The Build, The Results and The Tribulations.

So last week saw me pick up the components that would form my new PC, the first real upgrade I have bought in about 3 years. Getting new hardware is always an exciting experience for someone like me which is probably why I enjoy being in the datacenter so much these days, with all that new kit that I get to play with. I didn’t really have the time to build the PC until the weekend though and so I spent a good 5 days with all the parts laid out on the dining table beside me, begging me to put them together right now rather than waiting. My resolve held however and Saturday morning saw me settle down with a cup of coffee to begin the longest build I’ve ever undertaken.

I won’t go over the specifications again since I’ve already mentioned them a dozen times elsewhere but this particular build had a few unique challenges that you don’t see in regular PCs. For starters this would be my first home PC that had a RAID set in it, comprising of 4 1TB Seagate drives that would be held in a drive bay enclosure. Secondly the CPU would be watercooled using a Corsair H70 fully sealed system and since I hadn’t measured anything I wasn’t 100% sure I’d be able to fit it where I thought I could. Lastly with all these drives, watercooling and other nonsense the number of power cables required also posed a unique challenge as I wasn’t 100% sure I could get them all to fit in my mid-sized tower.

The build started off quite well as I was able to remove the old components without issue and give the case a good clean before installing bits and pieces in it. The motherboard, CPU and RAM all went together quite easily as you’d expect but when it came time to affix the mounting bracket for the watercooling I hit a bit of a stumbling block. You see the motherboard I purchased does you the favor of having the old style LGA775 mounting holes, letting you use old style coolers on the newer CPUs. This is all well and good but since the holes are only labelled properly on one side attempting to line up the backing plate with the right holes proved to be somewhat of a nightmare, especially considering that when it did line up it was at a rather odd angle. Still it mounted and fit flush to the motherboard so there was no issues there.

The next challenge was getting all the hard drives in. Taking off the front of my case to to do a dry fit of the drive bay extension showed that there was a shelf right smack bang in the middle of the 4 bays. No problem though it looked to just be screwed in however upon closer inspection it showed that the screws in the front could only be accessed by a right angle screw driver, since the holes that needed to be drilled for a regular driver hadn’t been done. After attempting several goes with a drive bit and a pair of pliers I gave up and got the drill out, leaving aluminium shavings all over the place and the shelf removed. Thankfully the drive bay extender mounted with no complaints at all after that.

Next came the fun part, figuring out where the hell the watercooling radiator would go. Initially I had planned to put it at the front of the case but the hosing was just a bit too short. I hadn’t bought any fan adapters either so mounting it on the back would’ve been a half arsed effort with cable ties and screws in the wrong place. After fooling around for a while I found that it actually fit quite snuggly under the floppy drive bays, enough so that it barely moved when I shook the case. This gave me the extra length to get to the CPU whilst also still being pretty much at the front of the case, although this also meant I could only attach one of the fans since part of the radiator was mere millimeters away from the end of the graphics card.

With everything all put together and wired up it was now the moment of truth, I took a deep breath and pressed the power button. After a tense couple milliseconds (it seemed like forever) the computer whirred into life and I was greeted with the BIOS screen. Checking around in the BIOS though revealed that it couldn’t see the 4 drives I had attached to the external SATA 6Gbps controller so I quickly booted into the windows installer to make sure they were all there. They did in fact come up and after a furious 2 hours of prodding around I found that the external controller didn’t support RAID at all, only the slower ports did. This was extremely disappointing as it was pretty much the reason why I got this particular board but figuring that the drives couldn’t saturate the old SATA ports anyway I hooked them up and was on my merry way with the Windows install being over in less than 10 minutes.

I’ve been putting the rig through its paces over the past week and I must say the biggest improvement in performance comes solely from the SSD. The longest part of the boot process is the motherboard initializing the 3 different controllers with Windows loading in under 30 seconds and being usable instantly after logging in. I no longer have to wait for things to load, every program loads pretty much instantaneously. The RAID array is none too shabby either with most games loading in a fraction of the time they used to.

Sadly with all games being optimized for consoles these days the actual performance improvement in nearly every game I’ve thrown at it has been very minimal. Still Crysis 2 with all the settings set to their maximum looks incredibly gorgeous even if I can’t seem to make it chug even on the biggest multi-player maps. The new mouse I bought (Logitech G700) is quite an amazing bit of kit too and the TRON keyboard my wife got me for my birthday just adds to the feeling that I’m using a computer from the future. Overall I’m immensely satisfied with it and I’m sure it’ll prove its worth once I throw a few more programs at it.

Speaking of which, I can’t wait to code on that beasty.