe RAID 1. I’m also still shopping for a deal on 250-300 GB SATA 3Gb/s to do the heavy lifting.

Purchased from newegg.com

The next piece just arrived, the A8N32-Deluxe motherboard from Asus.

This is one killer board – two x16 PCI express slots, 6 SATA II ports, on-board RAID controller, on-board 8 channel audio, dual Gb LAN, and so on. It’s probably a bit more than I needed for a dead processor line (939 socket), but it’ll serve me well through the next chip gen or two before I switch.

Asus really provides a great package – lots of cables, OC and tuning software, extra external ports to install if you wish (fire, usb, game, serial). It looks great, too, with the black PCB and copper heatpipe.

Purchased from newegg.com

OK, it’s not really part of ‘the build’, but it will be part of the system. I picked up a new 19″ LCD monitor today. I’ve been looking at getting one for a couple years (remember my VIAO laptop has a 12″ screen), but I’ve gotten more serious lately with the build happening now. After much debate (what’s new) I decided on the Sony HS95P.

I really wanted something a little higher-res and/or widescreen, but $140 in rebates swayed me to this one at well under the $400 mark. Its feature set is pretty average (1280×1024, 4:3 ratio, 12ms response, DVI and VGA in, decent contrast and brightness), but the picture is AWESOME. Super crisp, and super deep. I’m a big fan of Sony’s XBRITE treatment and this monitor is no exception.

Purchased from CircuitCity.com

Piece number 3 rolled in today…2 GB of RAM. Since I’m looking forward to using an Athlon X2 processor I opted for 2 sticks of DDR 400.

These XMS sticks aren’t the very top of the Corsair line (they don’t have any LEDs), but they’re close considering the price. They’re spec’ed to run at 2-3-3-6 timings, which is pretty good for $176. They should be pretty tolerant of overclooking, too (though I might have to relax the timing a bit).

Purchased from newegg.com.

Piece number 2 arrives – the power supply. I decided on the Hiper Type-R 580W in chrome. SLI certified, aviation style connects, up to four SATA drives, what more could you ask for?

This thing is sweet! No pimp LEDs, but the chrome cladding is slick – even the fans are chrome. Seriously, it looks like a great unit and it came with a great assortment of cables in braided red sheaths.

Purchased from Xoxide.com.

The first piece of the great computer build has arrived…the case. Gentlemen, start your drooling:

Now most people probably don’t drain a major part of their budget on a case, but of course I’m not most people (have you seen my basement ceiling). Maybe it was that I needed a little extra bling to help me get past not buying a new sleek laptop. Nah, actually it makes a lot of sense. You see I’m not the type to build a new machine ever year or two – maybe upgrade a component or two sure, but this case will live a long life. With that in mind I wanted something that could be used as a HTPC in the basement in the future. Something rack mountable would be nice since there’ll be a 19″ rack going in down there. Then I got to thinking, “Do I really want to power up the projector just to transfer a file or change some music that’s playing?”. Surely not. Of course I could use remote desktop from a laptop, but that might be a hastle, too.

Enter the Silverstone LC-18. With it’s builtin 7 inch 16 x 9 touchscreen LCD, it’s perfect for the basement rack! With all that said, I haven’t decided how soon it might actually make it’s way down there. There are some gaming issues to work if it were in the rack. But I’m guessing I’ll have a handle on that when the basement actually gets done. In the meantime I’ll keep it upstairs like a standard desktop (with a second tiny monitor).

Purchased from case-mod.com (via ebay).

After months of debating whether my next computer will be a new high-end laptop or a self-built desktop, I’ve finally decided on the later.

And what a hard decision it was! Between the Dell M170 laptop which is branded with my own corporate moniker (XPS) and some sleek new VIAOs rolling out with a graphics toggle to switch between integrated (battery life) and an Nvidia 7 series card (performance), the laptops almost won me over. After all we’ve been a laptop-only household for a few years now.

But ultimately what won me over to the boat-anchor side of the scene was pure graphics performance. Even at the highest ranks there are laptops which support battery melting SLI graphics, but those dual cards still don’t compare to their desktop equivalents. After digging through the Nvidia specs between the desktop 7 series and the GO 7 series equivalents, the choice was clear. Actually I didn’t have to look much further than my $4k+ Dell laptop for work, whose Quatro FX 1000 card is getting outpaced by the latest games (F.E.A.R. is unplayable).

The need here was clearly to get a machine that could take my gaming duties back from my work laptop. The Dell M60 has served me well, but I’m litterly almost out of disk space for actual work files and the games I can play on it are turned way down on the quality scale. Not to mention that taking my bread and butter machine (which I don’t own) to lanwar is a worry I’ll be glad to be rid of.

Gaming isn’t the only goal of the new box. My 1.1GHz VAIO laptop really limps with video work and can even be maxed out with heavy audio processing. I’m still holding on to the old boy. It’s the perfect travel mate – the 12″ screen never saw a airline tray table it didn’t like. But it might be pretty much limited to web work (which is actually why I bought it in the first place – Thanks McDonalds!).

So, a desktop it is; and piecing it together myself seems like a no-brainer. I just like having more control than the OEMs give you. Especially when it comes to selecting ram, hard drives, and such. Heck, I think building your own is worth just getting a clean install of the OS with no extra bloatware.

Watch the saga unfold….this is going to be fun!

Project timeline – I’d like to have it together around April.
Project budget – Since the laptops I was considering would’ve run close to $3k, I’ll be happy if I can keep this close to $2k.