ArticlesAfter talking about it for a long time, I upgraded my computer in January, purchasing the minimum parts I needed to assemble a brand new machine, and still have my old machine operational.
I went with one supplier for most of the components, except the hard-drives, which were significantly cheaper at another supplier. That was a mistake, because I had all the parts the next business day, except the hard-drives which took over a week.
Case
I went with the Antec Titan 650. It is a nice case, but I don’t love it like I love my old Antec Sonata. (The Antec Sonata was my Obama case, after 8 years of using inferior products.) I prefer the Sonata drive-mounting system.
The scary thing is that despite the Titan’s huge size, I have already filled all 6 of the 3.5″ drive bays!
Motherboard
GA-X48-DS4 which is a Gigabyte-brand motherboard with the X45 chipset and Intel RAID support.
I’ve had no problems with the motherboard, but don’t install the power-saver application. Apart from it breaking every GUI standard in the name of funkiness, I blame it for freezing the Vista Explorer on start-up.
There was support for a serial port on the motherboard, but there was no outlet for it. That surprised me, but I had a spare faceplate with a serial port plug on it, so I fitted it, just in case I ever need it.
RAM
I went with 4GB of Geil DDR2-1066 RAM, in 4 sticks of 1 GB each.
I did my research, and for one hour I think I understood what 5-5-5-15 meant. I came up with my own metric that transmogrified the various numbers into a Oddthinking rating of 0.116, which was very good for the price. I then promptly forgot everything I learnt. I hope I don’t need to learn it all again for a long time.
I’m getting a Windows Experience Memory rating of 5.9, up from 3.7, so I must have done good!
Processor
Intel E8500 (Dual Core, 3.16 GHz)
I am getting a Windows Experience Processor Rating of 5.0 (up from 3.0) which makes the processor the bottleneck for the overall rating.
It surprised me that the CPU was the bottleneck. Maybe I should have spent more money here? Then I realised that whichever component had been the lowest, I would have had a similar expression of surprise. I shouldn’t be surprised that I am surprised!
I can’t say I like the design of the fan mountings; they are very finicky.
Graphics
I chose a Gigabyte-branded ATI Radeon HD 4650.
The Windows Experience rating for Graphics and Gaming graphics are both 5.3, up from 2.9 and 3.5 respectively.
I went with the 1GB RAM option. I wonder if that was worth it. I also have the option of adding another Radeon card and getting the Crossfire action happening, but I don’t think I will bother.
Don’t install the ATI Control Center, unless you want to have them rub your nose in it by adding an option to the top of practically every context menu in the Explorer. Why does every developer assume that their software is the most important application on the computer?
Hard-drive
As I have mentioned in blog comments before, I am trying a new experiment.
I have a RAID1 array for my important documents and photos. I bought three new drives for this: two as active drives, and one as off-site backup. Every month I plan to swap out one drive for the backup. That guarantees me a perfect copy (no locked files, no missing directories) in return for a couple of minutes of downtime. It took a couple of goes to get the right drivers installed, but passed a swap test perfectly.
Each drive is what disk drive manufacturers get away with called 1 TB (1012 bytes, not 240 bytes), meaning I have about 931 GB available (up from 189 GB). Each drive has 32 MB of cache. I can’t get a Windows Experience rating for this RAID set, but using other tools, I am getting an average throughput of about 7 times faster than my old machine.
These drives are higher-spec than I planned (I was aiming for 750 GB) but the price was right.
Once the RAID1 was in place on the new machine, and my important files were copied across and verified, I stole the two RAID1 drives from my old machine. I made them a RAID0 set for the OS and other unimportant files. (Total size: 380 GB) RAID0 upped the Windows Experience rating from 5.3 to 5.9. (My old machine’s OS drive was also 5.3.)
I was pleasantly surprised that I could create a RAID0 set of my boot drive without deleting everything and reinstalling the OS. It just ran for a couple of hours synching them in the background and then required a reboot for the extra space to become available. After that I needed to extend the partition, and voila. Virtually no outage. I had planned for a whole extra O/S install, so it was great not to need it.
OS
I am running Vista x64 (up from 32-bit Vista). No insurmountable driver issues to date. There was one application that wouldn’t install, but it can’t have been important, because I can’t even remember what it was (drive metrics?)
Removeable Media
Between two machines, I have one DVD burner and two CD burners, which should be enough… except the DVD-burner didn’t like being moved. Now it only ejects a disk sometimes. The rest of the time, it strains but can’t get the tray to move. I can pry it open with force, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for DVD-burner bargains when it gets too annoying.
I believe I have some spare floppy drives in the cupboard, but I haven’t bothered installing one on my new machine.
Monitor
Aye, there’s the rub. My 21†CRT died on New Year’s Day. I can’t bring myself to buy a cheap LCD screen with poor colours, and I can’t bring myself to pay for an expensive LCD screen with good colours. I’m paralysed. In the meantime, I am running three 19†CRTs – two on the old machine, one on the new one.
