I'm sure I could have sleeved all these cables and made them look all fancy and whatnot, but it's fine the way it is- cables are at least out of the way of everything.After booting without incident, I checked and made sure that all of my components were working properly, which they were. The fans are a bit noisier than I would have originally hoped because the case is essentially completely open on one side with a mesh grille, however the saving grace is that they are a much, much mellower tone. I think I'll still get the 200mm external case fan though, as the case's fan controller is really great at keeping the case fans from getting annoying.
Then came the configuration! BIOS is something I have relatively limited experience with, so I left that be for the time being, at stock clock speeds and auto voltage until I can get a better feel for the system. I got a few things wrong, though, which led to some minor headaches.
1st- I forgot to select ACHI for my hard drives, instead leaving them in default IDE mode. This made my SSD run at a much slower speed than it should have, and required a fresh install of my OS to fix! It looks like I may be doing a third re-install to fix some other configuration mistakes that might have cocked up the registry, so I suppose it isn't that large of a whiff in the long run. The SSD eats Windows installations handily, anyways.2nd- As I was running my computer, I noticed it was really getting far hotter than it should have been. The CPU was running at about 45-47 degrees Celsius, which is not horrible but higher than I would have expected. The PSU also was dishing out pretty serious amounts of heat, as well. The culprit? I had forgotten to enable the Intel CPU stepping! Essentially, the CPU was running at full tilt and sucking its maximum wattage of 140W or so, to keep the CPU running at the advertised 2.8GHz at all times. BIOS time! I made sure to enable the setting, and on the next boot suddenly everything was cooler by at least 5 degrees, and it wasn't getting so hot anymore. Now the CPU was chugging along drawing about 40W at idle (dipping as low as 28W), with essentially no degradation in performance that I could notice.
Once I installed the Sapphire drivers the Radeon 5850 came to life as well, although some of the software settings had to be tweaked for max performance. The "overclockers" panel is a neat feature that I will probably end up dabbling a bit in. Like the reviews said, it really does do very well at idle, and while running the windows desktop it ramps the core speed down to a very low setting and is almost silent. Humorously, I tried sliding the fan's duty cycle parameter up to 100% just to see what max load sounds like and WOW. It is EXTREMELY loud, but the cooling is seriously good. Stepping that fan up just briefly dropped the GPU temps very low, very fast.
Anyways, there is still a bunch of tweaking to do before it is ready to roll, but so far the Windows experience score is pretty respectable for my budget:
(yes, I'm aware of how shitty and arbitrary of a benchmark this is, I'll have to run some more robust benchmarking tools once I'm finished.)
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