Impressions of the new PC

So I've told you what I had before, and what I replaced it with.  I haven't yet told you what I think of the new hardware I've put together for my new PC.

Here's what it looks like all put together...

I've now had some time to work with the new system and I can give you my impressions of the various components I chose to build my system from.

The Case

Normally, the case might not be an important part of your PC, but I had some specific expectations about my new PC.  One expectation is that my PC will run virtually silent. 

My last PC had a number of fans in it: a power supply fan, 2 case fans, a CPU fan, a motherboard chipset fan, and a graphics card fan.  All of these when running together will generate some noise.  All in all it was about as loud as a quiet blender when running.

The Antec Sonata 2 PC Case I purchased is pretty much a regular case with some front access audio and USB ports, nothing special really.  What's extra is the additional noise reduction features. 

Power Supply smart fan - when under normal load may not even turn on, and when it is on it's very quiet.

The case fan is a large diameter fan which means it can spin much slower and still move a good amount of air.  The case fan is a 3 speed switchable fan and is mounted to the case on soft rubber vibration isolating mounts.  You can turn it on low and it makes no noise, or medium or high, where it makes a little noise.  I chose low.

The case also comes with vibration supressing drive mounts. 
   

You screw your drive onto these drive trays through this soft-rubber "bumper" so that the drive is isolated from the drive tray by the rubber.  So when your drives spin up and get to vibrating, the vibrations aren't transmitted to the case.  This is very good for things like CD/DVD drives which tend to spin quickly and the CD/DVDs will vibrate causing noise.

All of the drive bays work with some nice quality drive trays that snap into place.  The external trays on the front have easy access so you can unsnap and pull the drive out easily.  The internal drive bays also have very easy access.  Many previous cases I had made you remove some other component or case part in order to remove the drive bay.  The way this case does it, I only have to unplug the cable and pull it out.

The Motherboard

The ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard I chose primarily because it's an AMD X2 CPU capable motherboard with 2 PCI Express x16 slots.  It also has received some good reviews and was not an expensive board.  I didn't go for the version that has an additonal set of SATA ports for more hard drives because I've never had more than 2 hard drives in a machine, so there's no way I'll need 8!

The CPU

I picked up an AMD 64 X2 processor.  This processor has 2 CPU cores on a single chip.  My previous system had an Intel HyperThreading CPU.  Hyperthreading fakes out the system into thinking it's got 2 real cores.  Hyperthreading is better than nothing, but it's not better than 2 real cores like in the AMD X2.  Also, the AMD is a true 64bit processor.

It's pretty darn speedy.

The CPU also has the capability of switching to low power mode where it underclocks itself from 2200Mhz down to 1000Mhz and reduces it's voltage as well.  This saves power and also runs the CPU fan quieter as well.

The CPU fan

Like the case, the CPU fan doesn't often get a second look.  In my machine I wanted something that would be pretty quiet.  The CPU fan in my Intel machine was one of the noisiest parts of the machine.

The CPU fan that came with the AMD 64X2 Processor was pretty beefy to begin with.  Check this out...

          

But it doesn't really compare to the Zalman CNPS7000-Cu Heat sink and Fan I picked up...

This fan stands out because... well, it's a freakin HUGE piece of copper 11cm x 11cm x 6cm high.  It also contains a large 9.2CM fan that has a variable speed controller on it. 

On it's lowest dial setting the fan barely moves, and sometimes stops all together.  On it's highest setting the fan spins up to as high as 2600RPM.  On it's low setting I've not seen it go higher than 800RPM... but I don't know whether to trust my fan monitoring software.  I'll have to compare it with some others to make sure it's correct.

With this CPU cooler I've never seen my CPU temperature go higher than 46 degrees C and usually runs around 34.  My old Intel CPU went over 80 degrees when under load and usually ran around 60-something.

The Hard Drives

Since I was going whole-hog on my replacement PC - no old parts - I decided to pick up a pair of 250GB 7200RPM SATA drives. 

I decided to live a little dangerously and I set these drives up on a RAID-0 configuration.  This means I use all of the space on both drives as if it were a single drive, and I also can read and write to both of these drives simultaneously... meaning I can read/write to my 500GB volume at up to 40MB/second.  Nice and speedy.

Overall I'm very happy with the choices I've made for hardware in my new system.  It's nice...