Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Brand new PC

I've bought a brand new PC yesterday, the last time I did that was in 2005. Since 2008 or so I switched to Mac. But porting my Little Crane game to Windows was too much of a lure, and my Mac Mini with Windows installed was not cutting it.

Building your own PC from components was, and still is a lot of fun. This is what I ended up with:

Intel core i5 4570 CPU. I would have preferred a low power T or S model, but those were not in stock at NCIX.

To keep the 84W CPU heat out of the case, I went with a maintenance free water cooling kit: Corsair H100i.

To keep the system relatively compact, I chose a mATX motherboard with H87 chipset: the Asus H87M-PLUS. The more expense Z87 chipset is really only req'd if you want to do overclocking.

A premium mATX case (Corsair 350D) with a nice aluminium front on a steel casing.

Wireless network adapter PCIe from Asus.

8 Gbyte of ram from Kingston.

Samsung 840 Evo SSD, and also a very cheap DVD writer.

8 comments:

  1. Nice... Are you going to have dual boot (Windows/Linux)?

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  2. Yeah, i need to investigate a 64bit ubuntu bug report on little crane.

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  3. En doet ie het al? Ik heb hier nog een I-286 met coprocessor I-287, naar ik meen met 2 MB Ram stripjes die toen een hoop geld hebben gekost. Ik lees 18 GB Ram, nou dat is al meer dan mijn oude HD'D's. Ik weet zeker dat je er geen Floppy's meer op kunt afspelen. Soundcards, speakerboxen en Graphic Card zie ik niet op je lijstje staan, zeker zo'n Integrated MoBo?
    Nou, je hebt jezelf een mooi kadootje gedaan, ik wil binnenkort wel eens even kijken of ik de temperatuur van het koelwater kan laten stijgen,

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  4. Replies
    1. Actually, I'll just wait for the new cylindrical Mac Pro to come out, and get that beast if it costs less than a small car. That one is so sleek, it will probably end up being exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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  5. UPDATE: Corsair H100i stopped working after 4 years. Out of the blue a CPU fan warning. But the fans are running, it's the pump inside the cooler that is broken. Buyer beware.

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  6. Update 2020: It finally got replaced by a Xeon W-2140B workstation. It's CPU is second hand, pulled from a Mac Pro.

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  7. UPDATE 2021: This machine is now plotting and harvesting Chia. Could use a faster CPU, though.

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