The build has begun! My four year old workstation's days are numbered. Yep, the 2.53GHz P4 with Windows 2000 Pro (yes, really) will be transformed into a server or somesuch and put off to the side. Here comes a Vista-ready kick-@$$ box, and I wish to thank everyone on the forums here (as well as a few other places) for their help with my choices.
I started with the Cooler Master Mystique 631 case, p/n RC-631-KKN1-GP. It's black brushed aluminum, fairly well-made, attractive but conservative, uses 120mm fans all around for quietness, places the sound/USB ports on top where they're useful to me, and offers no top ingress points for stray Coca-Cola. And no RFI -leaking Lucite side panel. Only I will know for sure how neat my cabling work is. After scratching my head and bugging the crap out of the forum participants here for two months, I settled on this and paid just $96 from NewEgg.
Not being able to leave well-enough alone, I replaced the two included Cooler Master case fans with Noctua's allegedly super-quiet 120mm fans for $20 apiece. Using their included sound-dampening fasteners required some ingenuity however, as the front fan's placement makes it impossible to get fingers or tools in to pull the fasteners through from behind on the two motherboard -facing mounting points. Thinking "what would MacGyver do", I attached some 20lb fishing line to the pull-tips of the fasteners and fished the line into the front of the case, allowing me to pull the fasteners into place with the line snaking through the case's fan mounting holes, the fan's mounting holes and the ventilation holes in the drive cage. Since I don't fish, add $6 for the small spool of filament.
I spec'd this build around Intel's Core 2 Duo "Extreme" EX6800. A factory-fresh, sealed retail box cost me $750 on eBay - still costly but a whopping $200 less than most retail discounters. Since Intel motherboards have never let me down in the past, that pricey CPU is going onto an Intel D975XBX2 "Bad Axe 2" motherboard, which I ordered through Page Computers for $215, but which took two weeks to arrive. A 2x2GB set of Kingston KVR667D2E5K2/4G ECC DDR2-667 cost me $716. Just a week later the price is back up by $60! That too took two weeks to arrive. Later this year when the RAM prices settle down some, I'll add another set for a total of 8GB RAM.
Since Microsoft won't have the DirectX-10 code out for Flight Simulator until late 2007 and that's the only gaming I do, I chose to avoid the DX10 hardware scramble and scarfed up a used ATI (real, honest to goodness ATI because in this case I'm a brand-name whore) X1950 XTX, retail setup with original packaging. I was hoping to keep that cost down toward $250 or so but ended up paying $305 on eBay. Later this year I'll put this back on eBay and buy ATI's "XT" version of their R600 -based card, assuming it doesn't need a nuclear reactor to power it.
An ATI TV Wonder 650 TV tuner card with the remote control in all the original packaging cost me $104 via eBay, which saves me about $35 and saves me the hassle of mailing in the request for the remote control. I wish a separate tuner weren't necessary but ATI never puts the tuner on their better cards, making the All In Wonder purchases a trade-off
For the storage subsystem I bought four WD1500ADFD 150GB "Raptors", $220 each at NewEgg and a $30 apiece rebate brings that to $190 each. Though the model is a year old and it's a bit unsettling to buy such "old" technology for a cutting-edge build, the Raptors are still top of the performance heap short of going to SAS/SCSI at twice the cost. They connect to an AMCC 3ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID controller ($285 on eBay still in factory shrink-wrap, at least a $50 savings) with the BBU module (another $110 elsewhere) where they will operate as a RAID-10 set with 256MB read/write cache, without loading the CPU appreciably.
For now I will have two optical drives. One optical is the Plextor PX-755SA (SATA DVD burner), $106 from NewEgg, and the second is Samsung's $43 SH-S183L SATA DVD burner featuring LightScribe. Both are black to match the case. I chose two different burners knowing that different burners can be better with differing media, and because however elite it may seem, the Plextor unit doesn't feature LightScribe. SATA all around will keep cabling neat. Two bays remain available for Blue-Ray/HD hardware once those prices settle down and the standards work themselves out a bit more.
