Building a new PC
After what seems forever, I found some time to post. Tonido is coming along, progress is being made, though what seems like an inch at a time. But that is a post for another rainy day.
Anyway, developing Tonido is a fun affair, I need to run several copies of Visual Studio 2008, Eclipse, a couple of browsers, several tail programs, then a couple of SSH sessions. Its fun stuff. Getting all this going takes a fair chunk of time. And on some days, I need to run a Virtual Machine to boot.
My aging Athlon 64 3000+ (from 3 years ago) couldn’t even pretend it could do this and I didn’t try. I finally got a Dell XPS 1330, Core 2 Duo laptop in the beginning of this year that was able to bear this load. I finally ended up connecting via Remote Desktop to my laptop, so I could at least use my desktop monitor (Dell 24 inch). Still this was a sub optimal experience, especially for long sessions.
The Gods must have taken some pity on the laptop after seeing it run its heart out and I got the blessings to go get a new machine. Yay!
After looking at the current PC market, I had to consider whether I should get the quad core cpu vs the dual core cpu. The dual cores were much faster than the quads and were cheaper, but the quad core.. well they just had 2 more CPUs. After endless research, I decided to get the quad (Q9450) and I think it turned out to be a *good* thing. Rounding out the specs, the rest of the system is fairly straightforward, ASUS P5Q, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, ATI Radeon 4850, Antec Titan 650 with 650 W PS.
The build went pretty well and it posted into BIOS without a hitch. The only tricky thing was trying to understand how to attach the CPU cooler. It took me a while before I understood how to attach the CPU cooler clamps to the motherboard. Anyway more of that CPU cooler in a bit.
Overall, the build was fine, and in a little over a evening, XP was installed and I was playing my free copy of The Witcher (that came with the Radeon 4850) at full 1920×1600 resolution at smooth frame rates.
Next, I threw my development workload at it and there was *no* problem whatsoever. VS 2008 is able to do parallel builds when it can and it really helps now. With Quad cores running, there was never a moment when I had to wait for the computer to do something, whether it be compiling or any other activity. I am just more productive, because during the VS build I could start another activity that could be done while waiting for it to complete. I guess you can never have too many cores.
A week went by and I finally decided to check out how stable the system was and I tried monitoring the temps. The case was running at 50 C! and, the CPUs at 50 C idle and almost 70 C load. And Intel’s spec said max temp was 70 C! Yikes.I tried several things, reapplied the thermal paste, reseated the fan etc. These didn’t help, and in fact I actually saw the CPU at 100 C in the BIOS once during my test! I thought it was cooked and expected to see smoke coming out. To see if I can salvage the CPU, I went and got a Thermaltake CPU cooler. I put this on and took out the stock Intel cooler. And what a difference it made! Temps went down immediately.
Then I found that the Radeon 4850 was running at 80 C!. After applying the Radeon “Fan hack”, the GPU temperature came down from 80 C to about 50 C!
Happy with the cooling, I OCed my Q9450 to 3.2 GHz from 2.66 GHz (my first overclock). Everything has been very stable. Idles at 45 C and at load never got above 60 C.
Here are some notes for someone building a new PC:
1) Choose a good case
A good case is crucial. My first build used a sub-par case and the front panel disintegrated during the build and I still use that machine with duct tape holding the frontpanel. ugly. The Antec Titan 650 is a very good case, almost silent. It has plenty of room to work with and comes with a very good PSU to boot.
2) Choose a good power supply
Enough said.
3) Buy a non-stock CPU fan
This applies if you are buying one of these new Intel chips. It is possible that I did a lousy job installing the cooler, but buying a aftermarket cooler really helps.
4) Reuse your Windows XP Pro license if you have it
This one was news to me. I was planning on getting Vista, but I learnt that it is possible to move Windows XP Pro from an old machine to a new machine, provided you have the retail version. So I retired an old machine, installed Ubuntu on it and moved XP Pro to the new machine. This is better because, I now have Vista and XP on my development machines and it is good to have as much diversity as possible.
5) Check your operating temps especially at peak load
I didn’t do this enough at the beginning, but should have done this right off the bat. Running Prime 95 torture test is a good way. Another good way is doing C++ compiles.
My new machine, according to the CPU benchmarks is at least 10x faster than my Athlon 64 3000+ and it is atleast 3x faster than my dual core 2.2 GHz.Everything is getting done faster. Now only if I can write software faster..