Saturday, May 1, 2010

The aftermath of a system build

6:48 PM / Technology / Comments4 Comments

The aftermath of a system build

UNREAL TOURNAMENT III at constant 60 fps with all details maxed out is niiiice. More thoughts to follow.

 
4 Comments

1. Graham said:

Mic, did you build this yourself? I'm utterly terrified of building my new rig and frying something.

(Posted on Sunday, May 2, 2010 at 1:31 PM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

I did indeed. Took my approximately an hour and a half to pull out the old components, give the case a good vaccuuming and put the new components in.

The biggest hurdle for me was squeezing the video card in. The card itself only just fit, and the PCI-E power connectors are on the end of the card rather than on the top as they were on previous models. Because the card was practically touching the case's hard drive column, I had to resort to some unorthodox cable management, threading the PCI-E power cables behind the column and squeezing the connectors through one of the air flow holes. If you're going for a 5870 (I think that's what you said in your email), definitely make sure you've got a case with plenty of breathing room.

The prospect of frying something certainly worried me a bit, but generally I think modern motherboards are pretty good at simply stopping the power flow if something's seriously wrong.

(Posted on Sunday, May 2, 2010 at 1:50 PM)

3. Graham said:

After a bit more reading, I've decided to opt for the 5850 card. The case I'm getting isn't top of my choices on the looks department (it's ugly as sin) but it is roomy and it's known to give the lowest GPU and CPU temperatures around. The Antec 902 Gaming Case. Only saved 600 out of the 1400 I need though so still a few months off though I should hopefully have it by the 27th July (SC2s release date)

(Posted on Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 12:07 AM)

4. Author Profile Page Michael said:

The Antec 902 seems like a really nice case. Not very pretty, as you say, but if it gets the job done then that's what matters. My own tower is jammed into a corner behind my desk so it really doesn't matter to me what it looks like.

Are you sure it leaves you enough room for a 5850, though? This picture makes it look like quite a tight fit, and that's a 3850.

(Posted on Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 9:25 AM)

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.

 
Archives
Categories
Recent posts