I almost forgot to mention:

This looked very nice once I got my new machine set up!

It’s been a while since I built myself a new PC. The PC I’d been using has been around the block in one incarnation or another for about 3 years now.

I never was really happy with that old machine - we kind of started off on a bad foot. You see, when I bought that machine, I was actually in the planning stages of building a new machine…you know researching parts and trying to decide what to build. While I was doing that my machine at the time decided to bite the dust completely. As a result, I got “rushed”. I ended up buying an off-the-shelf system from Best Buy - seemed like a good deal as an Open Item - it was a decent AMD x2 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and a 250 HDD. I also picked up a Nvidia GeForce 7900GS for it as well. I was happy enough with the machine, but just over a year after I bought it (and just after the Manufacturers warranty ran out, the crappy ECS Motherboard that Gateway used crapped out on me. At the time this happened I was in the process of moving, and I was pretty strapped for cash, so I found the cheapest AM2 motherboard on NewEgg which had a PCIe slot and since the Gateway case was non-standard…all the way down to the DVD-R/RW drive, I had to pick up a cheap case and SATA DVD-R/RW drive as well, and threw it all in. This also wound up being a “Band-Aid” and the cheapo motherboard I had purchased also bit the dust (it was a Biostar if I recall correctly). Still, since it happened at an inopportune time, I couldn’t just build a new system, but I had a little more cash to work with. I decided that old 3800+ was getting a little long in the tooth, and I’d heard “Core2Duo” so much I couldn’t stand it any longer - and I ordered a decent Gigabyte P35 motherboard and a Core2Duo E4600. The problem was, I didn’t do my homework, and not knowing much about Intel CPU’s (I’ve been a life-long AMD fan), I ended up buying what was has too be one of the crappiest Core2Duo chips made - I guess you could call it the “Celeron” of the Core2Duo line. It was faster at pure number-crunching, but I actually lost memory performance because of it’s anemic 400MHz FSB and skimpy L2 Cache. I also found out that the E4xxx line were the only C2D systems without hardware virutalization support. My last attempt to breathe some new life into this system was an upgrade to 8GB of RAM, which also became a headache because having all four RAM slots on that board populated with 2GB sticks made the system quite unstable.

Sigh.

So, as you can see, I never really had a good relationship with that PC. I normally upgrade every three years, and although, the jump to Intel was really an “upgrade”, I decided while I had the cash, to go ahead and build myself a new system, from the ground up - my first one in 3 years, and I was going to get exactly what I wanted, and since I had a working machine in the meantime, I could take my time!

As I said earlier, I have been a life-long AMD fan, and the launch of the new and improved Phenom II Quad Core chips from AMD coincided quite nicely with my purchase. The original Phenom could be called AMD’s biggest mistake - not only did they have that nasty TLB bug, they consistently performed far below Intel’s Core2Quad CPU’s. In fact, when I first started this, even though I’m an AMD fan, I was initially thinking of an Intel Q9400 or better yet, a Q9550 as the “heart” of my new build. I couldn’t really consider the Core i7 line, simply because I had *just* purchased a quality kit of 8GB of DDR2 that I wanted to use in the new build, so Intel’s Core i7’s requirement of DDR3 made it simply out of my reach.

As I read more about the Phenom II, the more I liked it. I feel this will finally make AMD competitive again. Now, before you start, let me remind you I’m not a “gamer” - although I do keep a decent 3D card in my systems for the off-time I might decide to fire of CS:Source for an hour or two, my system is really more of a true “workstation”, and I need a good, solid platform that will give good performance running multiple Virtual Machines simultaneously. This was one area where I missed having an AMD chip in my system. Not only do I feel their use of an integrated memory controller on the CPU rather than having it on the northbridge (something Intel finally copied w/ their Core i7 CPU’s) is by far the better design, I feel their hardware virtualization technology is far superior to Intel’s. You can go on many of the “tech sites” such as Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech or Extremetech and read a lot of reviews, look at lots of charts and graphs and analyze a bunch of numbers, and what it comes down to is that although the graphs can be drawn in such a way to make just a few Frames Per Second in a game or a few seconds of rendering times in a 3D modeling program look like a huge difference, there is really very little difference in performance between any of the top CPU’s from AMD or Intel - however, there are areas where the results will shuffle, as different CPU’s are simply more efficient at different tasks.

