Umbral Echoes Blog

For those interested, here are the components of the system I’m about to build. It’s not top-of-the-line, but I’m pretty happy with the price/performance balance.  🙂  Parts should all be here by early next week.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4 (AMD, SATA 6Gb/s,USB 3, supports dual video cards)
There were cheaper options, and I’m only getting 1 video card and not 2, but I wanted SATA 6, USB 3, and the possibility for 2 cards, for future upgrades.

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz Quad-Core
Nothing too fancy here.  It’s reasonably fast, but I didn’t want to go crazy.  Processor speed is actually less important to overall system speed than most people think.

Video Card: XFX Radeon 5850 1 GB
Here I splurged a bit.  DirectX 11 card, again looking to the future.  I could have gotten two lesser cards for slightly cheaper, and just as good of performance, but that would be noisier, take more power, and not leave room for future upgrades without replacing both cards. This way if I want more power, I add another 8580 (which by that time will have gone down in price significantly).

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
This is fast RAM.  Not as fast as the motherboard is capable of, but any faster starts quickly driving the price vs. performance into exponential (i.e. bad) territory. The computer I’m on now actually has 5 GB of RAM, so… well, in a few months it’s possible I’ll double this to 8, since I will be using this system as a work computer as well, and that means having lots of memory-intensive applications open.

Hard Drive (system): OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD

This baby is probably the biggest factor in this build affecting normal system performance.  It has a small amount of storage space (as most SSDs do), but solid state disks offer amazing performance. Here is an article from Microsoft about Windows 7’s performance on SSDs, and some of the benefits of SSDs in general. My housemate Cary has one in his Alienware system, and he says he definitely notices the difference. Coworker Sparr had a netbook that ran from an SSD and he also said it performed notably better than a standard hard drive — faster boot-up and overall operation, lower power consumption, no noise. Having your operating system run from one of these will nearly halve your boot-up time. Putting WoW on it will cut your load times similarly.

Hard Drive (storage): Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
This is where media and programs (that don’t need to load up really fast) will go. Nothing too special, though it is the higher-end Western Digital line, with a 32 MB cache. And they say once you go (Western Digital) Black…

Case:  Raidmax Smilodon ATX-612WBP
Honestly I don’t love this case — don’t have it, I just don’t love it.  However, it was on special, and the case is going to sit out of my sight for 99% of the time I’m using the computer anyway, so I mostly just needed something that will hold the rest of the stuff. And it’s not particularly ugly, just not particularly pretty (in my opinion) either.  If I was buying today instead of a few days ago, I’d probably get this case, which they’re running a special on for $50 and free shipping (coupon code TTCPN-N0012USU-FEB10).

There are also some odds and ends, like Scythe Slipstream case fans (better fans, and quieter), a 780W power supply, etc.  This build was mostly based on this article, with upgrades where I felt would be good, and some components switched out where I could find a better deal, or a better product for the same or lesser price. Ironically, since that build was written, some prices have actually gone up (I assume due to the weakening of the dollar, and the fact that most components are made overseas).

I did forget to order a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter for the SSD, but that’s livable — I can get one of those for less than $10 somewhere local.