Putting together a spec for a 3XS system

[Bismark]

Hi Folks

I am looking to replace my old (October 2005 vintage) main business/gaming rig (yes, it has to do both jobs...), and it is probably going to be either a Phenom II 940 or Core i7 system. (I want it to have a decent shelf life).

A couple of little complications:

1. The case cannot be too deep (about 540mm is the absolute limit) - my place is rather small and I cannot move my desk out very far (the system has to sit on the desk unless I want to rearrange all the furniture in my living room/office)

2. The system MUST be quiet as it sits about 65cm from my left ear and I have very good hearing (my previous machine [a Shuttle SFF job] was so noisy I kept wanting to throw it out of the window ).

FYI, here is the spec of my current rig:
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AcoustiCase C6607B Black (awesome case - great to work inside, sound-deading acoustic mats, easily removable drive cages...)

Nexus NX5000 Ultra Quiet PSU (400W rating I believe)

AMD Athlon64 x2 3800 Dual Core CPU (socket 939, so I couldn't upgrade it thanks to AMD's 'obsoleting' that socket before it's due time - grr!)

Zalman flower cooler 7700-Cu (120mm fan)

ASUS A8N SLI-Premium (the first one with the heatpipe-cooled Northbridge rather than those horrible little buzzing fans)

Crucial PC3200 DIMM 1024Mb (2 of)

Club3D GeForce 7800GT PCI-E (fitted with an Arctic Cooling Silencer so it exhausts directly out of the case)

Samsung SpinPoint P120 200gb SATA (2 of - the second one has the primary swapfile on it of course...)

Samsung 552B Black DVD-RW (just replaced with a newer, faster model as the old one decided not to bother reading CDs any more...)

Mitsumi 7 in 1 Drive Black (some people still even now send me stuff on floppy disk [?!])

OS is XP Pro

Total price (including building) was about &#163;1550.
>>

That machine even now (after all this time) is pretty quiet. When it first arrived you could barely tell it was switched on unless the HDDs were being heavily accessed (when you heard a dull, very distant-sounding thudding) or when the optical drive was working (let's be honest, optical drives are rarely if ever quiet). Temps are nice and low as well, especially the GPU temps.

Usage of machine:

Most of my work is academic DTP (so we are talking lots of 2D image processing, line art creation and editing, a page layout stuff) and processing PDF files for Web use (on-line journals, basically).

The latter is actually more taxing on the rig as Acrobat is not exactly efficiently coded and appears to be less than ideally 'friendly' to AMD CPUs - it regularly maxes out my CPU and I end up waiting around just so it can search a 30-page file for links to turn them into URLs, something that should be pretty trivial and which my laptop, a mere 1.6GHz Core Duo [not Core2 Duo, you will note], does between 2 and 4x faster.

I tend to play games which are usually at least a year old - often much older than that - I believe that the most recent 'mainstream' (i.e., not turn-based strategy or shareware retro-style) game on my machine is the Morrowind GOTY edition, although I am feeling the urge to get back into the FPS habit again (and Doom 3 and Quake 4 are both nice and cheap now ).

One question is: How far up the GPU scale can I go without the machine making a horrible noise? (assuming a decent case with good soundproofing). I have been looking at both the Sapphire 4850 Ultimate and the Sapphire 4870 TOXIC as the best bets for those chipsets - I have heard (or failed to hear, more like) an HIS4670 IceQ Turbo but I don't want to go that far down the GPU scale unless there is no choice (would keep the electricity bills down though.. )

HDDs will either be Samsungs again or maybe enterprise-class drives as the drives do get a lot of use.

I don't need Blu-ray so the usual Pioneer DVD-rewiter will do nicely.

I am considering a "proper" sound card as I will be digitising my music collection with the new rig.

I will be running Vista64 very probably (my peripherals are all new owing to the old ones dying of old age, so they all have Vista drivers available), so 4Gb RAM (if I go Phenom II) will apply.

Apologies for the rambling but I had to 'infodump' the spec of my old rig as I have not reached the required post count for these forums to let me put my rig's spec in my profile.

BTW, the budget is about the same as my old rig...although it has flexibility in either direction.

One final thing - I currently work/game using a 20" 1600 x 1200 resolution monitor (bought 4 years ago when they were scarily expensive ); when it dies I expect at least a 1900 x 1200 to replace it.

Constructive suggestions welcome!

