With the upcoming release of Star Wars: The Old Republic my thoughts lately have been turning to building a new PC to commemorate the release of this highly-anticipated game by Bioware. I thought I would post a follow-along of the build here on my blog as I’ve also decided this will be no normal PC. No, I’ve decided to go all-out on this one….
Goals
First and foremost I’ve decided that I’m going to build a machine that I can overclock (or at least attempt to overclock). I have barely even dabbled in overclocking, this will be something new to me. I initially decided upon a goal of 4 GHz but after doing some extensive reading on some of the overclocking forums I’ve decided that I might be able to go for 4.5 GHz. And to think my first computer years ago ran at a whopping 1 MHz….
Reaching speeds like this of course mean that I will need to water cool so I’ve been doing a lot of research on this as well. It doesn’t seem as daunting as I had assumed it would be, at least if you plan your build carefully. That also doesn’t mean it will be easy but since I’ve set a goal for this PC to be complete by mid-December I think that taking my time and researching should allow me to get at least a decent build. I’m not trying to win any awards here.
As far as graphics I’m not going all out on those, no triple- or quad- SLI for me (or even a double SLI). I don’t really play games that much, SW:TOR being the only one I even plan on playing. SW:TOR isn’t a graphics masterpiece such as Crysis so the goal here is a single, powerful card from the current generation of cards which should be more than enough to run SW:TOR in all its glory. Plus, I can always add more cards for a SLI configuration in the future if I desire assuming the motherboard supports it.
Finally, the last major goal I have is for the system to be quiet, or at least reasonably quiet. I think that with a single water-cooled graphics card I should be able to reach this goal. In any case I don’t want it to sound like a 747-400 starting its take-off roll every time I power the PC up….
Motherboard / CPU
I’ve been going around on this one lately. My original choice seemed to be obvious at first, I was planning to use a member of the upcoming Intel Sandy Bridge E series (the Core i7 3930K). 6 processor cores (with hyper-threading), 12MB of L3 cache, quad-channel memory, PCIe3 support, USB 3.0 support, SATA III (6Gb/s), and built for being oveclocked. All of this in a motherboard sporting the X79 chipset.
Or at least those were the original specs that I read about. Now it seems that Intel has dropped the PCIe3 support (though whether they have truly dropped it remains unclear: some sources say that they simply can’t get it certified for PCIe3 because there are no cards available to test but the CPU / chipset will in fact be able to run at PCIe3 speeds). They’ve also dropped USB 3.0 and reduced the supported 6GB/s ports down to 2.
For my usage scenario I’m not sure that I will miss any of these things, however. As stated above there are no PCIe3 cards even available today, and super high-end graphics are not a goal of mine anyway. With a single GTX 580 now I can always add more in a SLI if I need to, and the Sandy Bridge E CPUs do support 40+ PCI lanes so I should be able to get a good 3-way SLI if I ever decide I really need that.
The same applies to the loss of the USB 3.0 ports as native to the CPU (I’m sure motherboard manufacturers will use some PCI lanes to add USB 3.0 ports of their own). I simply don’t have any USB 3.0 devices, and I hardly use any USB 2.0 devices as it is. Basically for my digital camera, and the occasional file transfer and that’s it.
The loss of native SATA 6GB/s ports might be a little bit of a concern (though again I expect that motherboard manufacturers will add more). My original thoughts were to use a SSD for the OS (boot) drive and to use a raid array of HDDs for my data and scratch drives. That’s 3 drives right there (assuming a RAID 1), possibly more drives. Further complicating things is that I’m not 100% sure on the SSD yet as well, reviews I’ve read are still mixed as to the longevity of SSD drives.
Another thing that is a little concerning is that Intel seems to be having trouble with the silicon on the new Sandy Bridge E chips. Reports are that the server version (Xeon) of the chips has been delayed due to issues in the SAS (which stands for Serial Attached SCSI) but I doubt I’ll miss that (assuming it would have even been enabled on the consumer version of the chip) and that the initial chips won’t have a working VT-d (Virtualization for Directed IO) but again, this is more of an issue for servers and is not a feature commonly found in consumer CPUs and/or motherboards. Even though these issues are for “server-only” features they are putting a little bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for the Sandy Bridge E platform (since I now wonder what other issues Intel are having….)
So, even though I am still leaning towards the Sandy Bridge E platform I am keeping a close eye on the situation and won’t make a final decision until closer to the launch (which from what I can tell is currently scheduled for Nov 14, 2011). If I’m not comfortable with the Sandy Bridge E platform I will simply use regular Sandy Bridge (Core i7 2600K) and a corresponding motherboard.
Next Time
My next post will cover in more detail the plans I have for this build, especially for the water cooling aspect of the build. Since the CPU and motherboard I originally decided on aren’t even available at this point that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of my time on up to this point.
In fact, I’ve ordered and received the case already (as that seemed to be a most logical first step since the size of the case dictates what I can fit inside the case) so I’ll be talking about that, as well as some of the cooling parts I’ve decided on (radiators, etc.) and a general outline of my planned water-cooling loop. Future posts will also cover the planned design of the system on more detail.
So stay tuned, I plan on keeping this updated much more frequently than I have updated this blog in that past!