The New PC

So, I had to buy a new PC...

I was in a bit of a rush so I ended up with this mean looking one because the special silent case I wanted was going to take 10 days to arrive.

But it's rather excellent. I was a bit worried that all the mesh would mean that it was going to be really noisy, but in fact the opposite seems to be true. Because there's plenty of airflow the fans don't need to work so hard, which means the major cause of noise is eliminated. Unusually for me, I didn't go completely mental on the spec and stuck with a Quad Core i7-960 (3.20GHz) ,12 Gigs of RAM (only the 1866 MHz), a Rampage II Extreme motherboard, dual Radeon HD 5850 graphics cards and a Raid 0 boot drive. Most people would consider that a fairly extreme setup but for me that's quite sensible and restrained. I could have gone for SSD drives, a 980X Extreme processor, 5970 graphics cards, phase change cooling, well suffice to say I could easily have spent a lot more. It's probably just as well I was in a hurry.

I did switch the original CPU cooler (a CoolerMaster V8) for a supposedly super quiet Freezone Elite Pro. I sort of wish I hadn't to be honest. It's certainly a better cooler and there is a huge degree of nerdy satisfaction from having not only a liquid cooled CPU but one with a thermoelectric chiller. This means the CPU can be cooled to below ambient temperatures (a standard liquid cooler can only cool to temperature of the room) which gives me extra nerd points (and I get double for fitting it myself.) Unfortunately it's a lot noisier than the V8 despite the claims on the side of the box which is very disappointing and realistically I'm not going to be really needing super cooling most of the time.

Still, the V8 actually looks pretty funky sitting on the desk...