Brief Hardware Review

So first on the agenda is the current hardware I am running, I have a general feeling that I am looking to replace everything over the next few months. A brief look at my system:

Hardware Item	What I have	Modified?	Keep it?
Case	Antec p180b	No	No
PSU	Thermaltake Tough Power 750W	No	No
Motherboard	ASUS Striker Extreme 680i	O/C'd	No
CPU	Intel E6600	O/C'd	No
HSF	Thermalright Ultra-120 w/ 120mm fan	No	Yes
Thermal Paste	Arctic Silver 5	N/A	Yes
RAM	Corsair DDR2 6400 XMS2 2x1GB	No	No
Video card	MSI Geforce 8800GTX	No	For now
Primary monitor	Benq FP222W 22" Widescreen LCD	N/A	To become Secondary
Secondary monitor	Samsung 172x 17" LCD	N/A	No
Sound card	Motherboards on-board	N/A	No
Speakers	Logitech Z-5500 THX	N/A	Yes
Headphones	Sennheiser HD 555	N/A	Yes
Primary HDD	Seagate SATA2 NCQ 320GB ST332062 0AS	No	To become secondary
Secondary HDD	Segate ATA ST380011A 80GB	No	No
CD/DVD	Pioneer DVD-RW DL DVR-212 SATA2	No	No
Mouse	Logitech MX Revolution	N/A	Yes
Keyboard	A Logitech multimedia keyboard	No	No

So all in all not a bad system. I am having some significant benching performance problems, I believe this is due to a poor motherboard, the fact that I am running Vista and because it currently is pirated I am unable to install the motherboard drivers, whether this has an impact on performance or not I will soon find out, as I am purchasing a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit OEM. See below for first 3dmark06 1.1.0 benchmark.

This is essentially what I will base my benchmarks on from this point forward. It's fairly obvious what is letting my system down so I will just move on.

I have decided that my Antec p180b is no longer required. It is essentially too small, it does not comfortably fit an 8800GTX SLI system with ease, it fits - just, I daresay any case on the market will not meet my requirements. I have been playing with a permanent hardware-on-bench/laboratory style setup where I do not use a case at all and gives me the freedom to switch hardware with the greatest ease and run extreme cooling events without having to disassemble my PC, a case on hand wouldn't hurt though. I did eye the CoolerMaster Stacker 830 Nvidia Edition as it is a simply awesome looking case, see below.

I will talk in much greater detail soon about my planned setup, I think it will end up being very cool and absolutely unique.

My PSU, the Thermaltake Tough Power 750W is a joke of a PSU, its the kind of PSU people would laugh about around a watercooler or forum, it's no mystery why I would omit my PSU on my OCAU sig. I originally purchased 11 months ago a Silverstone 850W PSU however it was DOA and this was just as December/New Years rolled around and of course RMA/Warranties close down until 15th of January where I purchased it, so I needed a stop gap and only had enough money for the Tough Power. I ended up not bothering to RMA the PSU because I gave up after my system really struggled overclocking. I threw the Silverstone in the bin a few days ago. My planned replacement is the Tagan ITZ 1300W PSU. It is highly recommended and for a reason.

It's spec'ed fairly well and it's put together nicely to, it does lack a feature I rate highly which is modular cabling but the performance of this PSU puts me in a position to not complain about a minor annoyance, if you look below you will see how it faired over at hi-techreviews.com. I have never seen such on the mark voltage readings before, they don't falter under stress either.



It's fairly clear that the Tagan is a winner for its performance and capability, it has the cables and power to run the next DX10.1 cards in SLI from Nvidia which is exactly what I want.


The ASUS Striker Extreme is a failure of a motherboard, I am definitely looking forward to binning this. It's luxury features in the end did not cut it, it's frankly still poor even with the latest 1305 BIOS revision. I am not looking to replace this right now as my next CPU/Motherboard/RAM purchase will be a shift to next gen tech, PCIEx2 and DDR3. There is not yet a standout motherboard to chose from, however if I were to pick a new motherboard it would absolutely be the X38.

My current CPU once a workhorse is now a generation old, well and truly taken over by its stronger Quad Core brothers. QX9770 is what I am getting Jan 08, it is the best. I had up until recently been running my E6600 @ 3.4GHz but my PC has started to lockup/reboot so I just put it back to 3.15GHz it's not worth the effort of attempting to push my current system harder. The E6600 was a great CPU though. My current CPU and future CPUs that are going to be air cooled, will be done so by my Thermalright Ultra-120 HSF. It is the best air cooling device around. I envisage keeping this until I switch to water cooling. "I use Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste at every opportunity as this is a no-brainer." This is the sentance I had typed up before I thought I should actually have a look around for benchmarks of the latest and greatest, it now seems that AS5 is second now to Tuniq TX-2 and by a margin I would consider significant enough to purchase some new thermal paste.

My Corsair 6400 XMS2 RAM is dog food when compared to the godlike Micron D9 RAM that is going around at the moment, frequencies as high as 1200MHz with low timings. An upgrade to good DDR2 memory would boost my system performance a fair bit but again due to the soon to be released DDR3 memory - it is not worth it. There are a lot of people that are saying that DDR3 will be slower initially due to greatly relaxed timings, I do not believe this will be the case. DDR3 brings a fair amount of new technology and there are snippets of very fast DDR3 floating around already. DDR3 has a Prefetch Buffer of 8bits instead of DDR2s 4bits, runs at a lower voltage 1.5v instead of 1.8v and it's maximum possible density per module is up to 16GB!

As you can clearly see, 1333MHz with -very- relaxed timings at 9-9-9-24. This is just the first batch of IC's to come out though so we are all expecting great things. DDR3 will apparently be around until 2010-2012. Most exciting is the potential for massive amounts of RAM and the final shift to 64bit systems. I'm still avoiding it as the 64bit environment is just to unstable. With the release of SP1 for Windows Vista, 4GB of RAM will definitely last until the user base for Vista 64bit and XP64 is much bigger and the bugs have finally been ironed out.

My Nvidia 8800GTX is second to the 8800 Ultra cards that are currently out a single 8800GTX is not really a top of the line solution, SLI is where it is at. Not worth upgrading the 8800GTX at the moment because with a potential release of the 9800GTX early next year I think it is worth holding out and saving for its release. Maybe even going for 3-way SLI. Or ATI's 4 card crossfire. The graphics card market is giving me a headache at the moment just thinking about the money required to purchase 3x 8800Ultras. It will be interesting to see if the 780i brings anything to the table.

I have decided to purchase a Samsung 275T a 27" wide screen LCD is what I want to replace my current primary 22" with. Relegating my 22" to secondary display.

I am purchasing tomorrow 2x Raptor X150g drives to become my OS drive in Raid 0 configuration. I plan on keeping these until SSD drives are fast and available. I will also be adding a few TB drives to my system for some roomy storage.

My DVD-RW drive is playing up a bit in terms of the tray not closing when I press the button it is also additionally no longer the fastest, so I will be looking at a Sata2 20x drive. Also a BR or HD drive/wr drive would be nice, wait and see for now.

And finally I want to get a nice stylish keyboard that doesn't look so retarded, all the basic multimedia keyboards are shaped weird and do not have any sharp style which is what I want. I don't want gimmicks I want style, sometimes form is better than function.

So essentially I will systematically replace what needs to be replaced with the best and keep track of my 3dmark06 scores along with others.