Core 2 Duo PC Build

I had been thinking about building a new PC for a while now since my old desktop is about 4 years old and is becoming woefully under-powered. I also wanted a more powerful machine since my old box can't run newer OS's like Windows Vista without struggling. While I like Linux a lot and it has its place, after using it almost exclusively for my main OS over the last 18 months I've come to the conclusion that it isn't the best for most of the media creation and editing tasks that I have been doing more and more of. I will also be using this machine for PC gaming and I might as well get the most for my money by using it to its fullest. In addition to building a more powerful PC I wanted to make this computer as quiet as possible as well as get a new monitor.

Below is a comparison of my two systems:

Old PC Specs

• Case - Antec SLK1650B (ATX Mid-tower)
• Power Supply - Antec Earthwatts 500 (500W)
• CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz)
• CPU Cooler - Artic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro (92mm Fan)
• Motherboard - ASUS A8N5X (nVidia nForce 4 Chipset)
• GPU - nVidia 7900GS (256MB VRAM)
• RAM - 1GB Kingston Dual Channel DDR 400
• Hard Drive - 250GB Western Digital Caviar (8MB Cache, IDE)
• Optical Drive - LG 16x DVD Burner (IDE)
• Monitor - Princeton Graphics Senergy 714 (17", 1280x1024)

           

New PC Specs

• Case - Cooler Master Sileo 500 (ATX Mid-tower)
• Power Supply - Corsair CMPSU-450VX (450W)
• CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.0GHz)
• CPU Cooler - Asus V60 (92mm Fan)
• Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3L (Intel P45 Chipset)
• GPU - ATI Radeon 4850 (512MB VRAM)
• RAM - 4GB G.Skill Dual Channel DDR2 800
• Hard Drive - 320GB Western Digital Caviar (16MB Cache, SATA)
• Optical Drive - LG 22x DVD Burner (SATA)
• Wireless - Edimax EW7727IN 802.11b/g/n (PCI card)
• Monitor - Samsung 2243BWX (22", 1680x1050)

My new PC easily bests my previous model not only in performance, but build quality and noise reduction as well. The Cooler Master Sileo 500 case that I used has much better build quality than my old Antec case. It is much stiffer with less vibration and has noise reducing foam applied to the top, bottom and both sides of the case. It also has two 120mm fans that run at a low RPM and are virtually silent. Other nice features include toolless hard drive and optical drive installation.

The Asus V60 CPU cooler is also very quiet and keeps the CPU temperature below what the stock cooler could do. In order to get a quiet graphics card I purchased a dual slot model from MSI which uses a larger heatsink and fan than normal and does a significantly better job of cooling than a typical cooler would do. To keep the noise down when I'm not gaming I adjusted the GPU fan speed in ATI's Catalyst Control Center to around 45%. This doesn't impede the card's ability to cool the GPU, while greatly reducing the noise output of the fan. When I want to play a game I just set the fan back to automatic control and it adjusts the fan speed to keep the GPU from overheating.

My new Samsung monitor is also a significant upgrade over my old unit. Besides the higher resolution, it also has better black levels, higher contrast and a faster response time. It also features a very adjustable stand that allows the screen to be raised and lowered as well as pivoting into a portrait position. This monitor is also much more configurable than my previous model, with several handy brightness/contrast presets.

I am very pleased with my new PC build. This system runs Windows Vista very well and has more than enough power for the games I want to play. I also did some power usage measurements and found that they were similar to my old PC, around 100W during typical usage and close to 200W while gaming, not bad for a significantly more powerful machine.

Update on Friday, March 27, 2009 at 10:14AM by Joe

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my Core 2 Duo PC on a second hard drive. Everything worked well out-of-the-box except for the wireless card. I did some research and found that the Edimax EW7727IN PCI card uses the Ralink 2860 wireless chipset. This is great because Ralink offers open source drivers for their chipsets. Using the included directions, however, proved troublesome.

My problems were solved when I found this great tutorial in the Ubuntu Forums which lays out step-by-step directions for manually compiling, installing, and configuring the Ralink 2860 driver. Following this tutorial allowed me to connect to my wireless router on the first try. (NOTE: if you install a Linux kernel update via Ubuntu's update system you will need to redo the manual installation process)

According to some of the forum posts it looks as though this Ralink chipset may be natively supported in the new Linux kernel used in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 release. If this is the case it would make this card plug & play like most hardware is for Linux.

Update on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 5:27PM by Joe

I am writing this post while using the liveCD of the beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 and can confirm that the Linux kernel used in this version supports the Edimax EW7727IN PCI card which uses the Ralink 2860 wireless chipset. While it wasn't too hard to manually install Ralink's open source drivers, having my PC's wireless card be plug & play is fantastic.

Comments

[Sid Odin]

Looks like a solid build, although I'm thinking you've switched on over to Windows 7 by now instead of duking it out with vista.