[NightOwl]

Hello Bismark, just thought I would chime in with a few comments as I have just upgraded from a system not too dissimilar to yours (same AN8 mobo, Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with a Scythe Ninja cooler and power from a totally silent Antec Phantom 500W PSU) - I share your dismay/annoyance about the Athlon 64 x2 upgrade path being pulled out from under my feet just months after I built my system. Nevertheless, it served me well for 3 years.

In my new 3XS system (which arrived 4 days ago)...

CPU: I have the overclocked i7 920 @ 3.6Ghz. Very pleased with the performance of this as I do a lot of intensive mathematical calculation work that utilizes all of the available cores - from my own real world benchmark tests for this type of work performance is over six times faster than the Athlon 64 X2 4200+, rather better than I had expected. With the overclocking this CPU is just plain awesome.

HDD: I found my old Spinpoint P120S drives reasonably quiet and 100% reliable so I continued in the Samsung tradition with a new pair of 500GB F1 drives in my 3XS system - like their forebears they are nice and quiet (possibly more so, I fancy). No hesitation in recommending!

DVD: I plumped for the Blu Ray Reader Writer (LG GGC-H20L) - I was pleasantly surprised, this is actually the quietest optical drive I have ever owned! Like you I expected the usual load screechy whine as it spins up but it's more of a soft whirr. Maybe someone else can comment on the Pioneer drive, I'm just passing on my impressions of the noise factor - I really like this LG drive very much, no more wincing when a disk is inserted!

GPU: I don't need a gaming card so I selected a lower spec, passively cooled GPU (no fan, no noise) - I think you'll probably find a higher class of GPU will have a possibly noisy fan (to be expected as they tend to be smaller/faster) - you might like to research your options here carefully, regarding noise levels.

Case: I plumped for the Coolermaster RC-1000. This is far too large for your situation but I'm relating my experience just as food for thought. This case has acoustic padding and inside it I have the Corsair 620W PSU at the bottom (this seems very quiet), two 120mm Amber fans hugging the Thermalright cooler and a further four Amber fans dotted around inside the case (one on the floor, one at the rear, two in the roof). Considering the number of fans this is not what anyone would call a noisy system but it is slightly louder than I am used to (old system was built with uber-quietness in mind). I think the culprits are most likely the ceiling fans, with the hum/whirr emanating from the vents at the top of the case (which is on the floor to my right, vents about 1m from my ear - to me, the overall noise level is like a medium loud whisper). You might want to consider where any noise will be exiting from in your own situation and see how few case fans you can get away with. The Amber fans seem good to me, though (just bear in mind I have six of those altogether, plus a quiet PSU fan, so a "medium whisper" ain't half bad in the circumstances!)

Monitor: Treated myself to the 24" Dell 2408WFP (1920x1200) - this is an outstanding display. Not cheap but the image is superb, lighting is even all over (even into the corners and all edges), and it just oozes quality. Very pleased with this.

Finally, I'm happy to recommend Scan systems to people - my system took 3 weeks from order to delivery but part of the delay was due to a duff CPU discovered during the testing stage (so replacement & re-testing was needed, took several days more). Build quality is great and the staff, though busy a lot of the time, were very friendly and helpful throughout the ordering/building phases and kept me fully updated when necessary. The best bit about Scan systems is that you can have whatever you want fitted to your PC - other system builders simply don't offer that level of customisation and choice. I'm very picky about what goes into my systems, preferring quality branded parts throughout for better performance/reliability/longevity - if I hadn't found Scan when I did I would either have ended up with a second rate system or I would have built it myself. Having built my last two systems myself I have to say it's been rather nice to just sit back and let someone else do it for a change, and to get exactly what I want into the bargain has been worth every penny. Overall I am very pleased with my purchase.

[Bismark]

Thanks a lot for the input, NightOwl

For GPUs, as you mentioned, the quality of cooler really does make a huge difference - the standard fan on my 7800GT was a horrible, buzzing, whiny affair, but the Arctic Cooling Silencer virtually silenced the card even under full load (and 7800GTs consume a fair wad of power).

There is a passively-cooled Gigabyte 4850 card - I expect there would have to be some serious case fan action to keep that cool though.

I have been looking at various cases and so far the field has narrowed to Antec Solo, Coolermaster Sileo 500, Lian-Li PC7-B (with acoustic matting added), or (if I am feeling more flush) Antec P182 or Silverstone Fortress FT01-BW.

Now back to the day job (twiddling my thumbs while more PDFs are 'processed' for links).