I decided that Phenom II was the best balance for me. It’s “current” technology - what I mean by that is it’s a true Quad-Core chip (as was the original Phenom as well as Intel’s new Core i7) rather than 2 distinct Dual-Core dies in a single package. To me, buying a Core2Quad system would have been like buying the (P4/Netburst based) Pentium D after the Core2Duo had been released - in other words, I felt like a Core2Quad system, right now, would have been investing in old technology. The Phenom II and the Intel Core i7 share a lot of similarities, and honestly, although you can find specific benchmarks that can skew results to support your point of view, over all, on average, the Phenom II’s performance either Ties the Core i7 920 from Intel most of the time, or comes somewhere between the performance of the Q9550 and the Core i7 920.

So, alas, here is what I ended up with:

AMD Phenom II 940 3.0GHz Black Edition Quad Core Processor (Unlocked Multi - although I haven’t tried overclocking it just yet, and honestly probably won’t).

GeIL Black Dragon 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (left over from old Core2Duo system - which is going to become a VMware Server with it’s old 4GB of RAM re-installed).

ASUS M4A79 Deluxe AMD 790FX Motherboard: This was the only motherboard I could find on NewEgg which did not require a BIOS flash to recognize the Phenom II right out of the box. I’ve always had good luck with ASUS, and this is probably the nicest motherboard I’ve ever purchased. I especially like the “Q-Connector” for hooking up the front panel stuff - oh and yeah, it has a small Linux distro embedded on it called Express Gate! The rear I/O panel was even much nicer than anything I’ve experienced before!

ASUS EAH4830/HTDP/512MD3 Radeon HD 4830 512MB Video Card: As I mentioned before, I’m not really a “gamer”, nor is this a “Gaming PC”, but I want a good Video Card for when I *do* decide to play a game. I never buy high end, but I feel the HD4830 is a great performing little card for the money. The one I picked up was actually an OpenBox for $90 and an excellent value and a super performer!

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive: I *almost* got a VelociRaptor 10K RPM until I read the reviews of this disk w/ the 2 high density 320GB platters - it is a *very* fast drive and made more economic sense than a 150GB 10K RPM drive for $180USD.

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200RPM Hard Drive: This also moved from my old C2D system - I’d bought it about a year and a half ago - before the implementation of the single 320GB high density platter - so it’s nowhere near as fast as the 640GB drive - however it makes a nice secondary drive, and will house all of my Virtual Machine Virtual HDD’s

LITE-ON Black 20X DVD Burner: Just your basic DVD burner. I’ve never purchased anything but LITE-ON optical drives, and I’ve never had a bad one!

Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case: I was initially thinking of the Antec P182, but this little “Three Hundred” caught my eye, and there was just ’something about it’ that I liked. The 300 has a 120mm exhaust fan in the rear, and a 140mm fan on the top, with a spot for a 120mm on the side and 2x 120mm fans on the front. I moved the Antec tri-speed from the back and put it on the side, and I bought a Scythe “ULTRA KAZE” 3000 for the rear (which is on the fan header on my Mobo in it’s “silent” setting so it only spins up to full speed when needed). I also picked up a couple of cheap Rosewill 120mm fans (which had good reviews) for the front. As a result of this case, this is the “cleanest” build I’ve ever done. Not a stray cable anywhere, and all the air-flow anyone could want!

Antec BP550 Plus 550W PSU: At $90, this little, plain, un-assuming PSU is probably the best kept secret in all of PC building! While it’s nothing fancy, it has nice amperages on the 12V rails, and it’s modular. You really couldn’t ask for more, now could you? (Well, that is unless you wanted gawdy blue LED’s or something).

I was also going to invest in a good 3rd party CPU cooler, but I wanted to see what kind of space I had to work with in this Antec “Three Hundred” case since I hadn’t seen one in person. I think I’m going to stick w/ the stock cooler for now. AMD packaged a really nice heatpipe based cooler with the Phenom II 940 and since I probably won’t be overclocking, it will serve fine.

And there you have it - my new build. As for OS, it’s running Vista 64, and will be until Windows 7’s release. No, I’m not going back to Linux as my base OS - however I do have a few Linux machines in VirtualBox, and will have a few more on my “new” VMware Server.

This will get removed at some point but I need a new telly (by new I mean a second hand one that will replace my 14” portable with something a little bigger like 21”) and then I found this:

Link to Advert

HITACHI TV (not LSD or Plasma) with stand. 28 inch. Remote control. Full working order. £40 ovno,

Well, there you have it folks. It’s not a LSD Telly.

But I am intrigued to find out what a LSD Telly really is. :