AEon needs a new PC :)

[AEon]

Today, most of the hardware arrived:

• [lvlshot]http://aeons.poweredbylasers.com/tmp/hardware/AEon's-PC-2010.jpg[/lvlshot]

Still waiting for the mainboard, keyboard and fan controller.

I took a close-up shot of the memory box... I have never seen so much effort being put in safeguarding DDR3 memory... uncanny.

obsidian, note the hot pink memory stick

Thank you obsidian and foo for your feedback, without your help I would had a *lot* more trouble finding the "right" hardware. Starting to put things together now, hopefully that will go well.

[cityy]

That's so sexy.

[obsidian]

Pink to match the panties?

[AEon]

It seems I wasted a few Euros on the mounting rack for the 2.5" Intel X25-M SSD, since the retail version includes such an 2.5" adapter to 3.5"... alas I could not find the info anywhere.

The drive is tiny...

[U4EA]

I have to say AEon, the amount of effort you put into your research and posting on this subject is fucking inspirational. I also like the "parts ready for assembly" picture. Hope you enjoy using this PC as much as you seem to enjoy putting it together

[AEon]

U4EA,


The reason for this is that I don't live in any large city were you can "just" go right into the next shop to get what you might have missed. So, I am pretty much forced to plan it out carefully. Ironically, one cable was wrong, (USB cable to the USB hub needs a Mini-USB socket, was not mentioned in the info sheets), and I needed an additional patch cable (Ethernet).

The other more important reason is that I normally do not look into hardware that much - the last time was about 8 years ago - thus the help from foo and obsidian was invaluable to me, to find the hardware that is "current", has "future potential", and is "affordable".

Presently waiting for the mainboard... hopefully I'll get it in the next few days. I'll post some more shots once I have built everything into the tower.

BTW: I am trying to set up the PC on a 5m "leash" from my Monitor, so that I can basically roll it into the next room, and "shut" the door on any noise.

[Foo]

one cable was wrong, (USB cable to the USB hub needs a Mini-USB socket, was not mentioned in the info sheets)

You should be able to find a pack of USB converters that'll convert the regular USB connection down to the size you want. Probably more of them available than 5m micro-USB connections.

I found a pack that worked fine in a £1 store.

[AEon]

foo,
since the whole cable did not cost much, I got a new one, instead of using an adapter that will cost about the same. Personally I try to avoid adapters where possible. Thanks for the tip though.

Note: The more modern hardware seems to think printed manuals are for chumps, and that a one-page leaflet is more than enough. So in most cases you have to do some digging on the manufacturer's page to actually find a "useful" manual. Cost efficiency at all costs? Note we are talking retail here.

[AEon]

Assembling a new rig is a lot of fun and a learning experience. Installing programs on the other hand...

A small tip: I have a folder called "Archive" that contains all the software I install on my PCs (Tools, drivers etc.), together with configurations. The better tools like UltraEdit, Directory Opus or TheBat let you completely backup everything, so you just have to "restore" your settings and you are good to go... saving a huge amount of time on the new system. Interestingly, installing tools on a new system often reveals how few tools you actually need, and how much "junk" you accumulated over the years on the old system.

[AEon]

After waiting for the mainboard for a few extra days, here the new PC build:

• [lvlshot]http://aeons.poweredbylasers.com/tmp/hardware/AEon's-PC-2010b.jpg[/lvlshot]

• 1) Very clean cable build, I wanted to get *everything* out of the airflow, and moved all the cables to the back of tower, behind the mainboard. Due to the pretty nifty layout/design of the CoolMaster HAF 922 this is possible. And of course the exclusive use of SATA cables really helped keep things tidy, not to forget the modular cables the Corsair 650 HX provides.
  
  2) Detail of the 3.5" rack... from top to bottom HDD, SSD, HDD, above that the DVD burner. Alas there is *no* way to get the power supply cables for the ATi HD 5850 out of the airflow, so I decided to wrap it compactly.
  
  3) The ASUS PT6 Deluxe V2 comes with a nice "blend" for all the "ports".
  
  4) Just here for ambience... you can see the large 20cm front fan, that actually has red LEDs...
  
  5) On the other side of the mainboard I have tried to place the cables as neatly as possible, even though no one will ever see it normally. Just shows what can be done with cable binders and a clean layout.
  
  
  a) Not knowing how loud and stinky (think chemicals evaporating) the PC will turn out to be, I have added a complete set of 5m long cables that will let me roll the PC next door. To better move the tower I build this "rolling tray".
  
  b) Those wheels are 30 years old by the way. We had them lying around for ages, and finally they are of some use.
  
  c) The mounted 80GB Intel X25-M G2 SSD (Solid State Drive), with adapter to fit into those 3.5" drive bays.
  
  d) In case you are wondering what the big deal was with 5), this is the way it looked before I cleaned up the cable layout.
  
  e) The ATi card still wrapped up... added for fun.
  
  f) The ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 comes with quite a lot of extras. The angled-off SATA cables (3 of the 6 included feature this) came in really handy for the HDDs & the SSD.
  
  g) This is a quite interesting detail. These ASUS Q-Connectors let you stick on all the tower related cables (PWR Switch, Reset, DE LED, PWR LED, Speaker) without much hazzle. You can then stick the whole Q-Connector on the main board. It used to be a real pain having to align the cables properly.
  
  g) Stuff that came with the tower. The adapter lets you place a 3.5" Floppy Disk drive in a 5 1/4" bay if you like. Luckily, the FDD is dead, this mainboard lets you use the USB-stick instead.

