My Personal PC Build, Part 4

Well it's been a while but I've finally got a new case and bigger hard drive for my main PC. Hard drive wise I got a 1TB 3.5" Seagate 7200rpm SATA hard drive so I finally don't have to worry about hard drive usage any more. As for the case I got a CoolerMaster silencio 352. A very nice Micro ATX case that fits all the hardware in it that I want and has a bit of room for upgrades. Here it is:

Looks good doesn't it?

And some pictures of the interior.

Excuse the cables as this case doesn't have much in the way of cable management on the other side as you will see in the next picture.

As you can see you can get away with thin cables but anything thicker than the 4 pin CPU power cable won't fit as there is a lip at the bottom of the motherboard tray.

The rear of it. All fairly standard.

Finally an overall shot.

So now that I've finally got a decent case and a bigger hard drive the next things I want to upgrade are the motherboard and CPU as I could do with a bit more CPU performance and the best way for me to do that is to move up to a newer generation Intel socket and processor. I could also do with a bit more RAM as I only have 4GB but it's gotten ridiculously expensive (8GB for around £60 to £70 quid. I got my 4GB for around £15 quid.) so yeah I'm going to wait and see if it does come down to a reasonable price.

The other major upgrade I want to do is the graphics card. I've been thinking about the most cost effective way of upgrading to a better graphics card however as I only have a 400W PSU it does limit what you can use a bit. As anything higher than my GTX 650 would really require a better PSU which would cost around the £40 to £50 quid mark for a decent one which is a lot when you add that on top of a new graphics card so I was a bit stumped until I heard that the new Nvidia GTX 750 TI would only use about the same amount of power as my GTX 650 but have quite a bit more performance compared to my GTX 650 so currently that is the graphics card I'm aiming for.

And that wraps up this post. Hopefully I can post a bit more regularly instead of every 3 or 4 months. You never know I guess...

My Personal PC build, part 3.

Hello again. Since the last part I have changed a few things in my main PC so this post will update you all on what I've done. First up a picture of the inside as of now.

Bit of a mess still I know but to be fair this case doesn't really have any cable management holes at all, Need to get a better case...

So the first thing I did was add a 120GB 2.5" hard drive that I upgraded my old PS3 with but then the PS3 died so I pulled it out of there and stuck it in my PC as I needed more room for the VirtualBox VMs I have. It's mainly been used as a storage drive at the moment but I still need to upgrade my main hard drive as it's only 80GB And I only have about 15GB free on it. The 2.5" drive currently sat in a Akasa 3.5" to 2.5" HDD/SSD adapter.

As you may know I was using a Intel Pentium 4 630 overclocked to 3.6GHz however I finally upgraded to a Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 which I currently have overclocked to 3GHz. As you can imagine the performance has improved quite a bit and it runs a lot cooler as well. At the same time I also replaced the 80mm Arctic F fan with a 92mm Zaward Golf Blue LED Fan so now the back of my PC glows blue.

After those upgrades the component that was slowing me down the most in terms of gaming was the graphics card (A Nvidia GeForce GT 610) so I decided that was the next upgrade I should do when I could afford it. I managed to get a Gigabyte GTX 650 1GB card that is factory overclocked and that increased performance in games a lot. It also runs cooler than my old GT 610 too. Here are the results from the Unigine Valley Benchmark using this graphics card:

I also have removed a couple of fans (The 120mm blue LED fan on the side panel and the 120mm Arctic F fan) as I'm trying to figure out where most of the noise is coming from and I've narrowed it down to either the front 120mm CoolerMaster SickleFlow fan or the fan on the Arctic cooling freezer 7 pro CPU heatsink. The fans will probably get moved around a bit more yet. Oh and I did actually win a 140mm Noctua NF-A15 PWM fan with 120mm mounting holes which is still in it's box as I'm not sure what to do with it yet.

