As many of you already know, my PC recently died, fortunately, just over a week ago I got a tax rebate of £400 and so decided to use that to build a new PC, which I did last week-end. A number of you have expressed interest in what kind of a system I put together, so this post is to answer those questions.

Processor

The heart of a system is the CPU so this is where I started. I have been an AMD fan since the early 90’s. When their Athlon line came out we finally had some competition for Intel. But a lot has changed in the last few years, Intel have brought out the dual and quad core processors at a good price to performance ratio. AMD are now in the position of working hard to try and keep up.

So it was with some sadness I moved into the Intel camp and had a look at the dual core series. I chose the E8400 Retail version. It runs at 3.0Ghz with a 1333 Mhz Front Side Bus and 6 Mb L2 Cache and it comes complete with a cooler. For the price (£118) I think it’s a good deal. I could have gone for a quad core but they are another £50.

MotherBoard

There are several good makes out there Gigabyte, MSI, Asus but my favorite manufacturer is Abit, I have found them to be dependable and easy to get going. They make several motherboards, I settled on the IP35 Pro, it has won several awards and had some good reviews and costs £112.

It has everything I needed, it supports both dual and quad processors for when I upgrade the processor. There are 4 memory slots that support upto 8Gb. It has onboard LAN, 7.1 channel HD audio, 6 x USB2, 2 firewire ports and 2 eSata ports. There are 6 SATA ports and 1 ATA port (for 2 ide drives).

Memory

Choice of memory can either kill or make a system. On my previous system I had 4Gb because I do a lot of high resolution multi-layer Photoshopping, 3d animations and some video editing.

The motherboard can support 800/667/533 DDR2 memory so I picked 800. Just recently there have been some price drops and I was able to get 2Gb of OCZ memory for only £34. It is built for gamers and overclockers and has a timing of 4-4-4-15.

Video Card

At one time there were lots of manufacturers to choose from, these days you have basically 2 - either ATI or Nvidia. I needed good Open GL support and so Nvidia was chosen, now which model? I don’t (often) play games so I don’t need a top of the range card but I want something that has good performance and will last me a couple of years.

The most price effective one was the 9600 series and I chose a Zotec GeForce 96009GT AMP at £120. It has 512Mb of DDR3 memory and supports Open GL 2.1

Misc Stuff

The motherboard supports only 2 IDE drives, this meant that I had to get a SATA DVD-ROM for £16. I had already got a new PSU, 650W modular, and a couple of IDE HD’s. I am using the same case from the previous PC as it is a good quality one, it cost about £120, 5 years ago.

The Build

The hardest part of building the new PC was stripping out all the old stuff from the case. Once everything was out I gave the case a good cleaning. I had already installed the processor, cooler and memory on the motherboard so that was the first to go in the case. then I attached the case connectors, power, hd light etc. to the motherboard.

Next, I installed the hard drives and DVD-Rom and connected them to the motherboard, then I installed the graphics card. Lastly, I connected the PSU cables. With the hardware done, I installed Win XP and the drivers. Total build time was just under two and a half hours.

On the old PC I had three HD’s full of stuff. The new PC had only 1 IDE connector which was in use. I had thought about this beefore building and I bought an Icy Box. This is basically a USB connected box that has connectors inside of it for an IDE drive. The next hour or so was spent copying over data from the old HD’s onto the new ones.

I do have a problem with one of the HD’s it is a SATA drive. I connected it up to the motherboard and powered up the PC. The system recognizes it correctly but does not show in the Explorer. In Disk Management the drive shows up as a "foreign" format!! As this was the most recently added drive it has stuff on it that is important to me and I shall have to find some way of get the data off of it.

The last week has been spent installing software, finding bookmarks and restoring projects.

Wrap Up

Overall I’m happy with the performance of the new PC, even if it is "Intel Inside" and I stayed on budget, just. I have yet to install the Wacom tablet, scanner and printer as I haven’t needed them yet. The worst part of all this is trying to remember all the settings for the system and software as this was not a planned build. Normally I can do a complete rebuild in only one day as I backup everything before dismanteling the old PC, this time it died without warning.

The Icy Box was a real bonus find. I’ve never really thought much of external drives, they’re usually more expensive, need power and are slower. When I bought my case I made sure it would last and that there was a lot of space inside for extra HD’s. But this experience has changed my mind slightly in two connected ways. I have never, in over thirty years, backed-up stuff. If I lose data then tough in fact once I finish a project I often delete it and start over as the second time around usually has a better result. But now I have a couple of spare HD’s that I can quickly swap out of the Icy Box, so I might just start backing up stuff.

To see how much of an improvement in performance the dual core gives me, I rendered two 3d scenes in Cinema 4d. Both images rendered with about a 30% saving in time.

The one surprising thing that has happened was that in the recent Google update I went from PR3 to PR4 despite a slowdown of posting and traffic in the last month.