Historically I’ve upgraded my computer quite often, a pattern that changed when I purchased a my Dell workstation almost 4 years ago. At the time I thought that the 2 x 2.4GHz Xenon processors, its 1GB of RAM and its 2 x 80GB HDD’s would last for a good couple of years. And it has, I’ve upped the HDD’s to 200GB ones, added a DVD burner, upped it to 2GB RAM and gave it a SATA upgrade in the process.

Fast forward to now and I’ve been itching to upgrade to something with a lot more snap in order to meet my requirements, which are as follows:

• Have at least 2 monitors plugged in – If you haven’t tried it yet two monitors rock from a productivity point of view and you get a free workout moving your mouse over bigger distances.
• Run Visual Studio 2005 – My primary role in life is to write code and integrate systems, so this is a given.
• Run at least 2 virtual machines (hosted with MS Virtual Server 2005) all the time – A domain controller and a TFS server.
• Allow for the creation of 2 additional virtual machines at any point in time for evaluation and test purposes – for playing with Longhorn Server and Office 2007 server products.
• Allow general PC usage – Office (using 2007), Internet Explorer, blog reader etc.
• Allow my partner to access and author content in Japanese (‘cause that’s where she’s from)
• Have multiple sessions open on the host operating system at once (my other half often uses it for general PC usage and I Terminal Service in from a remote laptop, or vice versa. Sometimes I’m playing a game or utilising both screens on the desktop for development and she wants to check email, browse the web etc. all in Japanese so an RDP session is great because she gets access to her personalised, Japanese enabled desktop)
• Exist for at least 2-3 years without being replaced. This means that it’ll run Vista, Longhorn Server and the Office 2007 product line (including server components) before I next replace it.
• Support playing the occasional game – I don’t own an Xbox and don’t intend to, so I rely on my desktop for this task every 6 months or so when I decide to load a game up and play it for a couple of weeks before I relegate it to a shelf, never to see the light of day again – yet alone CPU clock cycles.
• Hardware support for RAID 5 to protect my data

So, with all the above in mind I set about the task of researching the computer that I’ll buy.

Things soon took a turn for the worse, I decided on an AMD x64 platform (more on why later) and went to Dell looking for one. But was disappointed – Dell don’t ship AMD based workstations, so I decided to build the first PC I’ve built in ages.

CPU choices

Processor options available fell into a few of categories:

1. Intel EM64T based Pentium
2. AMD Opteron – the first x64 chip and still highly rated for server work
3. AMD Athlon – good all rounder and much better on the desktop side of life
4. Intel Conroe – not yet released

Reading about the differences between the AMD and Intel, the AMD chips outperform the Intel ones every time because of the changes to the chip architecture that AMD made. It seems that AMD have done several clever things on their 64 bit line of chips, including reducing the traffic on the front-side buss (FSB) by adding a memory controller directly in the chip so all memory requests don’t have to be relayed across the FSB to the North Bridge.

The Conroe chips from Intel look great and Tom’s Hardware has rated them very highly based on some early benchmarks against the quickest that AMD make. But I didn’t want to wait the extra month, nor I suspect could I have afforded one of these chips on the day they ship to retailers from Intel, so I dropped this idea before it had completely formed.

So it looked like AMD was for me, but which one? Because of my carefully though-of-after-the-event requirements above, I know that only the Athlon will do for me because of the game/Vista requirements. That didn’t stop me thinking about a dual processor, dual core solution for a total of 4 cores though.

In the end I brought an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 chip. The FX-62 looks nice, but at an extra £250, I felt the increase in performance wasn’t worth the extra cash.

Motherboard

Phew – the chip decision was taken care of, onto the motherboard.

In the end I settled for an Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe SKT939 RD580 Crossfire ATX board mainly because it had better features around RAID and onboard NICs. I wasn’t intending to use the SLI features on the boards and I think that one graphics card is enough for any but the most hardcore gamer – in other words, I felt it wasn’t for me so didn’t have to get into the whole nVidea vs ATI thing.

Memory

It turns out that all RAM isn’t the same! In tests the Corsair RAM performs better than the rest, so this became a no brainer for me – I’ll have 4GB worth (4 x 1GB slugs).

The interesting thing here is that my motherboard choice means I can only have 4GB of RAM in the machine, so filling all the DIMM slots up isn’t going to matter further down the line. I’ve since discovered thought that when the board is fully populated with four DIMM’s, it reduced the FSB speed down to 333MHz instead of 400MHz. Of cause, you can over clock it back up, but I guess they had their reasons for this. If I had known this up front, I’d have got 2 x 2GB DIMM’s.

Also DDR-400 (PC3200 specification) is what the Athlon requires, so that’s what I got.

Graphics card

Strangely enough, when I sent my original parts list to a friend for review/input, he pointed out that I forgot to spec a graphics card and the motherboard chosen didn’t have one built in – that’s how much I worry about this subject

As a good general all rounder I picked a Sapphire X800GTO 256mb GDDR3 PCI-E VGA/TVO/DVI card because it should last me a couple of years and enable me to turn all the Glass features in Vista (and play the occasional game).

Case (and cooling)

I did put a little thought into the case, but not from the point of view of prettiness – it’s going to end up on the floor of my office tucked under a desk where I can’t see it and band my head every time I want to insert a DVD – but from the point of view of noise! My Dell is noisy and as my computers never get turned off, I wanted to give consideration to a quite PC – not that consideration is not a requirement but was used to tip the scales of any case/cooling choices.

Being mindful of this, my brother recommended that I really cool the CPU down with a heat-pipe. So I did, with an Arctic Cooling (AC-FRZ-64P) Socket 754 939 940 CPU Cooler with Heat pipe cooling. When it arrived, I was amazed at its size, but it fitted and does the job.

Like I said, I don’t care what the case looks like, so I got an Arctic Cooling T1 Silentium 450W Seasonic figuring that if Arctic Cooling are making good CPU coolers, the must have thought about the issue at a case level. And they have. The Silentium series of case has some very nice features that result in air getting into the case and around the high temperature areas to keep everything cool. In addition, the 4 case fans are really quite.

Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and other media devices

You’re probably wondering what I intend to do with a 450W PSU, well wonder no more as all will be revealed.

I want RAID 5 for my data (min 3 disks) and when I saw the price of SATA 2/300 drives I just ordered 4 (that max the case can host). Originally I was going to order the Seagate 250GB ones, but ended up with the Weston Digital 250GB ones because they run cooler than others. My general rule of thumb is never to buy Maxtor (too many failed Maxtor disks lie in my past).

For those that are interested in the exact model, I got 4 x Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATA2/300 16MB Cache. Once RAID 5’ed I’ll have three quarters of a terabyte to play with

I also intend to transfer the 2 DVD drives from my Dell to this new system for optical storage (reading and writing).

With all the above in the case, I knew I wouldn’t have room for a floppy disk drive, so I didn’t even bother to order one.

Ebuyer

I don’t usually give out free advertising, but Ebuyer did a cracking job on this one, having placed the order at about 12:29 all the components arrived the next day before 10:00 – you can’t beat that for a delivery time can you? – so I had the thing built a ready to go by the middle of the afternoon for some early performance tests…

Part 1, does that mean there’s going to be more on this?

Yes, I’m going to make you read more on this subject with a Part 2 - first impressions which will be posted in a day or so.

Filed under: 64 bit