Probably the first special on slevi this 5 article serie will cover my recently purchased new desktop, starting off with the selection of hardware following by benchmarks in which the setup will be thoroughly tested and of course ending with the conclusion. The hardware selection (reading now) General performance Benchmarking games (future entry) Application handling (future entry) Conclusion (future entry) Introduction When [...]

Probably the first special on slevi this 5 article serie will cover my recently purchased new desktop, starting off with the selection of hardware following by benchmarks in which the setup will be thoroughly tested and of course ending with the conclusion.

• The hardware selection (reading now)
• General performance
• Benchmarking games (future entry)
• Application handling (future entry)
• Conclusion (future entry)

Introduction

When one of your hobbies is gaming there’s no doubt that you’re going to face the problem of your hardware simply not cutting it anymore, at first it’s not that troublesome since the performance drop is minimal and can be cut back by lowering certain settings but as the years pass by you’ll start noticing how even on the lowest settings you barely manage to reach an fps of 10 if you don’t do something about it.

Now in case you have a desktop you can replace parts along the road where you think necessary to prevent this from happening, in case you had a laptop though like me then your options with regards to this are very limited. Even though it’s not impossible to replace the parts you’re usually held back in your tracks by over expensive hardware or items being hardly available.

At this point you remain with two choices, buy a new laptop or buy a new desktop. Myself I chose for the latter because the need for a new laptop has diminished and performance wise the pricing on a desktop is cheaper.

Powering up the casing

With the Cooler Master CM690 you have more than just a case, it truly looks like a work of art standing under your desk. The overall design is simply superb to be said at least, when seeing the casing you wouldn’t guess the pricing has been just 69 Eur.

There are also some flaws though, the front panel for one is extremely hard to get off and required some brute force along with a screwdriver to succeed rather than a simple click system as most cases I’ve had so far had. Then there’s also the power and reset button which look great, no doubt about that, but feel as if it’s loose parts ready to fall off at any moment.

The Cooler Master Real Power 520 is a modular PSU which fits the need of my hardware well, the 520 Watt might not be enough in case you pick a system with a thirst for energy but it’s enough for the average mid-range system.

Taking a look at the noise production from this thing I’m quite satisfied, it’s definitely one of the more quiet things within the system and compared to PSU’s I’ve had in the past it’s a lot less noisy.

A great advantage as well is of course the modular part, no longer having your case filled with needless cables but just allowing you to plug in just what you need. It’s a decent PSU overall, but in case you wish to go high-end I’d say take one which provides a little more Wattage.

The core

Asus is one of the most well known brands when it comes to motherboards and the P5K isn’t the first I have purchased from them. Within one of my older desktops I’ve used an Asus board for years and it has never let me down, quite satisfied with that.

This time it didn’t let me down either, the CPU worked right out of the box without any flashing required and no memory issues preventing the system from passing the POST.

There are some minor details though like the EDI being located totally down on the board which makes it impossible to reach the top drives but since I don’t make use of EDI that’s no an issue for me. Be careful though when selecting your RAM for this board as Asus is picky on its memory, there have been various reports on the net of systems not passing the POST because of certain memory brands.

Placed on the board there’s a nice little heatsink as well, how effective it is I can’t really tell but in combination with the airflow in the case it keeps the temperatures down on around 30-35 degrees on the board, this is significantly lower than the previous desktop I had running where the recorded temperatures were around 45-50 degrees.

The heart of every system, it’s CPU. With so many choice these days in what to buy it’s hard to come to a definitive conclusion on what would be the best for you. Dual cores, quad cores, Intel, AMD, etcetera. In the end you’re ending up going through a lot of benchmarks, making a selection for your own criteria and see how they perform.

In case gaming is your only interest then a quad core might not be the best choice these days as dual cores still perform better, what the future will hold for us though is yet to be seen. When it comes to applications like Maya (3D modeling) or Photoshop then the quad core performs noticeably faster than it’s dual core counterparts.

Myself I ended up going for the Q6600 for that reason, the performance profit in modeling and graphics applications is great and the loss in gaming is minimal. Since I do like doing that sort of stuff along this CPU fitted my needs quite well.

The reason why I didn’t go for the newer models of the quad core is mainly pricing, 199 Eur is more than enough for a CPU if you ask me, definitely wasn’t interested in paying 299 or even 399 for one; simply out of my budget. The difference in performance will most likely not even be worth the money.

Well, it looks like a big monster that’s one way of looking at it. In case it’s design you’re after than this Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro will probably not be the way to go with, it’s just a big ugly block with a fan in front of it, nothing fancy.

In case you’re wanting to keep your CPU cool on the other hand and don’t want to lay down 30 additional bucks for a fancy looking thing because your casing has no window anyway, then this thing comes in handy. It keeps the idle temp of my CPU around 24 degrees, ambient temperature is around 18-20 degrees. Not bad of a performance I’d say seeing as to how it cost less than 20 bucks, you do get a bit of noise from it though but it’s not bad.

If it’s ugly green chips you’re after… then Kingston is where you should be looking at. The DDR2-800 4gb kit I purchased with this system definitely doesn’t look anything fancy like the OCZ and GEIL memory banks you can find for example, but I wanted to be sure that it worked and actually was available as well which left me with Kingston.

For my previous desktops I’ve used Kingston memory banks before without any troubles or whatsoever so I don’t expect them to be causing any issues here either. So far the 4GB is working out quite good as well, with Vista using up quite a bit in idle I still get close to 3GB of memory available for me to do with as I please.

Graphics

This midrange card for 149 Eur is proving itself quite nicely, the 9600GT T2D OC from MSI. In the benchmarks it performs on a level close to that of the 8800 GT, good enough if you ask me especially for this price.

So far from what I’ve seen the performance in games is well, depending on the game it gives me fps’ of over 100 in FEAR (max) and 15-20+ in Crysis (High no AA).

The card does come with a downside though, it’s not particularly quiet. The fan produces quite a bit of noise and the transistors give a high frequency “buzz” which is especially noticeable when the gfx card is put under a high level of stress, for example during gaming.

Because I’m using a headset most of the times myself this doesn’t matter that much, but in case silence is what you’d be aiming for then I’d pass this card (or any 9600 GT as from what I’ve read it’s something they all tend to have).

Storage

Not much to mention here, although of course it’s essential for any system to run I haven’t picked anything special for these. As DVD player it became a Samsung SH-S203D which cost no more than 20 Eur, so quite a bargain and does what you’d expect from it. The only surprise is that looking at it’s price it’s still so silent, but I suppose that’s a good thing.

The HDD also comes from Samsung, the SpinPoint T 500GB is just an ordinary 16mb cache 7200rpm disk drive. When it comes to speed it’ll definitely be no match for Raptor drives in example, but I think it’s good enough.

Final words

This setup all together cost just over 770 Eur, for that pricing the performance is doing pretty damn good so far. Within the upcoming entries we’ll give a closer look to exactly how well it’s doing by going through a series of benchmarks, having a look at the temperatures it runs with and compare the performance to where I’m coming from just to show how great the difference really is.