System Build 2013: Closed loop cooler, Haswell, and more

Keen-eyed viewers may have noticed that I gave away my choice of CPU cooler in the last post about my system build, as the box was sitting right next to the case in the last picture. I decided to go with a Corsair H110 based on the impressive performance numbers that more than a few independent tests showed it could put out. Of course, the price was much higher than an air cooler and though it definitely pushed my budget even thinner, I think that it was a worthy addition considering the fact that the most recent generations of Intel processors have always been a bit warm, especially when overclocking.

For the CPU, I bought a Haswell i5 4670K almost the first day it hit retail shelves. Considering the fact that my previous rig packed an i7 and that a good number of Haswell reviews were less than enthusiastic about its overclocking potential, my choice bears a bit of explanation. First off, I went with the i5 because in most (if not all) gaming benchmarks i5 versus i7 had a negligible effect- most of the graphics workload is dependent on the GPU and rarely does the CPU become a bottleneck. Saving $100 on a processor and spending $100 more on a GPU would have a vastly larger return in terms of gaming performance. Based on my usage, the i7's hyper threading just wasn't worth it this time around. In terms of why I chose Haswell over a previous gen i5, the simple fact that on the Asus Z87-A motherboard all of the internal SATA ports were 6 GB/S and supported RAID sealed the deal, as this feature is conspicuously absent from the previous generation. Micro Center was running an absurdly good bundle deal, and the whole endeavor only cost me $10 more than what I would have paid for a previous gen i5. That was a pretty airtight case for me.

Of course, to round it out there was still a lot of other choices to be made. I still needed a power supply, RAM, and a video card.

I chose a Seasonic 650W fully modular power supply- the wattage isn't enough to support a big SLI build, but I had decided to go for a big single card once again, because the power/noise/heat equation still greatly favors a high tier single card over two lesser cards in SLI. I wasn't about to skimp on the quality of the PSU, though, hence why I used a Seasonic that had been noted for its very solid, stable voltage regulation.

I chose DDR3 1600 RAM- although there is dispute as to whether or not DDR3 1600 or DDR3 1866 is the point past which diminishing returns kick in, 1600 is the highest speed actually supported on Z87 without an overclock. I found a good deal on 8GB of Crucial Ballistix Elite memory; despite the "overkill" sized heat sinks it was mercifully free of LEDs and bright colors that some RAM tends to come with, and the timings were excellent for the price. My previous system got along just fine with 6GB of memory, but when a kit of 2x4GB sticks comes along at such a good deal, upping the memory to 8GB didn't seem like too extreme of a jump.

The video card proved to be much more elusive than I had hoped. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 700 series has just hit the market, and a number of the models are a bit scarce. In the meantime though, I assembled what I had into the case:



More to come as I finish off this build!

E3 2013: My take

I'll admit that I don't really watch E3 with the enthusiasm that some consumers do. In fact, I tend to tune it out and let the hype die down before really digging into it. However, I felt like I should weigh in this year, as it really provided some great material to discuss.

Microsoft lost me with their lackluster presentation of the Xbox One, and managed to kill all desire I had for one when the details of it's rather draconian connectivity dependence came to light. I could go on about the fact that requiring internet check ins and always online single player kills the very essence of single player, but I'd probably just be preaching to the choir. The whole "kinect is always listening" business also creeps me right the hell out, as the camera and microphone will apparently always be monitoring. I'm not really the tinfoil hat type, but doesn't that strike anyone else as a grievous invasion of privacy? Used games being essentially blocked was just another nail in the coffin, and I can't help but be slightly amused by the fact that this rather bold move is spitting in the face of Gamestop's business model, which, last I checked, was responsible for moving a whole lot of Microsoft systems and games. Add on top of all of this the fact that I'm on my third Xbox 360 (the previous two died conveniently a few months outside of warranty, leaving me to foot the bill for another system) and I think you can count my consumer enthusiasm as suitably snuffed.

As an aside, why would they call it the Xbox One? Never mind that it's an odd naming scheme, it's like they actually want Ebay to be flooded with scammers selling "original Xbox" systems as "Xbox 1" and using sneaky wording to confuse the unsuspecting holiday buyers.

Sony really hit it big for me, and my previously lukewarm interest in the PS4 has been galvanized into some actual enthusiasm. A $100 lower price point and no used game blocking nonsense was a breath of fresh air. Still, I'm concerned about them stepping up to the plate to regain their momentum in the games department. I can't shake the feeling that Sony had been caught off guard this past generation when (in my opinion at least) the Forza franchise totally blew the doors off of Gran Turismo, which had been the reigning champion of motorsport games. Tom Clancy's "The Division" looked awfully cool, though.

Finally, Nintendo has been off my radar for a while, since the WiiU never really struck me as something interesting. That all changed when I saw the Monolith title that was in the works for 2014... It really, really wowed me, it looks like Monster Hunter but with mechs, and there's something undeniably awesome about that combination. Consider my interest piqued.

System build 2013: Case optimization (Part 1)

I've been running a bit of a backlog once again, as the computer building has officially started- more often than not I find myself making tweaks as opposed to writing about them. As I'm putting this together, the system is bootable and the OS is installed, though there is no video card yet and no attempt at cable management has been made. I'll have to back up for a moment to detail how I got to where I am now, and that leads me to the initial run of case optimizations.

