Monday, April 04, 2005

Meet the new rig

Update

It wasn't long before I discovered that my new computer was having the same problem as the previous computer. I had originally thought it was the motherboard, which is partly why I got a new system, but now know that it was the 40GB IBM DeskStar hard drive. That drive had been in the previous computer, and the computer before that. All three computers that drive was in had problems. I did some web research and it is apparently a known issue with that line of hard drive. It's now a paperweight.

I recently replaced the 120GB IDE drive with a 250GB SATA drive. The 120 I put in an external enclosure that allows me to hook it up to a USB port. I now have 120GB of portable storage goodness.

At the same time I replaced the two off-white optical drives with a new DVD burner and a CD burner/DVD ROM combo drive. I can theoretically burn two CD's or burn one CD and one DVD simultaneously. The best part is that they have black bezels so they match the color of my case. I also replaced the white floppy drive with a black multi-format card reader. Now I can pop the compact flash card from my camera into the front of the machine and access the stored images directly.

Since I now know that the motherboard in the old computer is good, I plan on resurrecting it. I'll get new RAM for the new machine, put the old RAM back in the old machine, put the old optical drives back in, and get an inexpensive hard drive. I need to reconfigure a couple of fans as well. Once it's up I'll probably use it as a game server, or a system where I can mess around with various operating systems and software without worrying about losing any data if I have to scrape the drive.

(Original post follows)

So I broke down and upgraded the computer. I had a partial system assembled by a local shop, bought a new video card at CompUSA of all places (the local shop building my system didn't have what I wanted and CompUSA had a good enough price on it), and put it all together. All in all, here's what's new in it:


In addition, I used the existing RAM from my old system (Corsair XMS DDR400/PC3200), the existing hard drives (WD 120GB and IBM 40GB), and the existing optical drives.

For grins, I ran 3DMark2001SE sort of as a guage of raw power improvement. It's an older benchmark and doesn't take advantage of some of the new rendering capabilities of current hardware. It showed a full 50% increase. 3DMark2005 gives a score in the 4800's which is in line with what I've seen in reviews of my new video card, a little better in fact. This motherboard will let me tweak all kinds of stuff but I think I'll just leave it alone as it's plenty fast now. The main improvement in the games that I'm playing is that I'll be able to run them at 1280x1024 resolution, which is the native resolution of my LCD monitor, rather than at a lower resolution. I can also run some games at higher quality, such as Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Unreal Tournament 2004.

It's also noticeably quieter. The power supply has a single 120mm fan instead of two smaller fans. The case has a 120mm fan in the back and an 80mm fan in the front. I've replaced the front fan with an even quieter one I was using in the old system. The CPU cooler is known for making little noise. The fan will speed up some when the system is under load, but even then it's not obnoxious.

The motherboard is capable of SLI, which is where you can put in two nVidia video cards and have them work together. Basically each one handles rendering half of each frame. I'm not using that as I have an ATi video card. I chose this motherboard instead of the Neo4 Platinum (non-SLI) because this one had much better onboard audio. It comes with a Creative SoundBlaster Live! built-in. It sounds good, and I'd say it's even better than the SoundStorm on my old motherboard.

The new case is smaller than the old, and has better airflow. However, being mostly steel and not aluminum (which I wasn't aware of when I bought it), it's heavier. Still, that means it's sturdier and is likely quieter as it doesn't flex as much with vibration of the fans and hard drives. The only lights on this computer are the LED's on the front of the optical drives, and the power and hard drive access indicator LED's on the front of the case. I thought about putting one of the lighted fans from the old system in the front of this case but they have aluminum frames and the front fan uses screws that screw directly into the fan frame so only plastic frame fans will work.

I've had a few hiccups but I've hopefully got all the kinks wired out. At the very least it should last me another year or so. I do plan on putting in a couple of serial-ATA drives, possibly later this year. For now, the hard drives from the old system appear to be doing the job.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)