An Atech XM-28U flash memory reader (reads pretty much everything) and a Sony FP920 floppy drive (still necessary to load RAID drivers for XP) cost me $35 and $8 respectively. Both again are black to match the case of course.
To keep everything both cool and quiet, I tossed Intel's stock heat sink & fan combo and replaced it with Zalman's big, heavy CNPS7700-Cu, $35 from NewEgg. And since it seems totally idiotic to me that a four thousand (and then some) dollar computer system should need a manual fan control, I retrofitted a JMC Products 1225-12H PWM -controlled fan onto the Zalman for another $20. This required cutting the frame and struts off the JMC, drilling two holes in its baseplate, manufacturing a 1/8" thick shim to compensate for the thinner baseplate, and cutting a couple of #4 screws to size.
Powering the new beast is a Thermaltake W0128RU modular 650 Watt high-efficiency modular power supply, $149 shipped from Directron.
This all plugs into an existing Logitech Z-680 speaker system, Viewsonic VP930b LCD, Microsoft Force Feedback 2 USB joystick and CH Pro (rudder) pedals, Icom PCR-1000 radio scanner, 8-port KVM switch and a Samson PL-1602 8x2 channel sound mixer. The icing on the cake - pun intended - is a Déck Legend "Ice" keyboard, which set me back a totally ridiculous $159 plus $12 S&H.
The only widget I still may soon need to replace is my Suncore class 2 Bluetooth USB dongle, whose Broadcom 2045 chipset may not be natively supported in Windows Vista. Suncore seems to have disappeared a few months ago, and the hope of drivers with it. Guess I'll find out in a week or two.
I'll be conducting some tests in the next week or so to see how the performance compares between the motherboard's own ICH7R and the 3ware SATA controllers in various JBOD and RAID 0, 1 and 10 configurations, and may consider putting the 3ware back on eBay if the difference is too small. Doubt it though.
Observations...
It lit up OK on the first run. There's nothing like triple-checking everything, and using a high-intensity flashlight for final inspection. That last step helped me catch a USB connection to the motherboard that was misplaced by one pin. It also reminded me to remove the HD activity light connector from the motherboard and place it on the 3ware controller instead.
Oh yeah, this puppy is quiet. I'm just starting burn-in so it hasn't ramped all the way up yet, but so far I'm really, really happy with the relative lack of noise, pretty much inaudible at idle, and the character of the whoosh there is when the fans kick up.
Folks who buy an aluminum case thinking the weight savings will help with transportability, are in my opinion, nuts. The weight of the power supply, hard drives and heavy duty cooling equipment really adds up. Unless we're talking about a middle aged arthritic guy hitting LAN parties, the case seems like a drop in the bucket.
The Mystique is a nice case but a few of the aluminum guide bits inside the 4" cage were not bent quite into the correct position, requiring some persuasion with right-angle pliers before the removable drives would slide in completely. The hard drive cage puts the drives sideways which helps keeping wiring out of the way of air flow and expansion cards. I find no issue with the strength of the magnetic catch on the door, about which I've read a few complaints. It's just strong enough to keep the door closed without interfering with optical drive trays popping it open. Those of you buying enormous video cards will want to know not to bother with this case if your cards' circuit boards will be more than about 10-1/2" long. And don't forget about PCIe power connectors if they point backwards. The HD sound connector mates nicely with the header on the Bad Axe 2 - all the extra connectors on that cable can be snipped off for neatness. Cleaning the front filter - really just a metal mesh by the way - is impossibly awkward without disassembling the front facade, a task made difficult how the facade is fastened and by the routing of the panel's wires. On the other hand, the Mystique looks just as nice even without the two wavy front aluminum pieces altogether. Maybe I'll leave it nekkid. Lastly, the side panel snorkel doesn't line up evenly with the CPU placement. But it's not off by enough to worry about.
