I mentioned awhile back that I’d built a new computer and would write more about it. Now that the origin of the post is dispensed with, on to the actual content! It is going to be long – consider yourself warned. This post is for the casual tech geeks out there and won’t be as in-depth as individual reviews would be. However, it will still be a bit much for those not technically inclined.
The titular beast with all the main components installed before the first power on. It’s a mess before cable rerouting was done. These days it is slightly less messy.
The Components
First up, the components (without prices since they fluctuate), links to where I purchased them, and specific comments about each:
Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo)
While I could have gone with a new Haswell processor bundled with a motherboard at a steep discount, I wanted something I knew I could hit high clock rates with. The ‘K’ model Intel processors are made to be overclocked hence the premium price compared to a regular 3770 and the performance differences are well worth it. Oh and I should mention the K’s are the only ones that handle OC (over clocked) memory which was a major selling point for me.
Intel 335 Series 2.5" 240GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
This was the second to last component of the build and the one I was the most indecisive about. In the end, I went with an SSD to improve shutdown times during storms and to speed up Corel PhotoPaint X5. There is no faster form of hard disk than an a solid state drive.
Why Intel and not Samsung like most people? Differences in the flash memory technology give Intel an edge in reliability and speed at a decent price. The missing 15GB (from 256GB) of storage is actually used by Intel for housekeeping which extends the life and functionality of the drive. That’s a huge plus.
G.SKILL Trident X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) SDRAM DDR3 2400 (PC3 19200)
Most people build a system like this with gaming in mind. So they only go with low latency memory with CL 9-9-9 and wouldn’t look at faster memory with higher latency. But photograph and video editing/processing use large chunks of memory where having fast memory pays off. Not having a virtual memory swap file enabled in Windows also makes speed desirable.
G.Skill’s Trident X is runs at 2400 GHz rather than 1600 GHz like most I7 Ivy Bridge users use. Latency is CL10-12-12 which is not horrible when you get the throughput I’m seeing. Games have not suffered at all from it and that includes online gaming.
Be warned, it is tall. Very tall in fact, due to its decorative heatsinks on top. They are removable to make it lower profile for large heatsinks like the one I have.
MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming Intel Z77 ATX Intel Motherboard
Quality motherboards with a lot of options are extremely pricey and are usually the second or third most expensive component in a build. This particular board is a ridiculously good bargain and has features that usually cost at least $100.00 more. It was a late consideration in the build and won out due to the ability to use OC memory of extremely high speeds (DDR3 3000).
Also important was having a dedicated LAN chipset that isn’t Realtek in origin. A lot of people don’t realize that a lot of their Internet performance is being lowered by a poor chipset handling the data up and down stream. More on that later on.
Oh and MSI is one of the best motherboard manufacturers out there with a deservedly good reputation.
Antec High Current Gamer Series 750W Power Supply
Antec power supplies have been rock solid reliable over the years for me and when this went on sale during the late stages of putting the build together it felt like it was meant to be. A modular power supply would have been a lot easier for the smaller case I used, but the money you pay for that feature was more than I could afford.
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
I briefly contemplated Windows 8, but the terrible interface and loss of features such as integrated backup software killed that idea quickly. Pro offers nothing I need since I use VirtualBox for running other OS’s, so Home Premium saved me money. It is as solid an operating system as Microsoft ever put out.
Western Digital WD Black 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA III Hard Drive
If you have an SSD for a boot drive, you need to pair it with a traditional hard drive for storage, temp directories for graphics editing, and game software. I’ve never been a Western Digital fan, but quality over on the sole remaining competitor’s side means they are number one right now. Sadly, that doesn’t mean guaranteed quality and a lot of drives are defective. This particular one has lower rates of complaints than the Blue or Green models while having very good throughput rates.
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Profile Memory
This was a freebie bundled with the MSI motherboard. It sits sealed in the blister pack as emergency backup memory. Link is omitted since I’ve got nothing to say about it one way or another.
