I’ve been talking about the hotness around my desktop computer for a while but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it like I said I would.  So here goes.

A few months back, I decided to get myself a new desktop computer.  But instead of just getting online and configuring one, I thought I’d build one from individual parts and get the kids to help me put it together.  I figured it would be fun for them and me to have a technology project to tackle.

So since I was doing this, I decided to go and get a tricked out system.  I hate having a noisy system so noise reduction was my primary goal.  Along with that, I have a pretty small office at home which doesn’t get enough air conditioning love so heat is also a big issue for me.  Fortunately, those two goals go hand in hand – if your system generates less heat, then you need less or slower fans to cool it and hence less noise.  Unfortunately, on the other side of these goals was my gadget freak need to have as much processing power as I could muster within these other goals (and without spending an outrageous amount of money).  I think I did an okay job at it.  Here’s what I bought and why.

First, the parts list:

• Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case
• Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6 (rev 1.0)
• Corsair 2×2GB DDR3 RAM
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600XT 256MB video card
• Samsung DVD±R Burner SATA
• Corsair 620W HX power supply
• Two 1TB SATA Western Digital Caviar GP hard drives
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 Ghz

All told this clocked in at right around $2500 for the setup.  I also bought a 24″ widescreen Dell LCD (not included in that $2500 price tag) that I’ve turned 90 degrees so that I can fit entire documents and web pages on the screen with little or no scrolling.

The Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case is quite rocking.  It wasn’t cheap (almost $200) but the features it has makes it well worth it.  Check out the Flickr pictures for different views on the case.  In particular, this case has built in noise reducing foam lining and a number of fans to keep heat moving out of the case.  Now I know what you’re thinking – “more fans means more noise”.  Well, actually more fans means each can run slower since no single fan needs to get all the heat out of the system by itself.  The case also has enough bays for six (yes, 6) hard drives and five front side bays (for CD/DVD drives, etc.).  The only downside: this thing weighs a ton.  That’s a small price to pay for this killer case.

When I bought my motherboard, I got the absolute newest motherboard with the latest Intel chipset (X38).  Of course, this chipset is now discontinued and the latest chipset is the X48.  That’s what happens when you buy a motherboard based on a chipset the day it hits the street.  Seriously, I bought the motherboard the day it was released.  The benefit of the X38 chipset is that it was one of the first (if not the first) chipset to support the latest RAM technology – DDR3 (it’ll also support DDR2 RAM but I opted to get a motherboard with only DDR3 slots).  This motherboard uses a lot of passive heatsink technology so that continues to help with my quest of quiet computing.  It also has a lot of SATA hard drive ports so the hard drive bays in the case don’t go to waste.  The single IDE drive port is useful for any legacy hard drives you want to move onto this motherboard (I’ve got two IDE drives that I use as backup drives).  The motherboard can do on board RAID as well although I’m currently not using this functionality.  Personally I’d rather back up stuff to my server (which does do RAID 1 for my files) and then backup those files to Amazon’s S3 service using JungleDisk.

The Corsair DDR3 RAM was pretty expensive when I bought it (about $900 for the 4GB kit – this was the single most expensive part of the computer).  It’s still pretty expensive but has come down some in price.  Most of my decision to buy this RAM was driven by the fact that it was one of the only sets of paired DDR3 RAM available.  In fact, when I was shopping for DDR3 RAM, there were only two or three manufacturers that had retail product available.

The Gigabyte Radeon 2600XT card happened almost entirely by luck.  I’m a huge ATI fan (one of my first cards was an ATI All In Wonder that let me watch TV right on my computer) so I was set on getting an ATI card.  What I didn’t know was that other manufacturers make equivalent video cards using ATI’s chipset.  The awesome thing about Gigabyte’s version of the 2600XT is that it is entirely passively cooled.  That’s right, one massive heatsink and no fans whatsoever.  This is the highest end card I was able to find in such configuration and thus it was the winner.  The card has the ability to drive two displays or one monster display.  For a while I bought a 30″ Dell LCD display for my office which used both connectors for a truly awesome display.  Unfortunately, I returned the 30″ LCD within days because of the amount of heat that thing throws off.  My office became an oven even when the LCD was in power saving mode.

The power supply might seem like a bit of overkill.  I’ve got an awesome APC UPS (Back-UPS 1500) which tells me the actual watts being consumed by the devices it is powering.  In steady state, the computer is consuming about 130 watts (that’s not under heavy load).  So having a 620 watt power supply may seem like overkill.  Well, the reasoning here is three fold.  First, as I add more devices to the machine (there are 6 hard drive bays after all), I won’t have to worry about killing the power supply.  Second, this power supply has a great modular design meaning I only need to plug in cables that I need for the machine.  Third, the unit is very quiet and this is helped by the fact that I’m running it way under it’s maximum capability.  Also, by running it way below the maximum rating, you can get a lot closer to an efficient power supply.  Like most power supplies, the sweet spot for this unit is at about 50% of the maximum load

For storage space I thought I’d maximize my storage density.  The largest drives available when I was doing my build were 1 Tb (well, not really 1 Tb since marketing mumbo jumbo steals over 100 gigs from all of us but that’s a topic for another post).  I’ve long been a fan of Western Digital hard drives so I thought I’d look at their lineup first.  Low and behold, Western Digital had a perfect drive for my build.  The Caviar GP drives both focus on low acoustical noise and lower power consumption all the while maintaining great performance.  Sure I could have gone for a faster drive for better performance but noise performance and heat dissipation would have suffered.  I could have gone all out and gotten an SSD and eliminated noise completely but I haven’t gone insane just yet.

Finally, my choice on CPU may be puzzling since I’m a self avowed performance freak.  I decided to get the lowest end quad-core CPU available at the time of my build.  Two reasons really.  First, I was moving from working exclusively on a Pentium M 1.2 GHz CPU on my lovely Dell X1 laptop and so moving to anything faster was going to be a huge improvement.  So moving to a 2.4 GHz quad-core CPU was a massive improvement from my perspective.  Second, we all know that CPU prices continually move down and performance moves up  (i.e., Moore’s law).  So I figured that by the time I max out the performance of this low end quad-core CPU, I’ll be able to fairly cheaply replace it with a better CPU and still have accompanying hardware (RAM, video, hard drives) that can keep up with the additional CPU performance.  If things go really out of whack, I’ll plunk down and buy a new motherboard and CPU combo.

Two final things of note on this build.  First, I’m now running the 64-bit version of Vista so as to take advantage of all the RAM in the computer. Second, most of the components within my build are able to be overclocked.  This includes the CPU, RAM, and video card.  As of now I haven’t bothered going down this path given the potential for system instability and increased heat generation.  I may try this later on if I want to extend the use of this machine without having to buy new hardware.  That will probably be another blog post when I get around to doing it.

So that’s it.  My build is complete and I’ve got an awesome machine (and a great project) to show for it.  Feel free to look through the photos on Flickr although honestly most of the photos look exactly the same – even to me.