by William
December 4, 2011 11:54 PM
The new PC hasn’t been forgotten, just in a holding pattern. Intel did release the first new LGA 2011 parts on November 14 as expected, and I have one sitting in the parts pile as I write this (a 3930K). The major hold-up at this point has been my decision to use the EVGA X79 FTW motherboard as EVGA did not release those on launch day. I have bee informed, however, that my motherboard is now en-route to me and should be here some time this week.
The Gang’s All Here
With the exception of the motherboard I now have all the parts needed to build the PC. As I mentioned earlier I ordered the CPU itself, it has been here since mid-November. I also have my EK Supreme HF CPU block now, I ordered it direct from EK in Slovenia as I could not ascertain when US suppliers would have it in stock (at least the new version with LGA 2011 compatible mounts.)
I also have my hard drives and solid-state drive now. I plan on using a 128GB Crucial m4solid-state drive (SSD) for my OS and programs, this should provide quick start-up times and good overall system performance. For general data storage I will be using 2 Western Digital WD1002FAEXCaviar Black 1TB hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. I actually lucked out in getting these as early as I did, I purchased them literally a week before HDD prices started to skyrocket due to the flooding in Thailand, the same drives I bought are now 2.5 – 3 times as much as what I paid.
I also have my RAM, it was the latest arrival to get here. I decided on 16GB of Corsair Vengeancetested at 1866 MHz. I was originally going to use some Corsair Dominator RAM tested at 2133 MHz but decided to stick with the far cheaper 1866 MHz RAM for now. From what I’ve been reading the integrated memory controller (IMC) in the new CPUs varies in quality from chip to chip and some people have reported issues with anything over the 1600 MHz, thus I decided to start with the cheaper and slower RAM. After my system is up and running I can do some testing, if I think I can get away with faster RAM I can get some Dominator at that time and retire the Vengeance to my Intel P55 system.
That’s about it for now, next weekend should be a busy one as I begin construction in earnest on the system (assuming the motherboard arrives on time this week.) There should be lots to report and more pictures at that time.