Wednesday, August 24, 2011

My New Computer

I just bought a new computer to play the games my current computer can run just as well. :|
I have a tradition to buy a new one every one and a half year. But this time it was especially hard to justify .. can it be that development has slowed down, finally ?

Anyway, I decided to spend no more than 2000 Euro and got the whole thing including prior dead-pixel test for the monitor, assembly, compatibility/stability test and transport for 1.990,07 € at Mindfactory.de.

Chassis: Fractal Design Arc

Power Supply: 580W be quiet! Straight Power CM BQT E8 80+ Silver Modular

Motherboard: ASRock Z68 EXTREME4 S1155 Intel Z68 ATX

CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K 4x 3.30GHz So.1155 BOX

Heatsink CPU: EKL Alpenföhn Brocken AMD and Intel S775, 1366, 1156, AM2(+), AM3

RAM: 16GB G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1600 DIMM CL9 Dual Kit (4 modules)

Monitor: 27" (69,00cm) Dell U2711 6ms 16:9

Graphics Card: 1536MB Asus GeForce GTX 580 DirectCU II Aktiv PCIe 2.0 x16 (Retail)

HD: 2000GB Seagate Barracuda Green 5900.3 ST2000DL003 64MB 3.5" (8.9cm) SATA 6Gb/s

SSD: 120GB Corsair Force Series 3 CSSD-F120GB3-BK 2.5" (6.4cm) SATA 6Gb/s MLC asynchron

DVD: LiteOn iHAS124-19 SATA Black Bulk

Keyboard: Microsoft SideWinder X4 Gaming Keyboard Black German USB

Mouse: Logitech G500 Gaming Laser Mouse Schwarz USB

8 comments:

  1. Sweet rig, Nils. Do they sell the men's version as well?

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  2. 3 years on my PC and it still runs ok (ram is a bit low, and I added a 460GTX card to boost the old 8800GT, which was fine anyway).

    Yes, it feels like evolution has slowed down, or maybe it's just linear instead of exponential, so it feels slower.

    BTW weird choice on the HD: in my experience the latest Seagate suck real hard. I'm sold on Samsung and Western Digital. And NEVER in my life I'll run without raid 1....

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  3. The HD serves only to store games and some videos.
    Honestly, 2 TB is WAY too much for me. I have 500GB right now and use 200GB of it. I don't really care if these are lost.

    The reason for the 2TB HD is that it is impossibly cheap. The 1TB version costs 40€ instead of 50€.

    As for important data. It takes only a few GB and I have it on both disks (SSD/HD), on a USB stick and some of it encrypted on the internet.

    About the choice of Seagate: The slow (5400) versions seem to be quite stable. The reviews and statistics I've checked seemed ok.

    However, it might have been a wiser choice to buy 2x 500GB for 65€ total and make a raid 1, I have to agree. I may call them and ask it to change ;)

    Thanks, Helistar.

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  4. The evolution of the PC didn't slow down but there are no new consoles around and all games are developed for the weekest link, which are the consoles.

    I will never understand why people buy these stupid slow green disks. They are for NAS systems but not for a gaming system. You bought a GTX 580 and a green disk? Seriously? I'm quite sure a fast disk would accelerate load and save times noticable (and therefore increase immersion because it halts the game for a shorter time! :).

    Maybe it's just me... I can't stand slow disks. :)

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  5. Kring, I ended up replacing the 2GB disk with 2x 1000GB Samsung Spinpoint F3 in raid 1 configuration. And most of the diskwork is loading, not writing.

    Anyway, there's a 120GB SSD in the mix. That should be fast enough for every game. On a different note, I never really cared about loading times. Don't know why, they just never really bother me.

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  6. Savegames can be huge *cough The Witcher cough* and saving takes some time.

    The SSD is probably to small to save games on, isn't it?

    WoW alone consumes 40 GB on my disk...

    > And most of the diskwork is
    > loading, not writing.

    RAID 1 is the fastest solution for random access reads, therefore good solution. :)

    Why did you replace the disk?

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  7. The reason were that 1000 GB was more than enough space, a raid 1 configuration is really fast and it adds data security, which I don't really need, but it's nice to have. And it costs just 20 € more.

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