The blades on the JMC fan seem unusually roughly finished. Wonder if that'll be a bad thing. I could always try out one of Arctic Cooling's new PWM fans, or at least I suppose I could if they'd get off their respective behinds and get their new PWM product line into the North American retail channel. It blows my ugly American center of the universe mind that folks in the Czech Republic can get one and I cannot.
If you relied on Intel's published documentation on the Bad Axe 2 motherboard, you'd think all you were going to get is a motherboard and maybe driver CDs and some instructions. I ordered with optimism and luckily this is not the case. Along with a decent booklet and a really nice full color fold-out setup guide, the retail box includes four SATA cables, a rounded IDE cable supporting two drives, and a rounded floppy cable. The SATA cables are nice FoxConn bits but the IDE and floppy cables seem a little cheesy. All are shades of Intel blue, which happen to match the stock CPU cooler's fan. You also do get an expansion backplane connector for two USB ports, but I won't be using it because of the flash card reader. And RAID driver floppies are thoughtfully included so you don't have to scramble to make your own, which is more than can be said for the 3ware RAID controller.
Modular power supplies are hyped with the promise of making cabling more manageable and efficient, but this is not necessarily so. For example I have four SATA HDs and two SATA optical drives but the two provided SATA cables only support three drives each. Yes, that's just enough, at least for now, but the distance between the HD cage and the optical slots is an issue for one of those cables, and what will happen when I add a third optical? And the cable I need to employ to power the diskette drive has three Molex connectors hanging from it, for which I have no need at all. I may just modify the included cables to suit. So it's nice that there's a couple less cables stuffed into a drive bay or tie-wrapped to the roof the case, but modular deal may not be all it's cracked up to be.
The state of graphics processor technology is overdue for a serious reality check. Right now all this box is doing is a MEMTEST-86 run - not exactly a huge GPU challenge - and there's substantially more heat coming off the XTX' heat sink than from the area of the CPU or RAM. It's time for a revolution. Seriously. This is just absurd.
Oh well, more observations to come once I load up an OS...
I started with the Cooler Master Mystique 631 case, p/n RC-631-KKN1-GP. It's black brushed aluminum, fairly well-made, attractive but conservative, uses 120mm fans all around for quietness, places the sound/USB ports on top where they're useful to me, and offers no top ingress points for stray Coca-Cola. And no RFI -leaking Lucite side panel. Only I will know for sure how neat my cabling work is. After scratching my head and bugging the crap out of the forum participants here for two months, I settled on this and paid just $96 from NewEgg.
Not being able to leave well-enough alone, I replaced the two included Cooler Master case fans with Noctua's allegedly super-quiet 120mm fans for $20 apiece. Using their included sound-dampening fasteners required some ingenuity however, as the front fan's placement makes it impossible to get fingers or tools in to pull the fasteners through from behind on the two motherboard -facing mounting points. Thinking "what would MacGyver do", I attached some 20lb fishing line to the pull-tips of the fasteners and fished the line into the front of the case, allowing me to pull the fasteners into place with the line snaking through the case's fan mounting holes, the fan's mounting holes and the ventilation holes in the drive cage. Since I don't fish, add $6 for the small spool of filament.
I spec'd this build around Intel's Core 2 Duo "Extreme" EX6800. A factory-fresh, sealed retail box cost me $750 on eBay - still costly but a whopping $200 less than most retail discounters. Since Intel motherboards have never let me down in the past, that pricey CPU is going onto an Intel D975XBX2 "Bad Axe 2" motherboard, which I ordered through Page Computers for $215, but which took two weeks to arrive. A 2x2GB set of Kingston KVR667D2E5K2/4G ECC DDR2-667 cost me $716. Just a week later the price is back up by $60! That too took two weeks to arrive. Later this year when the RAM prices settle down some, I'll add another set for a total of 8GB RAM.