Rosewill CHALLENGER Gaming ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Ah, the Challenger case, how I love thee. This is a fantastic bargain with features that cases two to three times its price have and many that much larger cases sport. Air flow is amazing and after rebuilding a previous PC with one I knew this would be the case for the build since I was going air cooled.
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO Cooler
Overclocking a CPU requires a reliable and effective way of dissipating heat especially when you hit 4 GHz and over. Most enthusiasts have gone for the closed loop water coolers. As impressive as the results of those are, they are not reliable and the small pumps have a tendency to burn out over time. Paying $80 every couple of years to replace one is not my idea of a good time.
But there are some superb if huge air cooled options that get you to the same low temperatures and high clock speeds. The absolute best bang for the buck is the $30 Hyper 212 EVO. Amazing overclocks are possible with it, though you need a case it will fit in. Once again, more later.
EVGA GeForce GTX670 2048MB GDDR5 256bit Graphics Card
Upgrading my graphics card was not originally in the build and was a last second add on. I’d missed having 256 bit pathways for the memory, not for the gaming but for the desktop experience. Windows move around a great deal more quickly with 256 bit memory compared to 192 bit or 128 bit. That meant going with AMD and 384 bit memory or giving Nvidia one last try after the problems on the old Intel G33 based PC.
Running at standard clocks, this video card won’t out bench other cards using the same chip, but the price difference was staggering. It is near enough to GeForce GTX 660TI’s to make it a steal. Knowing it would work with the older 314.22 drivers made an older generation than the GTX 7xx series made it the only choice. EVGA is also one of the best brands in the business and in my opinion the best making Nvidia based video cards.
Recycled from my previous systems are two optical drives, an Asus DVD burner and a Samsung Blu-ray drive. Monitor, keyboard, speakers, etc are all carried over as well.
Other minor (and one not so minor) components entered the build later and I’ll explain that as I go.
The Build
All PC builds start with the most important component: the case. A good case is a must with hot computer components in the middle and upper tier. The Rosewill Challenger is a smallish mid-tower computer case that just happens to be my personal ideal size. It also has a mesh front, heavily ventilated back and side panels. It comes with three fans which all perform very well and are relatively quiet: one 140mm venting out the top, one 120mm venting out the back, and one blue LED lit 120mm intake fan in the front. It moves a LOT of air for a case of its size.
Remember the minor components comment a little bit ago? That front LED fan lit my bedroom like a spotlight and I endured that for a week before replacing it with a Cooler Master 120mm SickleFlow Fan that has no LED lighting. What relief that brought to my tired eyes! It’s no fun being blinded by the light when trying to sleep.
Despite being smaller, the Challenger is not as cramped as you’d think. While there are limits on cable management, it does a pretty good job at that. One thing that makes it a little more difficult is the trade off of having the power supply on the bottom rather than the top. This provides stability and the ability to mount the power supply to suck in air and exhaust it outside bypassing the case interior completely.
The picture above shows the removable filter for the PS that you can slide off to clean. I’ve already had to do that thanks to a cat shedding uncontrollably due to the unusually cold temperatures this summer. Front panel connectors are what is hanging down and the various bits of hardware for mounting things are in the bottom of the drive bay.
That drive bay is great because it allows you to mount the hard drives directly in the flow of the intake fan giving you cooling on a component that gets rather hot. It’s a must for SATA3 drives. Notice the plastic tray for SSD drives that is included.
MSI’s Z77-GD45 Gaming mother board was not purchased for its looks, despite appearances to the contrary. Instead the Qualcomm Atheros LAN chipset was the biggest draw for me. The ability to improve online performance was very attractive especially when multitasking. The included software does take up more CPU time than other chipsets, but the benefits have been impressive. I can do full downloads, browse the Net, and game online at the same time without the gaming or VOIP stuttering, skipping, or dropping off.
Oh and despite claims that it doesn’t improve ping times, I’ve gone from 80-109 to 45-75 on average. People with already low ping probably won’t see much benefit, but it has been amazing for me. I simply don’t lag anymore.
