I began with the basic necessities first: the ThermalTake tower case and Antec Power Supply. I liked the ATX case with plenty of room for the motherboard and hard drive cages. The power supply is a good (orange) looking 750W with extra 6-pin plugs for Crossfire capable video cards.

Next, oddly enough, when I began the research about 5 months ago, I thought it was a good idea to buy the Kingston HyperX RAM because there was a rebate promotion at Newegg. Then RAM prices dropped dramatically, by almost half!  For sure, a painful lesson learned here. [Updated: Photo]

In the last 2 weeks, the shopping went into high gear, with the indication there were more online sale after Black Friday/Cyber Monday.  It was the time to start buying the ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 motherboard.

In order to test the motherboard, I had to make a quick decision to buy the CPU.  During my research, I was originally going with lower end AMD Phenom II X6.  But I read an awful lot of negative reviews on the AMD. There are many glowing reviews on the Intel i7 2600-K. I decided I needed to spend the money on a much better chip.  The CPU is the brain of the operation, so it needed to be the best one.  The Intel happens to be good at overclocking without requiring much power and producing heat. Additionally, I also got the Cooler Master 212+ CPU cooler, with a large heat sink and fan, to cool it off.

Next, I had to get the video card.  This was an interesting decision that I had to make. The choices were high-end Radeon 69XX series, the recently discounted Radeon 68XX series, or go with new territory of Nvidia GTX series.  I also had to decide on getting a card with 1G or 2G RAM.  Since my 23″ monitor only has 1920×1200 resolution, I thought the 1G RAM version is sufficient.  Anyway, I decided to get the discounted ASUS EAH6850.  My strategy here is to get another one so I can link them in a Crossfire configuration, at a later day when prices have gone down.  I need to watch the prices regularly because if the supply is gone, availability will be scarce and prices won’t come down. It’s a lesson I learned from the last build with Radeon 4850.

Finally, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try out the latest craze: Solid State Drives.  It promises faster boot up time and operation. Reviews only said to stay away from first generation SSDs, so I ended up buying the more recent OCZ Vertex 3 90GB drive. I knew it’s going to be a big improvement over hard drives.  Also, in the future, I may be able to use this as a cache for RAID hard drives².

Part of this exercise is to discover the advantages UEFI “BIOS”.  Microsoft touted Windows 8 to take advantage of UEFI to secure the boot process.  It can also (possibly) speed up power-on bootup, as shown in their video.  Right now, I haven’t explored this possibility since there’s no Windows 8 public beta, at least not until February 2012.

The ASUS’s UEFI is quite beautiful.

I always overclock my CPUs.  With the new motherboards and CPUs, this has become an easy exercise.  I overclocked the i7 2600K from 3.4 GHz to 4.6, with relative ease. This P8Z68 motherboard made it painless: just change the multiplier and set everything else on Auto. It’s so easy, my Grandma can do it.

Of course, with overclocking, I’ll need a good cooling system.  Putting in the massive CPU cooler was not the only thing I needed for my overclocking adventures. I had to make sure the case has good air flow.  So I made sure there are three 120mm fans blowing in from the front.  I also sealed any holes on the sides and the top of the case.  Now, when the computer is on, it’s pretty noisy – even when I close the cabinet door, where I stored the PC. I’ll need to tweak the chassis fan speeds to make it more quiet.  It’s going to be a balancing act between better cooling and lower decibels.

But for now, I can get the CPU cores to operate around 70°C under full load³ at 4.6 GHz.  Later, I’ll go search for that holy grail of 5.0 GHz.

Here was my shopping list.  The only thing left to do is putting in another Radeon HD68XX based card for CrossFireX configuration.  I can definitely wait for the price to go down a little more.  Otherwise, I’m pretty much done with this setup.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

PC Build 2011

1. I still used rebates and looked for discounts, whenever I can, as the first rule of thumb.
2. Using Intel’s SRT software.
3. Using prime95

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2008: Part 1
2. PC Build 2008: Part 2
3. Building An HTPC

With 4G of RAM, Vista is actually performing quite well.  I proceeded to install the essential drivers for the motherboard (including ethernet and sound), and the ATI video driver (including the Catalyst Control Center).  After getting the basics installed, I then install my essential applications, such as FireFox 3, Adobe Flash Player 9, ULead Burn Now, VLC Media Player, IrFanView, MWSnap, WinSCP, Putty, Twhirl, and Yahoo IM.  So far so good, system still performs well.

There is still more work to do.

The fun stuff is missing: video game.   I want to try out Crysis, Call of Duty 4, and Team Fortress 2, so I’ll need to pickup a copy of each.  These latest games should take advantage (or humiliate) my new video card.  I’m also preparing for the inevitable Starcraft 2.  The original game provided many hours of fun with friends and co-workers.  There are also my old favorite games that I’ll eventually re-install, such as Half Life 2 and Lord of the Rings: Battle of Middle Earth.

Finally, I’ll need to use video editing software.  Haven’t decided what to get yet, but suggestions are appreciated.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

PC Build 2008: Part 2

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2008: Part 1
2. PC Build 2011
3. Start Me Up Again With Windows 7

• CPU: Intel E7200 Core2 Duo 2.53 Ghz Socket 775 1066 Mhz FSB
• Motherboard: Asus P5Q Pro LGA 775 Intel P45 -2 PCIe 16x with 8x Bridge
• Memory: 4 Gigs (2×2) Patriot DDR2-1066
• Hard Drive:  Seagate Barracuda 500 Gb 7200 RPM 32mb Cache SATA
• Video Card: Powercolor ATI Radeon HD4850 Crossfire
• CD/DVD Drive:  LG 20X DVD/CD Burner SATA
• Case: Antec Three Hundred
• Power Supply: Cooler Master 750W-80Plus Crossfire Ready

The difficulty, of course, is to find bargains for the new parts.  In order to stay a little ahead of the technology curve, I have to spend a little bit more on parts like the video card, power supply, motherboard, and memory.  In my setup, the standard is set with the ATI HD4850 video card.  The Crossfire capable card enables me to gain more speed by piggybacking another of the same card to boost performance.   To have dual cards, I need a half decent motherboard, like the Asus P5Q Pro, with two 16x PCIe slots.  The potential bottleneck is the 8x bridge between the two PCIe slots, but tests revealed the speed gained is quite good – almost comparable to X38 and X48 boards.  In addition, the HD4850 has high power requirement (at least 325W), and dual cards setup needs another 150W.  This is where the behemoth 750W power supply comes in.

The choice for a Core2 Duo, instead of a Quad, is more towards pricing.  The Intel Q6600 is $190 vs. the E7200 $120.  A $70 difference for a questionable performance increase (in most applications) is not worth it.  I may end up trying to overclock the E7200 to 3.0 Ghz to increase performance.

Another potential upgrade is the memory.  The board has room for another 4Gb (2×2) of RAM.  I’ll get some more when the prices for PC8500 memory go down below $50.  It’s currently hovering around $100.

Also, with hard drive prices falling down so fast, there’ll be a chance to upgrade to terabytes of disk space.  So it looks like for the next 3 years or so, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to tweak this new build.

This article was posted on Rudy Amid's Blog:

PC Build 2008: Part 1

Related posts:

1. PC Build 2011
2. PC Build 2008: Part 2
3. Building An HTPC