Yes, my desk can handle that many monitors – hell, that’s why I chose this desk. However, the limited screen real-estate is very noticeable. (I guess I chose a bad day to migrate to Eclipse!)
Overall
A successful, but slow, migration with only a constipated DVD tray as a casualty.
I decided to trust Microsoft with their recommended Windows Experience metric, and the overall rating jumped from 2.9 to 5.0. It would take a new CPU and another graphics card to get it up to 5.9, so I’m happy where I am.
Of course, a faster machine just makes me more frustrated when it stalls for no reason.
With three monitors and two computers in an upstairs office when it is over 30°C outside, this room is damn hot!
Comment by Richard Atkins on January 24, 2009
Vista experience score: I’m getting 5.9s across the board except for a 5.7 from my 3GHz E8400, and I don’t believe anything’s overclocked here. Is there something wrong with the motherboard clock multipliers of your’s?
Linux: go with Ubuntu. It’s a debian package based OS, but very slick. I’m using the WUBI version here on my Vista x64 install and it’s great, but that might not be such a good idea with your RAID setups. I think my only issue is getting sound working, which I’m sure to do next time I have a day to kill 😉
Monitors: I know what you mean about the cheapo’s – I’ve got an AOC 24″ LCD here (~$350 at the time), and its nice enough (so big!), but it has visible flicker and the soft power switch is the poorest design they could have chosen: it tends to ignore keypresses when its being told to go into standby by the PC, and it’s black on black on the middle right of the bottom section making it … somewhat hard to spot without direct light on the screen. The next monitor will definitely be higher quality all round.
Vista and RAID 1: I heard a rumour that Vista likes to run a disk check on boot (before bringing up the GUI, of course) to make sure that the mirror is working. Way back in the day, this might have led to only a few minutes downtime. With 1TB disks though, this will be a several hour outage each time you mess with the disk configuration. Have you seen Vista do a disk check yet? Maybe it only happens if Vista is booting from RAID 1 arrays?
Hey, does all this mean that you’ll be installing one of those modern games all the cool kids are talking about? What you’ve got there is a very respectable gaming rig…
Comment by Alastair on January 25, 2009
Richard: Ubuntu is Linux for beginners, eh?
Hmm, well I like Ubuntu a lot actually but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily Linux for beginners. Instead I’d characterise it as the least-worst for beginners of all the Linux distros.
A few weeks ago I switched across to an Ubuntu box as my primary work machine. And in accordance with tradition I ran into video driver problems. After hooking up the second monitor, I just couldn’t get it to run in anything other than mirrored mode. Eventually fixed it by telling the gnome screen resolution thingo that it actually had one large (3840×1600) screen, which it *then* decided it would have to spread across two physical displays. In the end I wasted an embarrassing amount of time trying to get it working.
(As with previous experiences, Googling and trawling the Ubuntu forums was of absolutely *no* help! I dunno why this is…)
Anyway I’m sure Julian will give it a go and let us know his experience. I can guarantee there will be at least some small hiccups along the way – like yours with the audio – but that’s part of the fun, right?
Comment by configurator on January 26, 2009
*jealous*
I’ve been wanting for months to fix my old pc. Only the cpu is dead, but any new cpu would require a new motherboard, the hard drives are hardly sufficient and I would probably need a power supply too, so I basically need to buy a whole computer minus a case and a dvd-burner :/
I get by with ‘just’ my laptop for now…
You have badquotes (“) in your ‘stalls for no reason’ link’s href, which causes some browsers to be unable to browse the link. [Ed: Thanks. Fixed.]
Comment by Julian on January 28, 2009
I found my first 64-bit compatibility issue from my old friends at PyGame.
Comment by Julian on January 28, 2009
Richard,
Re: Windows Experience scores
Really? Hmmm… I didn’t touch anything. I guess I will have to learn what to do to optimise it; I certainly didn’t try to overclock it. (This room is too hot to dare!)
Re: Ubuntu and RAID
The Linux machine will be my old one, which has been stripped of its RAID drives. It will probably use the Windows machine as a file-server.
By the way, you mentioned the need for Gigabit Ethernet, and I pooh-poohed it, because I was thinking of surfing the net. You were right; 100 Mbps is definitely a bottleneck for serving files across the LAN.
Re: RAID checks
RAID is being performed by the motherboard’s Intel ICHR9 (sp?) chipset. Adds several seconds to boot-up, but nothing serious.
Re: Gaming rig
I used Battlefield 2 as a metric to compare against the old machine. Definitely runs smoother. I ran the Call of Duty IV (?) demo too. Wow, all those bots are looking good!
I would have thought I would need Crossfire happening to before the cool gamer kids would let me in their clans.
Comment by Julian on January 28, 2009
Alastair,
In Richard’s defence, I am not a real beginner to the *nix lifestyle. I have done a couple of installs a few years ago – both with major problems, I should add. I have many months/few years experience coding on Solaris, AIX and Linux. I am a beginner Linux Sys Admin though.