Since Microsoft won't have the DirectX-10 code out for Flight Simulator until late 2007 and that's the only gaming I do, I chose to avoid the DX10 hardware scramble and scarfed up a used ATI (real, honest to goodness ATI because in this case I'm a brand-name whore) X1950 XTX, retail setup with original packaging. I was hoping to keep that cost down toward $250 or so but ended up paying $305 on eBay. Later this year I'll put this back on eBay and buy ATI's "XT" version of their R600 -based card, assuming it doesn't need a nuclear reactor to power it.
An ATI TV Wonder 650 TV tuner card with the remote control in all the original packaging cost me $104 via eBay, which saves me about $35 and saves me the hassle of mailing in the request for the remote control. I wish a separate tuner weren't necessary but ATI never puts the tuner on their better cards, making the All In Wonder purchases a trade-off
For the storage subsystem I bought four WD1500ADFD 150GB "Raptors", $220 each at NewEgg and a $30 apiece rebate brings that to $190 each. Though the model is a year old and it's a bit unsettling to buy such "old" technology for a cutting-edge build, the Raptors are still top of the performance heap short of going to SAS/SCSI at twice the cost. They connect to an AMCC 3ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID controller ($285 on eBay still in factory shrink-wrap, at least a $50 savings) with the BBU module (another $110 elsewhere) where they will operate as a RAID-10 set with 256MB read/write cache, without loading the CPU appreciably.
For now I will have two optical drives. One optical is the Plextor PX-755SA (SATA DVD burner), $106 from NewEgg, and the second is Samsung's $43 SH-S183L SATA DVD burner featuring LightScribe. Both are black to match the case. I chose two different burners knowing that different burners can be better with differing media, and because however elite it may seem, the Plextor unit doesn't feature LightScribe. SATA all around will keep cabling neat. Two bays remain available for Blue-Ray/HD hardware once those prices settle down and the standards work themselves out a bit more.
An Atech XM-28U flash memory reader (reads pretty much everything) and a Sony FP920 floppy drive (still necessary to load RAID drivers for XP) cost me $35 and $8 respectively. Both again are black to match the case of course.
To keep everything both cool and quiet, I tossed Intel's stock heat sink & fan combo and replaced it with Zalman's big, heavy CNPS7700-Cu, $35 from NewEgg. And since it seems totally idiotic to me that a four thousand (and then some) dollar computer system should need a manual fan control, I retrofitted a JMC Products 1225-12H PWM -controlled fan onto the Zalman for another $20. This required cutting the frame and struts off the JMC, drilling two holes in its baseplate, manufacturing a 1/8" thick shim to compensate for the thinner baseplate, and cutting a couple of #4 screws to size.
Powering the new beast is a Thermaltake W0128RU modular 650 Watt high-efficiency modular power supply, $149 shipped from Directron.
This all plugs into an existing Logitech Z-680 speaker system, Viewsonic VP930b LCD, Microsoft Force Feedback 2 USB joystick and CH Pro (rudder) pedals, Icom PCR-1000 radio scanner, 8-port KVM switch and a Samson PL-1602 8x2 channel sound mixer. The icing on the cake - pun intended - is a Déck Legend "Ice" keyboard, which set me back a totally ridiculous $159 plus $12 S&H.
The only widget I still may soon need to replace is my Suncore class 2 Bluetooth USB dongle, whose Broadcom 2045 chipset may not be natively supported in Windows Vista. Suncore seems to have disappeared a few months ago, and the hope of drivers with it. Guess I'll find out in a week or two.
I'll be conducting some tests in the next week or so to see how the performance compares between the motherboard's own ICH7R and the 3ware SATA controllers in various JBOD and RAID 0, 1 and 10 configurations, and may consider putting the 3ware back on eBay if the difference is too small. Doubt it though.
Observations...
