New PC Parts Are All Ordered
My old desktop finally died of mysterious causes in the spring, and I’ve been back and forth on what to replace it with since then.
I’ve spent this summer slowly acquiring parts for my new desktop. Following my trend of naming my computers after fictional artificial intelligences, her name is Athena, after the Battlestar Galactica character.
Once I get home (where all of the parts are waiting for me), I’d like to properly document the build and post about it here, if for no other reason than to get this project blog started. In the mean time, I’ll give an outline of the hardware I chose.
The Case
The case I chose is a CoolerMaster Storm Scout. I’ve had my eye on the Storm Scout for a few years now. It’s a solid-looking case, and it looks like it will have much better airflow than my old case. That, and the handles are a nice touch for someone who moves around as much as I do.
Power Supply
I had hoped I would be able to stick with my current power supply, an old Antec that I bought when the predecessor released its magic smoke. However, I don’t think it has the new 8-pin CPU power connector, so I decided to get a new one. I chose a 600 Watt OCZ Power Supply, which is overkill for what I’ve built, and should give me some breathing room if I want to improve down the road. It’s modular, which I like because dangling cables aggravate my inner neat freak (the power supply that died on me was modular, and I loved it until the day it killed itself).
DVD Drive
I wouldn’t have bought a new DVD drive, but my old one was PATA (better known as IDE), and most new motherboards have finally done away with those hideous ribbon cables. I decided on an LG drive that was on sale back in June. I’ve always been very happy with the build quality of LG’s drives. I just wish Blueray drives were cheap enough to be worth buying.
Motherboard
I held off on buying the motherboard and processor until just last week, although I had picked them out as early as a month ago. The reason I waited was once I ordered this motherboard, I would have only three weeks to submit a mail-in rebate form, and I wanted to test it beforehand.
The motherboard I decided on is an Asus P8P67. I went into this build planning to buy either an Asus or a Gigabit. I chose the P67 chipset as a nice compromise between price (the H67s are cheaper) and performance (the Z68s are a bit beefier, but you’re mostly paying for the on board video). I originally didn’t want to spend as much as I did, but I wanted a full size ATX motherboard, and I wanted to do an Intel build (My last was AMD, but I think Intel is still beating out AMD.)
Processor
Like I said, I originally wanted this to be a cheaper build. I was originally looking at either AMD or an i3. That was before I started working at National Instruments. Once I had the money, and had been playing with i7’s at work, I wanted to upgrade a bit. I wasn’t willing to shell out for an i7, but I decided I definitely wanted a Sandybridge processor. The advantage of Sandybridge is that it puts the memory controller, PCIe controller, and several other chipset functions right on the processor die, which makes everything a lot faster. The processor I went with is the i5 2500K, which is the “unlocked” version of the i5 2500. Because it is unlocked, I will be able to overclock it if I want. I never got around to overclocking my old desktop, but it’s something I’d like to try with the new one.
RAM
I went back and forth about how much RAM to get. Once of my considerations was that I will probably want to run virtual machines on this computer, and those can really eat up your RAM. Most of my friends told me to “Go big or go home,” so I decided to go for 8 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM from G.Skill.
Salvaged Parts
You’ll notice that I haven’t said anything about a new hard drive or graphics card. I’ll be recycling the 250GB SATA drive from my old desktop, as well as the GeForce 8600. Both work fine, and I just can’t justify buying new ones right now. I’m sure down the road I’ll upgrade both.
Price
| Case | $89.99 |
|---|---|
| Power Supply | $74.99 |
| DVD Drive | $18.99 |
| Motherboard | $154.99 |
| Processor | $219.99 |
| RAM | $69.99 |
| Tax | $42.45 |
| Shipping | $2.50 |
| Savings and Mail-in Rebates | -$125.00 |
| Total | $548.89 |