Time for another PC upgrade!

Aopen LX45

So my main PC workstation is in need of a good overhaul/hardware upgrade. One major reason is noise. The combined noise output of the PSU fan, the CPU fan and the fan on my graphics card is getting to become somewhat of a nuisance. Not to mention the fact that my once-trustworthy NoiseControl Silverado CPU dual-fan is not performing at all well these days, leaving my CPU temperature around 60°C when idle. Not good.

Apart from that, my rig will for sure spew out masses of melted silicium and copper coils if I attempt to run Battlefield 2 on it, so that’s as good an excuse as any to upgrade the thing, in my opinion.

Being the fanatic infomaniac that I am, I have spent quite some time combing the Net for the best price-performance ratio for the hardware that I intend to upgrade. I’ll be upgrading everything more or less, except for my trusty old AOpen LX45 casing and a few peripherals.

The configuration will consist of the following:

Motherboard

ASUS A8N-E

Socket 939, NVidia nForce4 Ultra, LAN, Audio, 4xUSB2.0, FW

Review

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 3000+

1.8 GHz, Processor in a Box (PIB), Venice core

Review

RAM

GeIL Value

2 x 512MB, PC3200 @ 400MHz, Dual DDR-SDRAM

Review1 Review2

Video

HIS X700 PRO

256MB GDDR3 SDRAM @ 960MHz, ATI RADEON X700 PRO @ 460MHz

Reviews

Harddrives

Hitachi 7K250

2x160GB, 7200 rpm, 8MB, S-ATA-I, 150 Mbps, 8.5 ms RAID 0

Review

PSU

Chill Innovation CP-400P Rev. 2.0

400W

Mouse

Logitech© MX™ 518

Gaming-Grade™ Optical Mouse

Review

Mousepad

Func Industries fUnc sUrface1030

Competition mousing surface (blue/orange)

Review

A few words on my choices. The motherboard was really a no-brainer. Not being interested in SLI, but still wanting a top-of-the-line chipset supporting SATA and Athlon64, the A8N-E can’t be beaten.

The CPU was a little difficult. I wanted a good Athlon64, and I soon settled on the Venice core, since it’s produced with AMD’s 90nm technology, and thus creates a lot less heat. The San Diego core is also new and based on 90nm, and is basically a Venice with 1MB L2 cache instead of 512KB. Pricewise, though, the jump from the cheapest Venice 1.8 GHz (3000+) to the cheapest San Diego 2.2 GHz (3700+) is over 100%, and that’s just not feasible in my eyes. The 2.0GHz Venice was only about 15% more expensive and comes with more multipliers for overclocking, but I think the 1.8GHz will be fine. BTW, there’s a very good (unofficial) AMD roadmap here.

I wanted some cheap, good PC3200 Dual DDR SDRAM (not higher than PC3200, since the motherboard doesn’t support higher). I’d been recommended OCZ and Crucial, but they were a bit steeply priced. GeIL’s Value series seemed just right, and it came with quite good recommendations from various reviews.

The video adapter is by far the component that has caused me the most grief in selecting. I must have changed my mind 20 times over the past month. I knew it couldn’t be too expensive (around 1500 DKK, or 200 EUR), so it basically came down to NVidia’s 6600GT or ATi’s X700 PRO series (the XT series having been cancelled). I believe that 256MB of RAM on the video adapter will come in handy come BF2, since I hope to run the game at high resolutions with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, so that was a requirement. Since the 6600GT with 256MB RAM is rare and expensive, I took a look at HIS’ Turbo series of cards, and checked out a few reviews of the HIS X700Pro IceQ Turbo. As it turns out, the cooling system used by HIS is made by Arctic Cooling, a company renowned for their silent and effective cooling systems, perfect for overclocking. The ‘Turbo’ in HIS’ product line means that the cards come with a custom overclocking utility that can really boost your card’s performance. Some reviews have had this card’s memory running at speeds around or over 1050MHz, and the core at over 500MHz, which is akin to the X700XT and the 6600GT. So in the end, I’m sticking with ATi.

The harddrives were also a bit difficult. I originally had my eyes on Seagate’s new 7200.8 series of SATA harddrives, since they came with NCQ, a technique that allows the disk drive to reorder I/O requests in a way so as to minimize disk access. The nForce4 chipset supports it, so I thought why not? But alas, the Seagate drive doesn’t perform very well, in spite of NCQ. In fact, in some cases it performs worse than it’s predecessor, the 7200.7 which lacks NCQ. So off I went to look at IBM’s sold-off harddrive production at Hitachi. Hitachi’s new SATA-2 series of harddrives looked interesting, the T7K250. Apart from supporting the extras in the SATA-2 standard (NCQ among them), it also allows for transfers up to 3.0Gbps, which is also supported by the nForce4 chipset. Looking at various reviews, though, I quickly learned that the impact of 3.0Gbps burst transfer rates, as opposed to 1.5Gpbs was negligible in real-world applications. Burst transfer reads did however show a massive improvement, though nowhere near 3.0Gbps (minus overhead, of course). Access times and CPU utilization was also improved in some cases, and the drive had NCQ. … BUT – then I looked at the pricetag, and held the 250GB T7K250 model up against, say two regular 160GB 7K250 SATA-1 drives in a RAID 0 configuration (as seen here) in which the average read time simply explodes. Considering that it’s actually cheaper, and I get 70GB extra playroom, I’d say that was pretty easy in the end, even though I don’t get 3.0Gbps burst rates or NCQ. The ASUS motherboard supports RAID 0, of course.

The Chill Innovation PSU is produced here in Denmark and had some okay reviews attached, so I thought I’d try it out. It’s a revision 2, so I guess it’s been improved upon a bit since the original. Quite cheap and supposed to be silent.

The mouse and mousepad ought to be top-of-the line. The MX 518 is in direct competition with the Razer Diamondback but a bit cheaper. It also has a DPI of up to 1600. I like Logitech, so that was it. In any case, it’ll be a major improvement over my old ball-based Logitech PS/2 which is about ripe for destruction. The fUnc sUrface1030 is relatively unknown, but I came across a review over at Dan’s Data, a crazy Australian guy, who reviews all sorts of PC oddities, and writes extremely funny stuff to go along with it. Check out his review of the sUrface1030 and then some of his other stuff for a laugh. Actually, any review of the sUrface1030 ends up praising it, so it can’t be bad.

All in all, I’m quite content, and can’t wait till the stuff starts arriving at my doorstep