[Philipp]

Hi Bismark,

Sorry I completely missed this thread

As NightOwl has mentioned, we custom build all of our systems so what ever you need doing we can do

Have a look at the below system….

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ConfigureSystem.asp?SystemID=880

This system seems to be exactly what you are looking for, and if you opt for the Silverstone fortress it has built in sound proofing.

I would also recommend sticking with the GTX260 GPU (as per the spec) it’s not a noisy card and will serve you well playing at 1600*1200 & 1920*1200

If you need anything else just give me a shout

Forgot to add, if you want a GPU that is not listed on the site this isnt a problem, your welcome to pick one from the main website www.scan.co.uk

Cheers

[Bismark]

Thanks for the feedback Philipp.

It will be a few days before I seriously spec up a machine as I will not know until the beginning of the new tax year (i.e. a couple of weeks from now) exactly what my budget is.

Ye olde credit crunch could have a major effect on the orders from my customers so I need to know what I can expect to be coming in money-wise in the next quarter (if things are not looking great it could actually increase the budget, on the grounds of 'I might as well get a flash rig while I can still afford it' ).

So far I specced up a rather spiffy overclocked Dragon AMD system for about £1200 (complete with Sapphire TOXIC 1Gb 4870 Vapor-X graphics card) and a very, very nice Core i7 which came to (gulp!) £1800.

The Dragon system used the Lian-Li case with additional soundproofing; the Core i7 rig used the Silverstone Fortress.

Any thoughts on the Sapphire 4870 TOXIC edition with the Vapor-X cooler as regards noise levels? (the temps are bound to be pretty good with that cooler)

Also, what fans do you recommend for the Thermalright CPU heatsink?

I am veering towards WD Caviar Black HDDs and I might even add a bit of 'bling' with one of those Akasa card reader/fan control/front panel display widgets [for example, this: Scan code LN11645].

Also, how do you rate the ASUS XONAR sound cards versus the Creative Labs X-Fi family? (I was looking at the D1 [Scan code LN22613], which is about the same price as the X-Fi Extreme Gamer). [I have not had a discrete sound card in any of my machines since the Soundblaster Vibra 16 in my old K6-2 400MHz machine, which was replaced in April 2002]

[Bismark]

As it is the new tax year, I can start working on the spec for this machine in earnest; the budget is pretty much what I thought it would be (i.e. I can go a bit 'mad' if I want to... ).

It looks like I will stick with the Silverstone FT01-B case - the dimensions are OK and it looks good.

A few queries about the case:

1. how decent are the fans it comes with and would I be better off replacing them with 3rd party ones like Akasa Ambers, Arctic cooling or Noctua jobbies?

2. Is the soundproofing up to scratch? I will almost certainly be going for the overclocked i7 and putting a GT260 GPU in it, plus an optical and at least a couple of HDDs (WD Caviar Black jobs, most probably)

Other considerations:

I probably don't need the P6T Deluxe with OC Palm motherboard; I am considering either a Deluxe minus the OC Palm or a Rampage of some description. [The Rampage will be more likely if I don't get a flashy sound card - the sound card I am looking at is the £70 ASUS Xonar]

Having checked your configurator pages over the last few days, and looked up several on-line reviews, I am veering towards using the new Noctua CPU cooler/fan combo rather than the Thermalright/Akasa.

I am giving serious consideration to having a 3-bay hot-swap caddy installed so I can easily install a 3rd HDD at a later date (and it makes things easier when I eventually have to replace a failing drive as I don't have to go grubbing about inside the case ).

Constructive suggestions are welcome as always - I hope to finalise the spec by the beginning of next week at the latest.

[Bismark]

The time has finally come - here is the version 1 final spec, just requiring a bit of input from you Scan engineer guys

Please use the CF2 thermal paste with Noctua cooler like you used on another recent D0 stepping build (I gathered that it was the best combo for stable overclocks)

HARD DRIVES: Altthough I specified Samsung F1 on the configurator (2 of), I would prefer 2 smaller 'Enterprise-class' drives like the 320 GB Western Digital WD3202ABYS RE3, 24x7 (one for the OS partition, important applications partition and games partition, the other drive for the main swapfile and business data partitions).

I have only just managed to fill 60% capacity of my current machine's HDD space (2 x 250 Gb Spinpoints) after 3 years and 6 months, so a storage HDD is not really an issue (especially with my extensive collection of external HDDs in USB2/FW caddies to back up 'personal' data plus an external NAS RAID appliance to back-up the business data).

