Monday, July 13, 2009

New Computer

Built a new computer today with parts from the Intel Retail Edge's Big Deal program.

From the top down, outside in:
Antec 900 Case, with Dynex case fan for the side panel.
HP 22x DVD-RW drive. Cheapest SATA drive we have.
Intel DX58SO "Smackover" motherboard.
Intel Core i7 920 processor (stock speed of 2.66 Ghz)
6GB of OCZ 12800 (1600Mhz speed) DDR3 RAM
BFG Geforce 260 GTX OC Maxcore video card (I love BFG graphics cards and the lifetime warranty)
Seagate 7200.12 500GB SATA hard drive. The newer Seagates have speeds approaching the Velociraptors, with more space and less than half the price.
And, a 750W Corsair power supply.

Stock CPU fan currently, although I might replace that once I get my mail-in-rebates :( from Newegg for the RAM and PSU.

Motherboard is slow to post, takes 5 seconds or so for my monitor to go from power saving to showing video... worried me a little on the first boot. Once it's running, it's crazy fast. Only thing I'm having issues with so far is slow internet, and that's likely due to installing updates.
Windows Ultimate 64-bit, to be upgraded (for free) to Windows 7 come October 22nd.

Everything has gone great so far. Flashed the new BIOS, then used it to increase the memory voltage to 1.62, QPI to 1.35 and timings to 7-7-7/20 in able to get the desired 1600Mhz speed. Running great so far. I'm debating using the Intel "Auto-Tune" function for the processor overclock, or simply changing the settings myself.

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