Sunday, June 4, 2006

   New PC bits smell nice
They do, its slightly differant to the new car smell ^_^ well so far my PC is a case, the Jeantech Phong 2. Yes, they very almost named a case after a pair of pants, aparently it means 'wind' in japanese or chinese or some such, draw from that what you will. But all the same its a very good case with a 140mm fan drawing air in, over the components to cool them (cooling is very important!) and a 120mm fan sucking the hot air back out again. It also has front usb, audio and firewire ports, if I can work out how to connect them up. It even has controllers for the speed of the fans, so you can turn them right up when the PC is desperatly crunching away to play new games, and turn them down nice and quiet when you're just surfing the net. And a temperature sensor display to tell you how toasty you're expensive components are getting :-S . It also came with a nice selection of thumb screws and other bits. The overall construction seems pretty solid and in my opinion you could pay twice as much for a far inferior case. So all in all im very pleased with the case.

Iv also bought the power supply, a 580W one from Hiper. Its basically the same as theyr type-R range just minus the 'bling' like modular cables, LED fan, etc. Which would all be a bit pointless since you cant see into my case anyway. So I got the same quality but saved some cash. Its got another whacking great fan on the underside and the case is made out of a sort of metal mesh to help keep it cool. A quality PSU is important because cheaper ones can often struggle to reach theyr rated wattage (is that even a word? :-p) and can even damage your components. Unfortunatly I havnt been able to test it yet since I havnt got the rest of the bits.

The last bit I have at the moment is a dvd-rom/cd-rw. I was tempted to get a dvd-rw but then I realised Iv already had one of those for 2 years and Iv never used it to burn a dvd, so I thought id save some money and go for the step down. If I ever do want to burn a dvd ill do it on the other PC, and if I ever sell that PC ill just swap the drives over ^_~ but again I havnt been able to test the drive.

So now im just waiting on:

CPU - AMD Athlon 64-bit dual core 3800+

The 64 bit part means that it can handle 64 bits of data at a time, most processors can only handle 32 bits at a time. Ofcourse the application has to be written to give the CPU 64 bits at a time, which most programs arnt yet, but its good to be future proof.

The dual core part basically means its got 2 processors on one chip. This is good because a processor can only do one thing at once, it may look like its doing lots of things but its actually doing them so fast that its looks to you and I like its doing multiple things at once. So by having 2 'cores' it really can do 2 things at once, so one might be running your antivirus while one is running a game. Unfortunatly few programs are written to use both cores at once, but almost everybody is running multiple applications at a time nowadays. I mean, just at this moment iv got a firewall, antivirus, anti spyware and a web browser going. Ok so none of those things are very demanding but chuck a game in aswell and you notice a difference.

Motherboard:

I cant actually remember the proper name for the mobo iv ordered :-p its from Gigabyte and it can support upto 4GB RAM (although to start with ill only have 1GB) and 7.1 surround sound (although my speakers are only 2.1 lol) But what i really wanted was the option to have both a dual core processor and dual graphics cards, and this was the cheapest board I could find to support both those things.

Graphics card: BFG Nvidea 7600

graphics cards are funny things, for 99.9% of them the chips are either made by Nvidea or ATI. Then theres a whole load of other companies like BFG, XFX, Sapphire, Club3D, etc, that actually make the cards using these chips. after reading the reviews I decided that the best GPU (graphics processing unit) for my budget was the Nvidea 7600. And ill say now im not going to get into a shouting match about who is better, ATI or Nvidea, iv used both, and will continue to use what I deem to be the best card for my money at the time. Im not big on brand loyalty, ill quite happily jump ship if I think theyrs a better deal to be had elsewhere. So once Id decided on the GPU I had a look at the graphics cards out there and settled on the BFG mainly because it comes pre overclocked (basically they make it run a bit faster) and since I never bother to over clock my components myself I figured I could get a bit more bang for my buck going for this one, and I read some good reviews about it aswell.

Also later on if I can get an identical graphics card then I can have 2 graphics cards ^_^

Apart from all that im getting 1GB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Nothing too remarkable about them. So thats going to be my PC, itll cost around about the £650 mark. I think you could get a lot less for £650 if you went into PC world or some where like that and bought one off the shelf. that and theyr fun to build ^_^

Well if you actually read that entire long ramble, thank you and im very impressed ^_^
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