Make no mistake- the 650D is a great case, but for the system I've designed it's slightly sub-optimal for a few (somewhat) easily remedied reasons. Most of note, the front 200mm fan is too shallow and a bit noisy, and its proximity to the hard drive cages makes it necessary to modify the case to fit a deeper fan that moves much more air. Hearing excellent reviews about the Cooler Master Megaflow 200mm fan and the relative ease with which it can be modded to fit the 650D led me to snag a plain old black, non-LED version to hack to bits. I suppose I'm officially a case modder now, then?

The modified setup involved cutting the 650D's front grate out, and removing the rear tabs of the Megaflow so that the fan fit through the front of the case and secured into the existing mounting points, which would (hopefully!) leave enough room for the drive cages to be mounted as well. The fan was easy enough, as I'm vaguely familiar with working on and shaping ABS plastic. Using a file almost feels like cheating, it shapes the material so easily.



Since it's not going to be showing in the final product, I didn't really have to worry about making it "pretty," just dimensionally correct. Finishing such a surface is a notorious pain in the butt anyways. On to the case. The front grate had to be removed such that the fan could slip down into it and meet up with the existing mounting points. This was much more involved, and required hearing protection, dust masks, a lot of patience, and a helping hand from my friend Emily, who tag teamed on the Dremel with me to get it done.



After finishing the cutting and sanding, I took the case to the edge of the garage and blasted it down with an air compressor- this was not a simple "canned air" job, since those steel shavings get absolutely, positively everywhere. And now, the finished assembly:



The margin between the fan and drive cage is very close, but it still clears- success! It doesn't really show well in pictures, but it's about a 1mm margin, so no buzzing fan rattling on a drive cage!

Aside from this major mod, everything else was just a matter of picking which fans went where, making sure that it would ultimately be a positive pressure setup, and coming up with a general game plan for cable routing, though this will come later after hooking all the hardware up and making sure it was ready to roll.

More coming soon!

System build 2013: Using a budget "cache" SSD as an OS drive?

Having used a solid state drive on my 2010 build, there was no way that I would go back to having only standard hard disks for my 2013 build. After looking at various reviews and benchmarks, I decided that the primary SSD for this build would be a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro. At $130, it offers an amazing performance level that is on par with the larger SSDs that have more memory modules for the controller to work with. The Samsung unit is also double the capacity of my current SSD, which cost me $170 at the time. Although it is tempting to bemoan the cost of being an early adopter, it's actually quite impressive to see that 3 years later, I'm buying a faster, larger SSD for less money.

I digress. As I learned to live with the somewhat limited 60GB on my current SSD, I found that it was a bit of a lost cause to try to "manage" games and prune them aggressively upon completion, especially on a drive that was sharing the OS. Reinstalling, updating, and so on became a bit of a nightmare. Having an SSD with 0 bytes of space left would not make for a happy computer when it was time to apply an update, be it game or OS. World of Tanks managed this feat once or twice during a patch, which resulted in the dreaded "no more space" error message and left me scrambling to figure out how to clear up some space. Steam was too big to fit from the beginning. Now both Steam and Tanks have ended up residing on the slower hard disk. 128GB of space is an improvement, but it's still going to require some creative tweaking because my Steam folder alone weighs in at 144+ GB. Now, to be perfectly fair my Steam library has not yet been pruned, but factor in that I've got to install World of Tanks (~14 GB) and my OS (~16GB) and I'm looking at deleting 46GB of stuff just to have a drive that is totally full!

Using a dedicated OS drive is the solution I've come to, but what to use without being over-sized and over-budget? The SSD market as a whole has pretty much moved away from smaller size drives, which is disappointing. Enter the SanDisk Readycache drive, a 32GB drive intended as a cache drive to speed up traditional hard drives. The price is certainly right, at $39.99 it was the cheapest SSD out there that I could find. But how would it fare when I just format it, throw it into a computer, and install the OS directly onto it? The deck is certainly stacked against it, since it's smaller (and as a result has much fewer memory modules) and uses a less advanced controller that is apparently more suited for its intended use as a cache drive. I'm all for giving it a fair shot, so I picked one up. I figure if it can deliver even comparable performance to my current SSD for $40 I'll be happy.

I decided to momentarily install it in my 2010 rig to benchmark it versus my current SSD, and eliminate all other variables. Same system, same SATA controller. The results were actually pretty interesting.
(To be perfectly clear these were both on my motherboard's 3.0 GB/s SATA controller.)

First the baseline of my current Corsair Force Series 60GB:

Bear in mind that it might be showing some signs of age, but it's the best I can do with my current resources.

Now the SanDisk:

Interestingly enough, the sequential read is actually faster, at 136% of the Corsair's speed. Where it gets trounced, though, is the 4K random read, where it barely hits 31.5% of the read speed (but this is still much faster than the average traditional hard disk drive). Since booting Windows 7 is a mix of sequential and random reads, it's hard to call it in one direction or the other. I don't believe the SanDisk will boot faster than my Corsair, given how much the random read lags behind. What the real-world difference in performance will be remains to be seen. My initial impression based on the data and the fact that these numbers still handily outpace traditional drives is that the difference will likely be hard to notice, and on the order of a second or two.

The bottom line is that for the money, this drive looks like it's actually a pretty decent choice. It's not going to win any benchmarks for sure, but its selling point is its reasonably low cost.