It lit up OK on the first run. There's nothing like triple-checking everything, and using a high-intensity flashlight for final inspection. That last step helped me catch a USB connection to the motherboard that was misplaced by one pin. It also reminded me to remove the HD activity light connector from the motherboard and place it on the 3ware controller instead.
Oh yeah, this puppy is quiet. I'm just starting burn-in so it hasn't ramped all the way up yet, but so far I'm really, really happy with the relative lack of noise, pretty much inaudible at idle, and the character of the whoosh there is when the fans kick up.
Folks who buy an aluminum case thinking the weight savings will help with transportability, are in my opinion, nuts. The weight of the power supply, hard drives and heavy duty cooling equipment really adds up. Unless we're talking about a middle aged arthritic guy hitting LAN parties, the case seems like a drop in the bucket.
The Mystique is a nice case but a few of the aluminum guide bits inside the 4" cage were not bent quite into the correct position, requiring some persuasion with right-angle pliers before the removable drives would slide in completely. The hard drive cage puts the drives sideways which helps keeping wiring out of the way of air flow and expansion cards. I find no issue with the strength of the magnetic catch on the door, about which I've read a few complaints. It's just strong enough to keep the door closed without interfering with optical drive trays popping it open. Those of you buying enormous video cards will want to know not to bother with this case if your cards' circuit boards will be more than about 10-1/2" long. And don't forget about PCIe power connectors if they point backwards. The HD sound connector mates nicely with the header on the Bad Axe 2 - all the extra connectors on that cable can be snipped off for neatness. Cleaning the front filter - really just a metal mesh by the way - is impossibly awkward without disassembling the front facade, a task made difficult how the facade is fastened and by the routing of the panel's wires. On the other hand, the Mystique looks just as nice even without the two wavy front aluminum pieces altogether. Maybe I'll leave it nekkid. Lastly, the side panel snorkel doesn't line up evenly with the CPU placement. But it's not off by enough to worry about.
The blades on the JMC fan seem unusually roughly finished. Wonder if that'll be a bad thing. I could always try out one of Arctic Cooling's new PWM fans, or at least I suppose I could if they'd get off their respective behinds and get their new PWM product line into the North American retail channel. It blows my ugly American center of the universe mind that folks in the Czech Republic can get one and I cannot.
If you relied on Intel's published documentation on the Bad Axe 2 motherboard, you'd think all you were going to get is a motherboard and maybe driver CDs and some instructions. I ordered with optimism and luckily this is not the case. Along with a decent booklet and a really nice full color fold-out setup guide, the retail box includes four SATA cables, a rounded IDE cable supporting two drives, and a rounded floppy cable. The SATA cables are nice FoxConn bits but the IDE and floppy cables seem a little cheesy. All are shades of Intel blue, which happen to match the stock CPU cooler's fan. You also do get an expansion backplane connector for two USB ports, but I won't be using it because of the flash card reader. And RAID driver floppies are thoughtfully included so you don't have to scramble to make your own, which is more than can be said for the 3ware RAID controller.
Modular power supplies are hyped with the promise of making cabling more manageable and efficient, but this is not necessarily so. For example I have four SATA HDs and two SATA optical drives but the two provided SATA cables only support three drives each. Yes, that's just enough, at least for now, but the distance between the HD cage and the optical slots is an issue for one of those cables, and what will happen when I add a third optical? And the cable I need to employ to power the diskette drive has three Molex connectors hanging from it, for which I have no need at all. I may just modify the included cables to suit. So it's nice that there's a couple less cables stuffed into a drive bay or tie-wrapped to the roof the case, but modular deal may not be all it's cracked up to be.
The state of graphics processor technology is overdue for a serious reality check. Right now all this box is doing is a MEMTEST-86 run - not exactly a huge GPU challenge - and there's substantially more heat coming off the XTX' heat sink than from the area of the CPU or RAM. It's time for a revolution. Seriously. This is just absurd.
Oh well, more observations to come once I load up an OS...
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram