My Core i7 of 2011 in Ireland:
By the end of 2011 my Pentium 4 of 2004 was again too slow for the recent crop of computer games. Actually, it still could not run with good frame rates my beloved MS Flight Simulator 2004! Besides, it was now imperative to have a PC that could run one of the best OS of the time: MS Windows 7. Finally, I was now involved in writing books, so I needed a PC that could run with good screen refresh MS Word documents worth hundreds of pages with hundreds of pictures. As soon as started to investigate the hew components needed, my old PC got mortally offended and gave up its soul. On inspection the culprit was the Gigabyte motherboard, and finding an identical one (for a fast fix) proved impossible. I had to go through the lengthy chore of extracting the hard disks and mounting them in my Seattle PC Service Pentium 4 PC, so that I could go on with MS Office, Internet and Email for a few months while I planned for the new components, purchased them, assembled the PC and loaded the software.
Three years earlier I had acquired a flat monitor, always with a 1600x1200 px resolution. I selected a two-year old top model, that had now become affordable, the 21.3" NEC MultiSync LCD2170NX:
As before, the new case had to be a maxi-tower, but narrow enough to fit into the piece of furniture I had made in 1998 and had brought over with me to Ireland. I went for the excellent Enermax SpineRex, a simple but impressive design, with eleven (!) front 5¼" bays:
See below the other component boxes, stored below my harpsichord, ready to begin the assembly:
The SpineRex case came without a bundled Power Source Unit. Enermax had many excellent matching ones and I went for the impressive Enermax Revolution 85+ with 920W (this value was obtained with different online power calculators, which appear to err significantly on the safe side: during its 9 years of service the monitored consumption never peaked beyond 40%):
Even since the 1990's I have had UPS units: they have saved my PC from the numerous AC micro-drops that are relatively common in all the countries I have lived in. I moved the UPS I had recently installed in the previous PC, the PowerWalker VI 1500 LCD UPS:
As a case fan controller I went for the showcase NZXT Sentry LX Dual-bay:
The NZXT 3 fans and 5 temperature sensors, as per my labels on the right hand side of the piece:
- CPU: no controlled fan (the CPU fan had its own controller); the temperature sensor was inserted into the CPU cooler fins.
- NBR: case side pushing fan, with sensor on the Northbridge sink.
- GPU: back exhaust fan, the impressive 12" Enermax TBSilence UCTB12, and sensor on the GPU.
- HDD: front case pushing fan (came with the case and has nice controllable blue and red LEDs), with sensor placed on the top hard disk drive.
- PSU: no controlled fan (the PSU has an internal exhaust fan), sensor over the top of the PSU.
See below a picture of the Enermax TBSilence UCTB12 fan in its case:
As always the heart of the PC is the motherboard, and after much searching, with the approval of my “PC guru” (my son Rafael) I went for the Asus Rampage III Extreme:
I have always been fond of Intel processors: they are particularly good for flight simulation. This time the ideal one was the Quad-core Intel Core i7-960 3.2MHz:
This CPU when working at full tended to overheat, even with no overclocking. As always, the bundled Intel cooler (on the left in the picture below) was barely adequate, and therefore I installed instead the very well reviewed and reasonably priced—though huge and very heavy at 1,040g—model you can see below on the right hand side, the Thermaltake Frio:
The Asus Rampage III Extreme has 6 RAM slots: it can handle 1, 2, 3, 4 or 6 strips, but it has three “channels” and the best performance is achieved with 3 strips. I installed three Kingston DDR3 1066MHz 4GB ones: 1066MHz (a bit on the slow side) was the RAM speed recommended in the Core i7-960 CPU specs. Now I had a total of 12 Gb of RAM:
For the graphics card I decided to have “only” 1Gb of RAM, because even though 2Gb cards were already available, they were still very expensive and were not needed by the games I was running at the time. I no longer needed a special graphics card cooler, because high performance cards now came with a large cooler that takes a second PCIe slot, with air being pushed directly outside the case. I have always preferred the ATi (now AMD) cards, and I went for the Sapphire Radeon HD6870, with its remarkable "Vapor-X" cooling system, and indeed when the GPU was pushed to continuous maximum usage the temperature never kept always below 80ºC:
The technology of hard disk drives had evolved. Although SATA hard disks were still prevalent, Solid State Disks (SSD) were now available and (in small sizes) affordable. Their impressive performance is only achieved through the new SATA3 (also confusingly named SATA6) ports, and the Asus motherboard has a Marvell SATA3 controller that caters for them. I bought a Crucial M4 SATA6 256Gb SSD:
I have to say, though, that installing the SSD proved quite challenging. To begin with, they are 2.5" units, but I wanted to install the SSD in a 5¼" front bay. I had an adapter from 5¼" bay to 3.5" HDD, so I screwed to the outside the two SpineRex side “rails” (requiredd for a straightforward insertion in the bay), then to the inside of the adapter I added two small adapters from 3.5" to 2.5", and the contraption was ready for the SSD. Three add-ons needed to mount an SSD!
The Windows 7 installation on the SSD was far from easy, mainly on account of the special Marvell port and the SATA3 driver it needs: the Windows 7 installer “dislikes” both. So I had first to install Windows 7 on a hard disk plugged to a standard SATA port, in one partition of exactly the same size as the SSD. Then in another PC using a partition utility I moved this partition to the SSD and made it bootable. Actually it was even more complicated, but eventually it worked to a charm.
In this computer I had two hard disk drives. The most important one consisted of two discs in RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration. For less critical storage there was also another identical disc. Their total storage was therefore 2Tb. These hard disks were all Western Digital Caviar Blue 1Tb, shown on the left hand side below. I installed on them (brought over from the previous PC) the beautiful Zalman Heatpipe ZM-2HC1, shown on the right hand side picture below.
For optical discs I had the usual DVD drive and also a Blu-Ray: this is needed to watch hi-resolution movies and for large yearly backups, thanks to its 25G capacity (with one-layer discs). I installed a LG BH10 Blu-ray Rewriter:
I could not find any substitute for my 2004 Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS Platinum, with its front bay drive, so I moved it to this PC. This was possible because the Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard among its PCIe slots also includes a PCI slot. Luckily I had kept the black front bezel, now needed.
In my former computer this sound card fed stereo speakers. I now wished to enjoy the surround sound this card can deliver for games and, without any pretence at musical hi-fi, I installed the excellent and very affordable (€82) Logitech X-540 5.1 Speakers:
Until now I had used always standard PC keyboards. I now opted for the Genius KB-320e Multimedia, with its 17 additional keys, mostly working without installing the driver:
I also moved to this PC a legendary mouse (when no longer in production, units were sold on eBay at €500 each!), which I actually got three years before, gorgeous with its inertial wheel and many conveniently placed and programmable additional buttons, the Logitech MX Revolution Mouse:
You always need an excellent all-purpose colour printer, even better if it can print on both sides of the paper and also print on CD/DVD/BD disks, such as the Canon Pixma iP4950 Inkjet Printer:
For Flight Simulation I had no difficulty in moving over from my former PC both the
ThrustMaster Hotas Cougar and the CH Pro Pedals:
I completed the case with the very useful front bay screen Crystalfontz CFA 635 YYE 20x4 LCD module:
Let us see now a few assembly stages. The Northbridge fan and the three RAM strips in place:
Now comes the hard disk cage, to be installed in the tower's bottom front. It was designed for the disks to be installed vertically, but I modified it to accommodate them horizontally, an arrangement I prefer. You can see the Zalman coolers above the two upper drives:
See below the tower with everything installed, ready to be closed and used:
The cables are neatly installed for optimal air circulation, as shown by the ones that go on the other side of the motherboard:
And this was the tower front by Christmas/Hanukkah 2011:
This computer, with quite a few important upgrades, was still working perfectly in 2022.