FOTG BUILD THREAD! Bad-Ass Home Brew PC!

Yup, so Christmas came a little early to the Duncan residence! Just a few days back, I decided that it was time to retire my 4 year old, 3.0ghz Pentium 4 HP rig. Installed Vista on it earlier this year, and I've been tortured ever since, while the applications keep getting more and more memory hungry. For development on FlyingGiants, I am constantly in the Adobe CS3 Suite-- Dreameweaver, Photochop, Illustrator, and many other applications for simple video editing (I use a Intel MAC with Final Cut for all the videos on the site), and photo resizing and various manipulation. Ugh. Anyways, been slowed to a crawl.

Some of you may know, I'm a techie from waaaay back. I've been working in IT, and for the past 5 years, Internet Security. I've always been a BIG fan of, "hey dude, go buy a Dell" in leiu of going full on best buy noob dork home brew systems. It's been about 10 years since I build my own PC, and decided to do it again.

The current generation of Intel processors are hitting 3.3ghz on the high end - in QUAD core configurations. What's a core? Think of it as being KINDA like running 4 seperate processors of the same speed. I say KINDA because there are a few caveats that are technical in nature that are way to geeky for this conversation.

In early 2007, Intel released the Q6600 - a Quad Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz chip that turned out to be a BEAST. Why? Because you can overclock this puppy to some astronomical levels. What's overclocking (OC'ing)? In the system bios, or pre-boot motherboard configuration, you can kick up various voltages, and system speeds which will actually increase the system processor and bus speed. Honestly, it's pretty much the same as dumping extra octane, or nitro into model airplane fuel for better performance. The results are the same too. When OC'ing, HEAT is a very important variable, along with countless other factors.

Not going to go into how to OC a processor, but check out these excellent links:

http://www.wikihow.com/Overclock-a-PC
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/cpuoverclocking/

Video overclocks:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/141

There are tons of videos of people OC'ing on Youtube, this guy did a cryo freeze and got his P4 to run at 5.0ghz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyK3WlWTi10

AAAAANYWAYS. I'm not going that extreme. Why OC? Bang for the buck. The Q6600 is $275, and with a little OC, I can make it perform to the same specs as it's $1100 counterpart. Again, not going to go into all of the ins and outs of OC'ing, but if you want to do it, get ready to do some serious research. Being new to OCing, it took me a good few nights of sitting back and clicking away. Google is your friend.

This is the system I purchased:

Antec Ninety Nine case - massive cooling
4gb Corsair DDR2 800 with the big heat sync
ASUS motherboard which later turned out to be a turd of OC'ing. Ended up replacing with ABIT L35 Pro (EXCELLENT!)
NVidia 8800GT 512mb video - new video card on the market
2x Pioneer DVD burners (gots to burn them DVD's!)
Thermaltake V1 CPU Cooler
Artic Silver 5 CPU grease
Intel Q6600 Quad 2.4 G0 Stepping (G0 is very important of OC'ing, google will tell you why)
Dell 24" panel monitor - BAD TO THE BONE! Don't research, just buy a dell panel
5.25" CF card reader
Antec modular 700 watt power supply
Extra 120" case fan
QTY 2 Western Digital Caviar 500gb SATA 3 HDD's

All up cost, around $2k. You can get this figure around $1000 for the CPU alone with some shopping.

After all the research I did, that was the configuration I ended up with. I ended up OCing the 2.4 CPU to 3.2ghz on air cooling (many are running 3.5+ on water cooling with excellent results)!! I'm currently running Vista 64 Ultimate, and it's pretty darn snappy! Vista is still however a pig, but service pack 1 (SP1) is on it's way, currently as a release candidate, and gold expected in Q1 of 2008. Many have bitched about Vista, and moved back to XP, and honestly, from all my experience, I cannot blame them EXCEPT, the general rule of thumb with Microsoft OS's, is WAIT TILL SP1 to install. NT4, 2000, 2003, and XP all fit this bill. Vista will definitely solidify this practice.

So, that's my new PC story. If you're want to build a home brew PC, I recommend it to the advanced user who understands hardware, and components. It's not for the faint of heart. If you want a killer system, but don't want to deal with the hassle, Dell's or HP's are my favorites, in that order. They will run for ever. If you have any questions, fire away. Anyone else out there a OC freak?

And BTW, buy all your shiz from NewEgg.com. Read all their product user reviews. It's an amazing, and content rich site.

Enjoy,

Max

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