New Computer

It’s been a while since I bought a new computer, but yesterday I decided enough was enough and I went and got myself one (without elaborating too much: ever tried to play Left 4 Dead on a Dell XPS M1330? You haven’t? Well, imagine what the original Counter-Strike looked like back in 1999. Then halve the resolution. That’s what it looked like). I had done some research (of course – how could I not?) and came to the conclusion that the best thing for me was to go “all-out” and buy something new. So I ended up with:

• Intel Core i7 920 (2.66Ghz, quad-core)
• Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58 chipset)
• G.Skill NQ 3x2Gb DDRIII @ 1333Mhz
• Gainward GTX285 1Gb
• Asus Xonar DX
• Western Digital “Green Power” 750Gb 7200RPM SATAII
• Antec P182

All up it cost me an amount you can figure out for yourself if you’re so inclined. I also had to buy a desk to put it on and a screen to use with it. Got myself a Benq G2400WD 24″ – my first “full HD” screen. Very nice screen for the price ($350-ish), I was expecting it to be pretty average, but surprisingly it is not. It only has tilt-adjust, not even height-adjust, but I’m not that tall anyway so the positioning is perfect for me.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about setting it up: I accidentally bought the wrong case initially. I could have sworn that my mate had an Antec P180 case, so I bought one as well. I didn’t realise however that I had mistakenly chosen the “mini” version and was in fact buying a microATX case which would not fit my full size ATX motherboard. Frantically, on a Saturday afternoon, I looked up the website of the retailer I bought it from to see if I could get a refund or return. It was 3.30PM and I knew they closed at 4PM. “Fuck!” I exclaimed as I read the return conditions; “a 20% restocking fee will be charged on unopened items only, opened items cannot be returned” – ridiculous terms, but not applicable to me as I had unfortunately opened the box in my haste to get leet computing powah active. So I jumped onto OCAU and posted a thread in the ‘For Sale’ forums – not half an hour later I had a buyer, and that evening he came and picked it up. Ah, OCAU, so useful sometimes.

Now however I was left with a leet computer without an appropriate leet case to put it in. No worries, I thought, I’ll build it on the desk and get Vista installed while I figure out my case issues. So I started that. Well, by ‘started’ I mean what I actually did was a social discovery process to find just where I could get myself a Vista x64 DVD. I did intend upon using my legitimate Home Premium key which I got with my laptop nearly a year ago. So I started looking in all the usual places you’d find proprietary software, the kind of place where you can obtain said software at little cost to yourself.

However, it was very slow. Apparently my internet karma was low that day and I wasn’t getting the download speeds I wanted. So I sought an alternative source, and that source came in the form of a friends’ Microsoft Technet subscription – access to all Windows operating systems and software. Of course, being Microsoft, you can’t just download an ISO. You have to use Internet Explorer and you have to install an ActiveX script and you have to use their special downloader. Which of course crashed at 91% of the download, late at night, and made me annoyed. Luckily though, my mate’s very understanding and he popped ’round again to input his credentials and get the download resumed.

Anyway, I still needed a case. Where the hell was I going to get a case on Sunday? Computer Alliance, that’s where. They are slightly more expensive than other stores, but most other stores typically don’t have any customer service and/or stock. I was pleasantly surprised when I called to ask about the case; not only did the salesman give me a few details about the case that I didn’t know, he also asked me about what I was going to put into it and made the recommendation that unless I was tidy with my cable management, large dual-slot video cards were sometimes a tight fit. This was relevant to my interests (guffaw!) because I have a large dual-slot video card. Moreover, when I arrived at the store I found it was pleasantly decorated, full of stock (and customers – lots of people need to buy computer bits on Sunday it seems) and also full of friendly staff!

So I had my case. I went home and finished the Vista installation, then dismantled my bits and pieces and started the fun part of building a computer: the hardware assembly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as fun as it used to be. These days because everything only has one place, and also due to the relative simplicity of my system (CPU+RAM+motherboard already assembled, only things to insert/plug in were video card, two SATA cables and the front panel cables), and also due to the high standard of design that my Antec P182 was built to. Cable management is a breeze these days. No more huge power cables hanging about inside the case, no more large, wide IDE cables blocking airflow, and no more cases being thoughtlessly designed as a set of boxes inside a larger box.

The Antec P182 has plenty of reviews so you can check it out for yourself. I was really quite impressed by the thoughtfulness of the layout and what it enabled me to achieve in terms of airflow and cable management. My only critique is that some of the important plastics (fan cages) felt like they are quite poor quality and after removing and replacing one of the fan cages once, it was already showing signs of stress fractures.

So I spent half an hour or so installing everything into the case, then I fired it up and got ready to copy my games from my laptop. Because I hadn’t installed SP1 for Vista yet this took longer than expected as I had forgotten about the terrible Vista file transfer slowness. While the games were copying, I decided to install all my drivers. This took forever as expected. I also installed SP1, and Windows downloaded a bunch of updates in the background without asking me. Yeah, OK, whatever. I was doing that anyway.

Then I rebooted. It took 45 minutes to reboot. The logoff screen said ‘Installing update x of y, please do not turn of your machine …’ for a very long time. I can’t believe it takes that long to update a modern Windows operating system. I don’t care about who/what/where/when/why, but I do care about how long it took. And it took way too long.

Eventually it sorted itself out and I jumped into WoW. It looked pretty good with all the settings at ‘Ultra’ (newly released graphics option tier with the 3.1 patch), but I still only managed 15fps in Dalaran. I’m going to blame Blizzard’s game engine for this. Performance in low population areas and instances is astounding, and it looks pretty damn good for a five year old game.

Then I fired up Left 4 Dead once Steam finished sorting itself out and I was COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY. As I had been playing it (as mentioned earlier) on my laptop, the transition from 720×480 resolution with everything on LOW to 1920×1200 with everything on HIGH was astounding. Not only that, but I was framerate capped to 60 fps – the refresh rate of my LCD. Awesome! However, when playing multiplayer I’m currently experiencing huge packet loss and lag spikes – it seems to be related to the nearby train line: whenever a train comes by my window, the packet loss starts. It’s annoying because I’ve never experienced anything near as bad with any of the other WiFi devices in my house before. Sigh.

As I sit here writing this, Team Fortress 2, Unreal Tournament 3 and a bunch of other Steam titles are downloading. I can’t wait to try it out this evening!

Pictures coming soon…