I thought I'd list the details of the machine I assembled last summer. I got a great deal of help reading the various forums and discussions within them. Without OC3D, I would have been about my task much longer, with much more tentativeness and perhaps with less success. Seeing Tom Logan's avid and enthusiastic description of the Snow White contest prizes motivated me to write.
The last time I put a rig together, in 1988, they called them PCs, not rigs. Prior to that, I'd been assembling computers for 4 years. I put together such a high-end PC that it served me well for 7 years, but hardware was developing so quickly then, that by the time I bought a new machine, I'd been left behind perhaps ten times. I decided I'd buy cheaper, cookie-cutter computers, but just more often. That worked for a while until the high end moved significantly higher than the average.
I started buying more expensive factory-produced machines. The last time I purchased a new desktop machine was 2005. I'm a software developer and I work in systems, communications, signal processing and mathematical areas, all outside of graphics or sound. My son began to develop into a gamer and I started to watch movies on my computer once my internet speed was up to it. My obsolescent machine was irritating him and was finally so outmoded that it was bothering even me. Notwithstanding this, writing text and compiling it were still OK.
I hardly knew where to begin. When I found OC3D, I was able to use all the discussion to come up to speed. Usenet was not as helpful as this site and most articles and blogs were insufficiently technical and lacked both generality and detail. These are the important details of the computer I assembled:
I'm running both the cpu and the memory at standard speeds, 2.8ghz for the processor and 1333 mhz for the RAM. The mother board provides a minor, automated, hands-off overclocking, however, which I'm using, so, I'm running slightly faster than factory spec. I didn't make the effort to learn how to overclock anything. I figured correctly that this would be adequate for my video watching and would be more than enough to make my son happy. He's 14, plays Battlefield Bad Company. Perhaps when he's old enough for it to make a difference to him, he'll show me how to do it. Now, there are no lags caused by the computer or the network, so he's content, content to blow stuff up. This rig has delivered good results for me, too.
The Razer Lycosa keyboard has buggy driver software and has design flaws. I bought it for the feel of the keystrokes, but I'd have chosen a simple, non-programmable kb if I'd found one that felt equally good to me. The Razer mouse (Imperator) is quite good. The Powercolor graphics card is very good and the Xonar sound card is excellent. Now that 1080p movies with big sound are quite common and the transmission speeds and local storage are adequately up to the task, I'd like to get a 40 inch monitor and a better sound system to fully exploit this hardware's capabilities.
Hope this is of interest and of service, even though it's 6 months old.
The last time I put a rig together, in 1988, they called them PCs, not rigs. Prior to that, I'd been assembling computers for 4 years. I put together such a high-end PC that it served me well for 7 years, but hardware was developing so quickly then, that by the time I bought a new machine, I'd been left behind perhaps ten times. I decided I'd buy cheaper, cookie-cutter computers, but just more often. That worked for a while until the high end moved significantly higher than the average.
I started buying more expensive factory-produced machines. The last time I purchased a new desktop machine was 2005. I'm a software developer and I work in systems, communications, signal processing and mathematical areas, all outside of graphics or sound. My son began to develop into a gamer and I started to watch movies on my computer once my internet speed was up to it. My obsolescent machine was irritating him and was finally so outmoded that it was bothering even me. Notwithstanding this, writing text and compiling it were still OK.
I hardly knew where to begin. When I found OC3D, I was able to use all the discussion to come up to speed. Usenet was not as helpful as this site and most articles and blogs were insufficiently technical and lacked both generality and detail. These are the important details of the computer I assembled:
- Case
Cooler Master HAF 922 (Bought an extra 200 mm Cooler Master fan for the side of the case, for a total of 3 case fans. Such a large case made (makes) it easy to add large and slow fans so that plenty of air moves but at a slower rate, so that the rig is quite quiet.)
- CPU
Intel i7 930
- Mother board
Gigabyte UD3 (Would have preferred to get a UD5, but this has proven to be quite adequate)
- Memory
OCZ PC10666 DDR3, 12GB
- CPU fan
Cooler Master V8 (Not the greatest, but it's proven entirely adequate with the very minimal overclocking I run, and, it's quiet) - Thermal paste
Cool Laboratory Liquid Pro (This one had the best specs of all I read about and all those on my retailer's rack. I think it has made an important contribution to the consistently low temp of the cpu. Admittedly, I'm running close to factory speeds, but, I can see from the characteristics of this paste compared to others I've used that this is probably superior.)
- Hard drive
Seagate ST32000641AS Barracuda XT, 7200 rpm, 2 TB, SATA 3
- Power supply
Thermaltake TPX-875m (Ample power headroom, for expansion, maybe another graphics card or additional drives)
- Graphics
Powercolor PCS+ HD 5950 (Just 1, enough to drive a single 27 inch monitor at high resolution, briskly)
- Sound
ASUS Xonar Essence STX (It seemed to me that many people overlooked getting a special sound card, and relied upon the mb's electronics. I can tell you this card makes a huge difference.)
- DVD
Asus, 2
I'm running both the cpu and the memory at standard speeds, 2.8ghz for the processor and 1333 mhz for the RAM. The mother board provides a minor, automated, hands-off overclocking, however, which I'm using, so, I'm running slightly faster than factory spec. I didn't make the effort to learn how to overclock anything. I figured correctly that this would be adequate for my video watching and would be more than enough to make my son happy. He's 14, plays Battlefield Bad Company. Perhaps when he's old enough for it to make a difference to him, he'll show me how to do it. Now, there are no lags caused by the computer or the network, so he's content, content to blow stuff up. This rig has delivered good results for me, too.
The Razer Lycosa keyboard has buggy driver software and has design flaws. I bought it for the feel of the keystrokes, but I'd have chosen a simple, non-programmable kb if I'd found one that felt equally good to me. The Razer mouse (Imperator) is quite good. The Powercolor graphics card is very good and the Xonar sound card is excellent. Now that 1080p movies with big sound are quite common and the transmission speeds and local storage are adequately up to the task, I'd like to get a 40 inch monitor and a better sound system to fully exploit this hardware's capabilities.
Hope this is of interest and of service, even though it's 6 months old.
