It's taken me ages to finally get round to putting up some pics of my new build but here we go...
This was my first build from scratch and I have to say was a lot of fun and thankfully, pretty painless (touch wood!).
I'm sort of part way through a major upgrade, new monitor and GFX card to come in a couple of months.
The new:
i5 750
ASUS P7P55D LE
GSKILL Ripjaws 4GB PC12800 C8
Antec Truepower 550W
Antec 300
Arctic Freezer 7
There are a few observations that I think may be worth mentioning for those who are looking at buying similar kit;
i5 - Loads of debate on here about whether it's worth the money. What I have found so far is that on a fresh install of Windows it is slower to boot up (probably the ASUS 'loading gate' or whatever it says). From cold start, 39seconds to usable windows vs 35 seconds on my old machine (AMD 4400+) and is no quicker running through Windows programs etc. Massive difference in SolidWorks however which is half the reason I upgraded as I was sick of the lock-ups and it became obvious that the 9600GT that I will be replacing was severly bottlenecked in all the games that I was playing, almost double the frame rates straight away and when I overclocked the card there was actually an improvement (last time made no difference) and I got over double the FPS.
Motherboard - The right-angled SATA ports are such a great idea, it was much better for keeping the cables tidy however they are a little close together and having both clip retained SATA cables in squashes them together a bit more than I would like.
Antec Truepower - I found for my build that there were the right amount of cables hardwired in and ended up not using any of the extra ones, the unit itself feels really good quality as well.
Antec 300 - Some people on here like it and others reckon it's too expensive for what it is but I thought that it was nicely built and the finish inside is smooth, which compared to my last case was a huge difference. There are loads of thumbscrews too which are awesome. The black paint on the outside is a almost a spattered finish which doesn't notice from a distance but looked a bit crud when I first took it out the box!
Arctic Freezer 7 - When I fitted this to my old AMD 4400+ socket 939 it was a bit fiddly but was a nice secure fit. The intel fitment however has push pins which means putting a hell of a lot of pressure on the motherboard to get them all the way in which is so much worse than having screws it's untrue! It was also obvious after removing it from my old pc that there is way too much thermal paste pre applied to the copper base, it had oozed out the sides a lot.
Sorry if that bit was boring! Pics now!
The new and the old...
I'm gutted about the 3 cables criss-crossing over the middle of the motherboard but there's nowhere else to stick them....
Also gutted that the 9600GT has a red PCB and a gold heatsink which clashes really badly with the lovely coodination of the other components
This was my first build from scratch and I have to say was a lot of fun and thankfully, pretty painless (touch wood!).
I'm sort of part way through a major upgrade, new monitor and GFX card to come in a couple of months.
The new:
i5 750
ASUS P7P55D LE
GSKILL Ripjaws 4GB PC12800 C8
Antec Truepower 550W
Antec 300
Arctic Freezer 7
There are a few observations that I think may be worth mentioning for those who are looking at buying similar kit;
i5 - Loads of debate on here about whether it's worth the money. What I have found so far is that on a fresh install of Windows it is slower to boot up (probably the ASUS 'loading gate' or whatever it says). From cold start, 39seconds to usable windows vs 35 seconds on my old machine (AMD 4400+) and is no quicker running through Windows programs etc. Massive difference in SolidWorks however which is half the reason I upgraded as I was sick of the lock-ups and it became obvious that the 9600GT that I will be replacing was severly bottlenecked in all the games that I was playing, almost double the frame rates straight away and when I overclocked the card there was actually an improvement (last time made no difference) and I got over double the FPS.
Motherboard - The right-angled SATA ports are such a great idea, it was much better for keeping the cables tidy however they are a little close together and having both clip retained SATA cables in squashes them together a bit more than I would like.
Antec Truepower - I found for my build that there were the right amount of cables hardwired in and ended up not using any of the extra ones, the unit itself feels really good quality as well.
Antec 300 - Some people on here like it and others reckon it's too expensive for what it is but I thought that it was nicely built and the finish inside is smooth, which compared to my last case was a huge difference. There are loads of thumbscrews too which are awesome. The black paint on the outside is a almost a spattered finish which doesn't notice from a distance but looked a bit crud when I first took it out the box!
Arctic Freezer 7 - When I fitted this to my old AMD 4400+ socket 939 it was a bit fiddly but was a nice secure fit. The intel fitment however has push pins which means putting a hell of a lot of pressure on the motherboard to get them all the way in which is so much worse than having screws it's untrue! It was also obvious after removing it from my old pc that there is way too much thermal paste pre applied to the copper base, it had oozed out the sides a lot.
Sorry if that bit was boring! Pics now!
The new and the old...
I'm gutted about the 3 cables criss-crossing over the middle of the motherboard but there's nowhere else to stick them....
Also gutted that the 9600GT has a red PCB and a gold heatsink which clashes really badly with the lovely coodination of the other components
well done
