Giddy with Excitement!

So I have finally gotten my butt in gear and purchased the components for my new gaming machine. It took me a while to decide on a few of them, but in the end I am quite happy with the results. Before we get into the new stuff, I’d like to talk for a second about what I am upgrading from so you can get a feel for my excitement and pleasure at the prospect of a new system. I built my last system in 2003 using an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ processor, and MSI K8N Neo platinum (which up and died on me in the middle of a LAN party and was subsequently replaced with an Asus board), 1GB of Kingston HyperX Memory, and a BFG Tech NVIDIA 6800 Ultra graphics card (On AGP nonetheless). Still a great system that has served me very well, but the demands of newer games have proven to be a little too much for it (resulting in my subsequent cutting back on gaming). For the new system, I wanted to try some multi core stuff, and try my hand at a little bit of overclocking. Other than that I pretty much wanted the best bang for the buck and planned on spending about $1500 on the system (just core components since I can shuffle things a bit and use cases I already have). So I decided what I wanted, begged and pleaded with my wife to let me get them, and was able to order the components about 5 days before the end of the semester (which will give me something to do besides homework). Since AMD has been struggling quite a bit lately, I decided Intel had the best performance for the price on processors. I was having a hard time deciding what to get right up until I came across a bunch of articles on the barely released Intel Core i7 series (and by barely released, I mean in November). After reading the results of overclocking the 920 model (the lowest model) and comparing them to the Extreme top end 965 model, it was a no brainer to save $700 and get the 920, then overclock it to beat the 965 (seriously, not at ALL hard to do, even on air cooling). Since the i7 is a totally new design, it requires a totally new motherboard as well. Asus has served me very well in the past (although I have heard some good things about Gigabyte) so I went with the P6T Deluxe (I decided I didn’t need the Palm edition which has a little USB handheld devise to overclock the BIOS while the system is running). Being torn on the memory to use, I opted for a dual channel kit from OCZ. I went this route because at the time all of the triple channel kite were heinously expensive (though they have dropped significantly in the last few weeks) and based on many articles I’ve read, the new QPI setup the i7 processors are using for the internal memory controller are not able to utilize all of the bandwidth available to the memory. The result is that a triple channel kit is more money, and not much increase. I eventually plan to fill out the board with 12GB of RAM, but for the time being I find that 4GB is more than my system can use (due almost entirely to the speed at which it is accessed). Now on to graphics cards, which is one area I didn’t want to cut any corners because of the way this system will be used. I had a choice between the NVIDIA GTX 280 and the ATI HD4870x2. Performance wise, these two are fairly similar (though one or the other tends to gain a tiny lead in specific tests, they are both quite capable). In the end it came down to future plans and cost, and the day I went to order the GTX 280 was on sale for $350 AND a free copy of FarCry2 AND had a $35 mail in rebate (so in like 10 years I’ll receive a $35 check and will have forgotten why). This made the decision for me and I was set. I do have plans to add a second card later on (you know, get some kinky card-on-card SLI action going on), though the price will have to come down a bit before I can justify it to my personal accountant (A.K.A. my wife). To power this setup, and all future plans, I calculated that I would need at least a 750W power supply. I decided on the Antec TruePower 850W and am VERY please with the decision. Modular cabling, tons of power, 5 year warrantee, $120, life is good! I have had plans to transform my current machine into a Media PC, but I will defiantly need more hard drive space, so I threw a Western Digital 1TB and a Lite-On DVD burner into the order (since my stupid HP lightscribe DVD burner stopped recognizing any kind of DVD about 2 months after the warrantee expired). Total, out the door with shipping and everything was a few pennies under $1470 (Mission accomplished). I did try to twist a little harder and get a new 1920x1200 24” LCD added to the mix, but the Nikkinator shot me down (maybe for my birthday?). Below are a few pictures of the boxed components and the assembled product.





An astute observer will note tat memory is in neither of the pictures. This is because it was coming from the other side of the country and was a few days behind the rest of the stuff. Nevertheless, I couldn’t wait to get things assembled. So it’s assembled now, and I was very quickly able to get all my games imported (since all I had to do was convince windows that the games were on the drive I was pointing it to). After XP was fully updated and I had installed all the latest drivers, I just HAD to try out a game, and the inaugural game was Left4Dead with all the settings maxed out. HOLY CRAP! There is a TON of detail I was missing before (very noticeable) and the game runs absolutely flawlessly (sorry no fps numbers, system isn’t optimized yet so there’s no point). Next on the list, Try Vista ultimate 64-bit and see if DirectX 10 really makes as much difference as some say it does. I can’t say for Left4Dead, but I did notice some extra eye candy in FarCry2. Not a huge difference, but enough to notice. One thing that has really surprised me, Vista isn’t as terrible as everyone says. This could just be because I’m throwing more resources at it than it knows what to do with, and the fact that I have given it quite a while to mature, but I think it might be alright for now… (famous last words?). It defiantly runs faster than XP (probably not a common experience, and I’m comparing 32 bit XP to 64 bit Vista). Anyway, after attempting to run 3DMark vantage it became painfully obvious that what people were saying about the i7’s was right… the stock heatsink is INSUFFICIENT!! 50C at idle and 80C under load at stock settings (no overclocking) makes me really nervous… so it was back to Newegg to try and find a big fancy aftermarket heatsink for a processor that has been out less than 2 months. There were two options, and one of them looked pretty good and had a TON of good reviews (I guess this little heat issue of the i7’s is going to make a few heatsink companies VERY happy, at least in the short term). An extra $60 and I was back to waiting (I haven’t installed it yet, because it was delivered just a few hours ago and I’m still at work). I am very anxious to try some overclocking as it appears almost effortless to get these things to overclock well beyond the 965 Extreme numbers (sure glad I saved myself that $700). Hopefully sometime soon (next week or so) I’ll have the heatsink installed and some overclock numbers to report, as well as some benchmark scores to brag about (I did get 3DMark 06 to run in XP with the stock cooler and at stock timings and got a score of just over 17700, but I’m sure it’ll get better as I play around a bit). Now for the real business, we need to get a LAN party going sometime soon so I can really take some dedicated play time and see what this thing can do.