Build time, including lots of manual reading and BIOs tests about 8 hours. Still need to install Win7Pro... that will be for tomorrow though.

[obsidian]

Nice to see it working well. Very neat cable management.

[MKJ]

Assembling a new rig is a lot of fun and a learning experience. Installing programs on the other hand...

A small tip: I have a folder called "Archive" that contains all the software I install on my PCs (Tools, drivers etc.), together with configurations. The better tools like UltraEdit, Directory Opus or TheBat let you completely backup everything, so you just have to "restore" your settings and you are good to go... saving a huge amount of time on the new system. Interestingly, installing tools on a new system often reveals how few tools you actually need, and how much "junk" you accumulated over the years on the old system.

http://ninite.com/
might be useful for you

[AEon]

http://ninite.com/
might be useful for you

Wow... nifty page... pretty radical to simply have the tools installed without prompts. But the list of tools is really interesting, a few I am aware of, the others (in part as least) might really be interesting to look into. Thanks.

[phantasmagoria]

http://ninite.com/
might be useful for you

what a spectacular idea

though they don't have foobar or media player classic under the media players

[U4EA]

what a spectacular idea

Agreed

though they don't have foobar or media player classic under the media players

D:

[obsidian]

magoria@ishitbats.com

[AEon]

I had been using MPC for years under WinXP, but when I tried to get things set up properly under Win7, it became apparent how annoying it is trying to find all the codecs... I installed VLC, changed the key bindings the way I wanted and use that from now it... since it simply comes with all the video codecs I'll be needing.

[phantasmagoria]

Requested

Aeon, I've never had to install any codecs with MPC. I find it's much better at handling large data files and HD whereas VLC stutters and messes me about a bit, but VLC handles (for me at least) DVD discs and smaller media much more neatly, I use a combination of the two.

[AEon]

True... I noted that VLC is a bit less responsive. That you do not need to install codecs means that you either have downloaded it with some codec package or that you don't watch many different video formats. I download demo movies for games quite a bit, and most of them are not mp4 but mov or some other weird formats.

Alas yesterday I wanted to play a .bik movie from some car race demo, VLC did not support that ... drat. Maybe the game messed with the encoding to prohibit this.

[Foo]

bik (blink video) is a fairly special case, a bit like id's roq format. Doubtful you'll find a filter for that on many players, but blink offer a standalone player (IIRC).

[AEon]

bik (blink video) is a fairly special case, a bit like id's roq format. Doubtful you'll find a filter for that on many players, but blink offer a standalone player (IIRC).

Strange that "some" support is available in VLC, but not "pertinent" (read: working) support. You are right, I used to have the bink standalone player installed. I just hoped that would no longer be required... sigh.

Note for those interested: You can get the player (even a 64-bit version exists) as part of the The RAD Video Tools [1.2 MB] package (current version v1.9u 04-25-2010) at radgametools.com. The player is automatically associated with the .bik files, after install. Works fine.

[^Ghost]

some good utilities for your mobo can be found http://support.asus.com/download/downlo ... uage=en-us
not sure if the lateset versions are available on the cd it comes with (i cant remember)

Asus EPU 6-Engine
TurboV (used for OC'ing, from reviews i wouldn't recommend using it)
SoundMax (note with soundmax driver, I cant hear sound while in game, not sure if you'll have that problem)


enjoy compiling maps with your 920

[obsidian]

I'm just using the SoundMax driver that Windows 7 download and installed for me. Works fine, maybe skip the ones on Asus's server.

[AEon]

Asus EPU 6-Engine
I installed it for the cases where I wanted to be sure that the CPU is actually ramping up the power for games. DiRT 2 has crashing issues after 1 hour of gameplay, and one solution was supposed to be to turn on "High" mode manually. That did not help. From tests my system completely automatically ramps up the speed to "High" in games. So the EPU-6 Engine does not need to run at all... unless I want to try "turbo" (or what it was called), i.e. OC the system. Never tried it though.

Tip for folks using Win7... I run several gadgets on my desktop: Network Meter and System Monitor II, they let my monitor the network traffic and what the CPU actually does respectively. Interestingly the CPU in desktop mode really powers down to 1574 MHz (from 2.67 GHz).

My system seems to be cooled quite well, even after playing for hours the CPU and the GPU only reach about 50-53°C, so there would be a "huge" potential for OC here. But I don't need that kind of trouble, just yet :9

TurboV (used for OC'ing, from reviews i wouldn't recommend using it)
I downloaded it from ASUS... but did not install it since I am not going to OC any time soon.

SoundMax (note with soundmax driver, I cant hear sound while in game, not sure if you'll have that problem)
Be sure when using headphones to properly choose the two speaker/headphone settings. I installed the latest drivers for SoundMax (again from ASUS). The drivers on the CD were really old. I connected my PC to a 5.1 Amplifier (optical cable connect) for some music tests, mostly just stereo... that worked... and the headphone sound also works fine, in all games I played. (Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Q3A, QL, DiRT 2, GRID, ...)

I'd recommend installing SoundMax. Otherwise some games have trouble detecting the proper sound drivers. At least that was my feeling. The additional settings let you control quite well what sort of setup you have.

[KingManULTRA]

hey guys,

I have not built a new PC in a LOOOONG time. Can you guys verify if all the components I have work together? Also if I'm missing anything crucial or you have suggestions. Also is it possible to save more money on the power supply or hard drive?

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