The final thing I've done is add a 3 pin fan extension cable so the front 120mm CoolerMaster SickleFlow fan can be plugged into the motherboard as the 120mm Arctic F fan was connected there before I took it out. I also changed the female connector of the extension cable from a white one to a black Phobya one as it will blend in a bit better with the rest of my hardware. I will probably do a Quick Tech Tip on how to replace fan connectors so look out for that soon.

And that wraps up part 3. The next upgrades I would like to do are the case, hard drive and RAM so hopefully it won't be too long until I get some of those done and I can post part 4.

My Personal PC build, Part 2.

Hello again. This is the second part of the detailed list of components that make up my first PC build. Right now where did i get to... ah yes next up is the motherboard which is a M-ATX MSI G41M-P28 socket LGA775 motherboard. Some specs:


Intel G41 chipset
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (Intel® GMA X4500)
Supports two unbuffered DIMM of 1.5 Volt DDR3 800/1066/1333* (OC) DRAM, 8GB Max
One PCI Express x16 slot (PCI Express Bus SPEC V1.0 compliant).
Two 32-bit v2.3 master PCI bus slots.
Four 3Gb/s SATA ports
One Ultra DMA 66/100 IDE controller
Audio chipset integrated by VIA® VT1708S

Next up is the processor, This used to be in my IBM M52:

Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 630 HT
3.00GHz clcock speed.
2MB L2 cache
64-bit

Yeah i know it's a fairly old CPU but hey when you can't afford anything better you have to use what you got right? This is one of the areas i plan on upgrading. The CPU cooler i'm using is a Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 which is fairly cheap but well built and it does the job.

Next up is the RAM. I have one stick of Crucial 4GB 240 pin DDR3 PC3-10600 RAM. I can go up to 8GB which is the plan. Last up is the graphics card which is a Asus GeForce GT 610, Yeah not that great but for most of the games i play it works very well and it works with Linux which is always good as I am now Using Linux and my main OS. A few specs:

1GB DDR3 RAM
PCI Express 2.0
Low Profile
HDMI, DVI-I, VGA
DirectX 11.0
OpenGL 4.2

And I think thats it. Overall not a bad PC if I do say so myself. There are some things that could do with upgrading but it's still pretty quick compared to my last PC anyway. Anyway Cya next time.

My Personal PC build, Part 1.

Hey all. First post of 2013! hopefully i will post more on this blog this year. Well it's finally happened, I've finally built my first PC. Been wanting to do this since before I got my IBM M52 but couldn't quite afford it then. First I'll give you a detailed list of all the components. So first here it is in all it's glory, Awesome isn't it?

The case is a Novatech Vulcan V2 ATX midi tower case. It has:

Three usable 5.25 inch bay (It does have four but the top one is unusable because thats where the front panel ports/switchs are.)
5 3.5 inch bays
Seven expansion slots
A 80mm/92mm fan mounting point at the rear
A 120mm fan mount at the front
Two 120mm/140mm fan mounting points on the side panel
Two USB 2.0 ports
One USB 3.0 port (Connects using a motherboard header connector)
Headphone/mic ports
Top mounted PSU

It also came with two fans, one 120mm blue LED fan and one 80mm red fan. I'm still using the 120mm fan but the 80mm fan is else where.

The power supply is a Novatech PowerStation Gaming 400W Silent ATX2 Modular Power Supply. It's specs look like:

AC Input 200-260V ~ 3A 50/60Hz
DC Output +3.3V  +5V  +12V1  +12V2  -12V  +5Vsb
Max Load 24A    20A   18A      18A       0.3A   2.5A
Max Combined Wattage    120W        300W     3.6W  12.5W
Total Power 400W

Next up is all the fans:

Arctic F High Performance Case Fan - 80mm
Arctic F High Performance Case Fan - 120mm
Coolermaster SickleFlow Blue Case Fan - 120mm
Novatech 120mm blue LED Case Fan - Came with the case.

The optical drive is a LiteOn SATA CD/DVD writer and the hard drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 series 80GB SATA 3.5 inch HDD.

I'm going to stop here as if i put all of it in this post it will end up to long. I'll leave you with a picture of my desk now, See you all next time.