Back to aesthetics, I realized something when I assembled the heart of the PC. I’d accidently color coordinated the motherboard, power supply, and memory. Red and black with silver accents was the resulting theme as you can see in the photos. Getting the i7-3770k into the socket was one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had with a CPU. It seemed like I was going to crack it at any time.
Keeping It Cool
Fortunately, that did not happen though I was subjected to even more fear by the Hyper 212 EVO installation. That was simply scary from start to finish. It’s a huge heatsink and the included thermal grease is overly viscous. A section of defunct credit card was used to spread it as thin as I could. It works brilliantly, so the nerve wracking hassle was worth it.
The Challenger case had been documented in being able to fit the 212 EVO before, or I wouldn’t have attempted this. There are probably four millimeters of clearance between it and the side panel, so no side fan can be mounted in the upper position of that pane. Not that I need a side fan with the amazing air flow as is.
I did notice that the 120mm fan on the cooler was making more noise than I liked and by that I mean a hint of a bearing issue. Deciding discretion truly is the better part of valor, I substituted a 120MM Red LED SickleFlow fan also made by Cooler Master. That caused a slight increase in temperature of about 1 C idle.
Later on I added a second for a push/pull configuration and lowered temps by 2 C idle and 4 C under load. That surprised me since I thought the proximity of the case exhaust fans was adequate. The two fans make the radiator look like a small nuclear reactor in the heart of the case but don’t shed a large amount of light like blue LED’s do.
The EVGA GeForce GTX 670 was installed in the highest of the three PCI-E 3.0 slots to allow room for later experiments with a second video card. No SLI in this rig since 1920 x 1080 is the highest resolution on my monitor.
The Intel SSD installed with no hassles whatsoever and I installed Windows 7 64bit on it to test the Western Digital drive. Thankfully there were no errors detected during the deep scan and the beast was up and running. Well, after mistakenly reversing the power switch on the motherboard. I don’t know why, but I almost always make that error when building PC’s.
Speed Bumps
I did have some issues getting the memory to run at the correct speed and had to enable the advanced options under the overclocking section of the BIOS. Also, the bundled MSI Control Center app does not always properly register the memory speed, but CPU-Z does. For awhile I was sure the memory wasn’t.
Overclocking the CPU was more straightforward. I allowed Overclock Genie II to have a crack at it first and it managed a very conservative 4.2 GHz speed. Knowing that was nowhere near the limits of the CPU, I tried 4.4 and then 4.5. 4.5 GHz was not stable and that was only because I refused to up the voltage beyond stock. 4.4 GHz was the final result due to that and I would not be surprised if 4.6 or higher was possible with more voltage applied.
Why didn’t I do that? Simple, voltage squares when you increase it and I’d rather save the money on the electric bill given the meager increase in speed it would give.
To stress test the new build, I put in the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650TI that I have as a second video card and set it to handle all PhysX. Once the drivers recognized it, I installed Boinc and enabled the Einstein at Home application. Units were run on both cards and eight on the CPU by using HyperThreading. That put the entire system under severe thermal stress and maxed out the wattage at the same time. I tested for more than 24 hours straight with follow up sieges during the week after.
Despite the moments of terror and stupidity, this was the smoothest build I’ve ever experienced. The results speak for themselves in the Passmark benches I ran. There simply isn’t anything it is slow at. Video conversion, photo editing, gaming, virtual machines, and power multitasking are all joys to do on the new computer. A bigger surprise was how much faster web browsing is on the system.