SOUND CARD: I have stuck with the X-Fi - although Creative have had their 'issues' in the past with Vista drivers, it appears that the XONAR is not much better in this regard, especially when gaming.


Base Specifications

Silverstone Fortress FT01B-W Tower Case Black Aluminum with Window
3XS X58 Core i7 System
Asus P6T Deluxe - Intel X58 - Sok 1366
Silverstone FP51B Black Transfer Bracket
Akasa 8 Pin Extension cable
Acronis True Image Home 2009
Scan 3XS System - 1year Onsite Warranty (Mainland UK)
Scan System Configuration
Scan System Configuration (Details confirmed at checkout stage)
Qty Selected Specifications
1 *No Custom Colour Required*
1 Intel i7 920, 2.66Ghz, 4.8GT/s QPI, @ 3.6Ghz with 20% OC (D0 Step)
1 Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 Exclusive Dual Fan CPU Cooler (Fans Included)
1 3XS System Core-Logic Overclocking*10 - 20%*
1 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600) CAS 9-9-9-24
1 896MB XFX GTX 260, 621MHz GPU, 216 Cores, 2000MHz GDDR3
1 *No ATI VGA Card Required* (NVIDIA Required)
1 620W Corsair HX Series Modular PSU (Single Graphics Card)
HARD DISKS: As discussed above
1 *Solid State Drive Not Required*
1 Akasa Multi Memory Card Reader & USB 2.0 Port
1 Pioneer DVR-216DBK 20x DVD±R, 12x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6
1 LG GGC-H20L - Super Multi DVD Writer & Blu-Ray + HD-ROM Reader
1 Creative X-Fi Titanium - PCI-E (x1)
1 *Use On Board Network Port*
1 *Wireless Adaptor Not Required*
1 120mm Akasa Amber Case Fan, Ultra Quiet and Long life with NO LEDs
1 Sharkoon 4" Green CCFL 2in1 Kit
1 Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64Bit
1 Microsoft Office 2007 - 60 Day Trial
1 CyberLink PowerDVD 8 Standard Movie/Audio Player & Decoder
1 *No Software Required*
1 *No Software Required*
1 *Monitor Not Required*
1 *Gaming Keyboard Not Required*
1 *Gaming Mouse Not Required*
1 *Gaming Mouse Mat Not Required*
1 *Speakers Not Required*
1 Standard 3XS System Warranty - 2 Years (1st Year Onsite / 2nd Year Return to Base)


There is a component I wish to send in for you to fit to the chassis - a Crucial SK01 External 2.5" drive storage kit (it is a hot-swap SATA system for laptop drives/SSDs where the removeable caddy also doubles as an external USB2 drive enclosure); I want a 320GB Western Digital WD3200BJKT Scorpio Black drive from you to fit in it as well.

Feel free to make any suggestions that you think are appropriate...

[Philipp]

Hi Bismark,

We are using CF on all over clocked systems now, I have also just changed the online option for the CPU to reflect 3.8 Ghz+, we will aim for 4 GHz however

Not a problem with the hard drives, just email me (philipp@scan.co.uk) your invoice number once you have placed the order and I will amend them right away.

We install a lot of creative sound cards into systems with Vista and don’t have too many problems with the drivers, either way you’re buying a complete system any problems will be our problem and we will resolve them.

After you have placed the order I will raise an RMA number for the parts you wish to send in to be installed

The system spec looks great, the only advice I would offer is that if you ever think you are going to upgrade to an SLI set up its worth selecting the 850W Be Quite PSU, if not then the 620W Corsair will be fine.

If you need anything more from me feel free to post up or email me.

Best Regards

[Bismark]

Hi Philipp

Order placed today (finally - I dithered a bit over the final details).

I have emailed you with the invoice number and the changes I would like to the pre-configured specification.

Thanks for your help

[Philipp]

Hi Bismark,

Good to see you have placed your order, you will not be disappointed

I am not in the office today so will not pick up your emails, I will however action them first thing tomorrow morning.

Feel free to email/PM/post any further questions

Cheers

[Bismark]

Hi Philipp

Tomorrow is fine - I am out of the office most of the rest of today anyway at a 'business meeting' (in a pub, hmmm...). There will actually be some business done - honest

[I need to make some cash to replace the amount I have just 'said goodbye' to... ]

[Bismark]

Hi Philipp

Did you get my email about the machine specification changes?

[Just checking... getting paranoid in my old age ]

[Philipp]

Hi Bismark,

Yes sorry got the email, its all sorted

I have emailed back confirmation

Cheers