2011-06-01
My desktop case arrived today, so I finally had all the parts that I needed to resurrect kraken, my old desktop.
The parts:
| Case | Antec P183 Mid tower (rated as one of the better quiet cases available) |
| Power Supply | Nexus RX-8500. Incredibly quiet. |
| Motherboard | Asus P8P67 EVO (one of the few motherboards with dual NICs) |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 2600K (Sandy Bridge). At the time, the highest-ranking CPU on this benchmark that didn't cost four digits. |
| RAM | 16GB: 4x4GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600, 9-9-9-24 CAS latency |
| Graphics Card | nVidia 9600 GT that Robby gave me |
| Hard disks | Transferred from old computer |
| Optical drives | ...are for people who don't know how to use USB and netboot installers. ;) |
The build took a while, since I'm still pretty inexperienced at building these things. The fact that neither the case nor the motherboard had assembly instructions didn't help. It's a darn good thing the one I built with Kristin a month or so ago did - I probably would have missed a step or two otherwise.
The only two tools I needed (and technically, I could have done it without the awesome screwdriver, just more slowly):
The case is one of the Antec ones that puts the power supply in the bottom of the case. I'm still not sure how I feel about this. On the upside, the power supply creates far less turbulance around the processor at the bottom, and the case can have a vent at the top, which is more efficient since heat rises. On the downside, it puts the power supply in a different place than most motherboards and power supplies expect you to put such things, so some cables may be too short to route comfortably, which can cause turbulence and reduce cooling efficiency. Also, it's harder to flip the switch at the bottom than at the top.
The case also had these cool pull-out bays for the hard disks with these huge rubberized shock absorbers:
All assembled (yes, the cables are a mess):
About five minutes of fiddling with UEFI BIOS settings, and I successfully booted kraken. Later, I'll have to reinstall everything with 64-bit packages, and set up VMs, and...I'll be busy this weekend, I imagine. :)
And yes, the thing is as quiet as I had hoped. With the case fans set to low speed, I worried for a moment that the system didn't start when I pressed the power button. Even at high speed, the fans are peaceful. I am quite pleased.
Comments:
Danny | 2011-06-04T10:05:21.762707
The ram and cpu make me go nom nom nom.Jono | 2011-06-04T08:56:45.703129
Very nice - and I thought my machine was awesome :-)I still need to do some proper sound tests. I was also going for soft, but went with cheaper components. It would be cool if we could somehow measure the airflow inside the case at various points (to see how much benefit the change of location for the power supply gives), but I suspect it would be time consuming and/or hard.