Sound Quality
The last addition to the Challenger (as I have dubbed the PC) was better sound after testing the built in Realtek with SoundBlaster Cinema extensively. Asus makes the best soundcards aimed at consumers and I’d had a Xonar D1 in my previous PC. With no PCI slots, that meant buying a new one and I put that off as long as I could. Instead of choosing the equivalent PCI-E card, the Xonar DX, I went in a different direction with the midrange product, the ASUS Xonar DSX PCI-E 7.1 Sound Card
Why? It wasn’t just saving a few bucks. Instead, it was the unique feature of having a replaceable opamp to improve and tailor the sound. This is a feature of very high end audiophile cards which made it irresistible. I’ll be getting some Texas Instruments opamps to test next month, but I’ll be running the stock DSX through its paces first. It is still a huge improvement over the onboard sound as I listen to it while writing this.
By the way, download the drivers from Asus directly to get things working. After that, if you still have problems, get the UNi Xonar Drivers to install over them. Those saved my Razor Barracuda from the trash bin and it is running in my media center PC.
I suppose I should review the on board sound a little. Realtek had made great strides since their early integrated audio solutions. They fully support HD audio and sound considerably better than I remembered. However, the chipset doesn’t have a wide soundstage and isn’t as frequency neutral as I like. The bundled SoundBlaster Cinema software from Creative features bass boost, headphone enhancement, and Crystallizer which supposedly restores lost sound from compressed files such as MP3’s and iTunes files.
It’s really a gimmick and does it by spreading the spectrum of the sound being played back, but it sounded like it diminished the highs a great deal to me. The soundstage was also not as expansive as what I was used to and picking out individual instruments and voices was difficult. Note that this will only be noticed if you have good headphones such as Sennheiser or AudioTechnica make.If you are using speakers primarily like I do, only Klipsch and better will allow you to hear the difference.
My old Boston Acoustics BA7800 4.1 setup has superb sound and was a little known gem in its brief period of manufacture for Gateway. I also have Sennheiser headphones, so I’m an audiophile on a budget. If you are strictly a gamer or think the horrible bass heavy Dr Dre Beats headphones are great, you’ll love the onboard sound and won’t need anything else. In fact, it will be a superior experience to anything else integrated on motherboards.
Oh my, the highs are so much better with the DSX. It is like going from being nearly blind to having 20/20 vision in an auditory way. I can’t wait to play with a LM4562NA in this thing.
Virtual Video Shenanigans
Another software enhancement bundled with the motherboard is Lucid’s Virtua MVP. This allows you to share video from your discrete video card with the built in Intel HD4000 on the processor. It does work (only with your monitor hooked up to the motherboard), but isn’t worth the effort given how many games are not fully compatible with it.
If you have it installed while routing the video directly from your videocard, there are no benefits at all unless you have software that uses Intel’s QuickSync. There are only a couple of video convertor apps that use it with inferior results in picture quality to using normal mode.
You’ll save yourself a lot of hassles if you never install it and I know of what I speak from experience. With a fast card like the EVGA I put in the system you don’t need to monkey around trying to eke out a few more frames on a select few games.
One thing that came out of adding the GTX 670 was that my mockery of web sites that said 60 fps was the new minimum for gaming has ended. They were right and I was wrong, once you game at that frame rate the norm of 30 fps seems jerky. People insist that human eyesight can’t perceive more than that, but they are very wrong. Some of us can see at “higher refresh rates” and I’d forgotten how bad old CRT monitors were for me. 70-72 Hz was a must for me because the flicker of lower rates drove me nuts where other people didn’t see it.
I’ve stuck to the old 314.22 Nvidia drivers and haven’t had any reason to install newer ones. All the bugs I had with the older setup are gone and that’s proof my old PC had simply gone past the point of upgrading. It sits in the living room as a powerhouse media center happily using the Radeon 7750 to output a stellar picture on the 40'” HDTV.
Final Thoughts
At some point I’ll take photos of the exterior again after cleaning my room and the PC. It sucks up so much air that cat hair mats the front at times. I also may find some filter material to put on the side panel stop some of the hair that gets sucked in that way. Yes, the air flow is that strong out of the top rear of the case!
Challenger is so fast that sometimes it seems it finishes tasks before I start them and distorts the space time continuum around it. Or maybe that shimmer around it is just all that air being sucked in and blown out again.
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