Computer Dementia

Although my main development machine has only recently had its second birthday we all know that computers age even quicker than dogs. Working on a single core machine with XP feels like living with a black and white TV when all your friends have color. So time to send the old boy to the great kennel in the sky and take on a new puppy.

Custom Build

Normally I would just go online to Dell and choose a reasonably high spec machine, but not this time. Instead I’ve been inspired by a Scott Hanselman blog post into building a PC from components instead of just ordering a fully built system. It sounds more fun with the added benefit that you get to build the exact spec you want without compromises.

Dream Development Rig

My first decision is to forget about being sensible and ignore any attempt at creating a value for money machine. If you want value for money just go ahead with Dell/HP/Lenovo etc who work on razor thin margins. No, instead I am going to create my dream development rig. Something that will be a pleasure to use and last for at least a couple of years.

Intel Core 2 Quad Core Extreme QX9650 3GHz

I firmly believe you can never have too much processing power. If two cores are better than one, then using the same logic, I deduce that four cores must be better yet. So lets pick a nice fast four core processor from Intel which is unlocked so we can overclock for even better performance. I’ve have chosen the QX9650 which is only a little below the fastest processor they make. It also has good reviews from overclockers that indicate we should be able to improve on the 3GHz stock rating.

Gigabyte GA-X48-DS5 Motherboard

Looking at the cost of memory it seems that DDR3 is much more expensive than DDR2 even though the performance advantage it provides is currently marginal. So I went with a motherboard that supports DDR2 and has two PCIe x 16 slots with the latest X48 Intel chipset.

Corsair Dominator Memory DDR2 4GB

I am going to install Vista Ultimate 64bit Edition so that I can take advantage of the entire 4GB of memory I will be installing. Although Vista 32bit can in theory access 4GB of memory it does not work that way in practice. Because of the way the operating system reserves some of the address space it means you cannot get much above 3.25GB for use.

Samsung 22′ LCD Widescreen Monitor

Currently I have two 19′ 4:3 monitors. I will add to this by getting a 22′ widescreen that will become the main monitor, placing the existing 19′ displays on each side. I worked out that a 22′ widescreen would give me about the same display height for all three so that dragging windows between them would feel natural.

2 x Galaxy GeForce 8800GT

Having three displays means having two graphics cards to drive them. I opted for a pair of nVidea 8800GT cards from Galaxy which are at the high end of the mid-market. I don’t often play games so going for the latest and greatest seemed a pointless expense. 

Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Seagate Barracuda 500GB

A fast hard drive can really help with overall system performance. So the main drive with be a Raptor 150GB that spins at 10,000RPM. Even the code bloat that is Vista should fit easily within that. Data will be kept on a 500GB second drive running at the traditional 7,2000RPM.

Antec P190 Computer Case

Finally we need to have a case that is worthy of the latest hardware. I just hate those nasty plastic cases you get from Dell. Instead I want something that looks cool and also runs cool. Looking around the Antec P190 fits both counts and comes with high spec power supplies as well.

The Build

All the hardware arrived last week but I needed an extra hand with actually putting it together. With one hand in plaster it meant calling on the services of my brother-in-law. Nick is great with hardware but also a self proclaimed Linux fan boy and so needs watching carefully. It wouldn’t have surprised me to turn my back and find a extra 20GB partition installed running Ubuntu. Needless to say we don’t want to sully a new machine with that kind of virus.

Luckily it went nice and smooth and after about 6 hours we had Vista up and running Crysis. There was only a single gotcha in the whole process. It turns out that the CPU fan is so big it overlaps two of the memory slots. I had ordered 4 x 1GB sticks and so could not install half the memory. So I ordered 2 x 2GB sticks and will use them instead in order to get the 4GB required.

Performance

Looking at the Vista performance numbers I can see that all the settings are rated at 5.9, which is actually the maximum number that Vista will display. As a more real world test I performed a build of Krypton using my custom msbuild script. It took just 35mins when it used to take 1h 15mins on my old machine. My old machine was not slouch either with a Xeon 3GHz processor and 2GB of memory.

Considering none of the applications in the build process are designed to use multiple cores it shows that the new machine is significantly faster even when using mainly just the one core. So far I have not played around with trying to overclock the processor. Once I have some results I will let you know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 1:02 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.