01
My New PC | 2011-12-28
I decided to buy a new computer. After thinking through, I decided to build one this time. It was a big project because 1) I had to upgrade the knowledge of hardware, 2) I had to spend so much time researching for reviews and benchmarks for pretty much all the components I bought beside memory, 3) I had to be a woman to spend so much time shopping around online to find the best deal. With help of not going to mountains and Christmas sales, I finally was able to decided what I wanted.
02
My New PC | 2011-12-29
My CPU, Intel Core i7 2600K. 4 core + 4 Hyper-threading. I overclocked to 4.4 GHz. So far even after playing high-end game like Battlefield 3 or photoshoping, I am unable to put this CPU on 100% load. With normal office applications including Photoshop, it only goes up around 25 to 30 %. I only see it went 100% when I did CPU stress test. Super impressive. My motherboard is Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3, Tom's Hardware recommended. Good mobo for the price.
03
My New PC | 2011-12-29
I picked Zalman CNPS10X Performa for my CPU cooler and Corsair Vengeance Low Profile DDR3-1600 CL9-9-9-24 (16 GB) for my memory. The cooler's fan barely fits over the memory sticks. The cooler keeps my overclocked CPU around 63 degrees which is my target temperature.
04
My New PC | 2011-12-29
Got Seasonic X660 Gold for power supply. This doesn't use fan while in low use helps to keep noise down. PowerColor HD6770 1GB GDDR5 for my graphis card, cost performance card. It was only $110 and runs Battlefield 3 (BF3) no problem even with my 4 year old PC. With new PC BF3 runs around 40 to 45 FPS. I got D-LINK DWA-552 Xtreme N Desktop Adapter for Wifi. Some reason I had problem playing BF3 online, but after switching PCI slot, the problem went away.
05
My New PC | 2012-01-03
The best of my new PC is right here, the disks. I got 3 disks. Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB for storage. It's very quite HDD. I need to concentrate to hear the HDD moving. And the killer OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 120GB SSD x 2 on RAID 0. Most of you have no idea what that means, so let's say my old harddisk can sequantial read 50 MB/s which was avaragenal at 4 years ago I beleive. My faster old HDD can sequantial read at 72 MB/s. The new Western Digital Caviar Green can sequantial read at 105 MB/s which is current avaragenal. My SSD on RAID 0 cracks 1025 MB/s. Starting Battlefield 3 which used to take like 2 to 3 min with HDD on my old PC (this game took longer than starting Windows), with my new PC with SSD ,it take about 15 sec. Loving SSD.
06
My New PC | 2012-01-03
At last my case Bitfenix Shinobi. I don't know why but why do these manufacture make such super ugly PC cases while most of package manufactures such as Dell or Apple have cool designes. Shinobi was one of the few cool looking case I could find and was cheap too.
07
My New PC | 2012-01-03
Now I have to clean the house…
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