Part II of pimp my PC was today, in other words, yes was around Simlim got a quick swipe at few more items to make my PC complete. That means picking up a western digital 1TB harddisk ($322) together with Vista Home Premium ($129). Amazingly alot of stores are still selling vista at like $167 to $179 and the WD Harddisk at $385-$460, how is that so with some stores are still able to sell the exactly same thing at the price I paid for?

Apparently, later do I know after chatting with some store owners there that actually some distros (and MS) gives some kind of bulk and loyalty discounts to some stores, while some pass the savings directly to customers, many will still direct the savings (poof!) into their company itself and keeping prices still at the recommended retail rate, there are however always one or two stores which can go lower. So the moral is if you want to find big bargains in SLS, do your homework- bury yourself in the papers!

The Western Digital harddisk I’ve got is the greenpower series with a variable rpm from 5400-7200rpm depending on use and comes rated with about 40% energy savings compared to other full fledged 7200rpm 1TB drives, something not really meant to scream in terms of performance but hey I only needed “environmentalists approved” computer storage!

Got back and started the gigabtyes flying around drive to drive for my backup.
I know that the actual drive capacity is always less than the usable capacity, but not so much that it is more than a physical harddrive itself! My 1000GB drive comes up as 930GB formatted- so that almost a full 80GB harddisk ($60 bucks) taken out, I should get a discount!

For a personal record, now I have about 2000GB of harddisk space comprising of 1x500GB Hitachi Enterprise Deskstar + 1xWD 1TB drive + 2x250GB Hitachi Deskstar drives. I won’t be counting those 1 or 2 80GB harddisks I have lying around the house, until I can find them too, but hey that quite negligible already.

Got some cool stuff today, or like those peeps in hardware zone will call “a Hoot”, will let ya in for in with this teaser on the left to figure out the parts.

I wanted to challenge myself in building a sub 10k 3Dmark2006 PC around $1000 without overclocking, the budget itself is a challenge I gave myself too, but I think in the computer world, what you pay is what you get. This system will be a major upgrade from my current Pentium 4 system, retaining hard disk, power supply, media drives and casing. This is so after countless revisions and price checks over the last months, finally I can have a capable system both for work and play!

Part are brought from various stores based on my research since the past month (with stores):
Intel Quad Core Q9450 Processor (1333FSB) + MSI Neo-3 P35 ATX Motherboard- $657 (Bliss)
4GB (2x2GB) Kingston DDR800 PC6400 ram – $136 (Powersys)
Powercolor ATi Radeon HD3870 DDR4 512MB – $305 (Fuwell)

Total: $1098

I was rather satisfied and fortunate to get the processor and board at that price as no store will sell them to anyone so low before, kudos going out to the helpful staff at Bliss computers. The Radeon card comes with a professional cooling system from Zalman, so it’s very much a dual slot cooler card with ultra zippy DDR4 memory- ATi’s most powerful single GPU solution to as of date.

I was initially considering the cheaper Geforce 9600GT ($239) for my graphics solution till Vista SP1 came along with DirectX10.1 support, which yields a promising 20% increase in performance in Assassin’s Creed with 4XAA enabled. Assassin’s Creed is one the first DirectX 10.1 game to be released recently and only the Radeon HD3800 series cards are the more future-proof cards in the market today with DirectX10.1 support, therefore my rather unusual shift to ATi considering my 2 previous graphic solutions being Nvidia cards.

Assembled and replaced all my old PC parts in the evening and got everything tested and working, only that my re-animated hard disk with XP refuses to boot in my new system, it’s not an activation problem, which I can get done by calling up Microsoft tech support, but more of a boot incompatibility. So a backup, reformat and re-installation of XP is the cleanest solution. The bad being that I hate reinstalling all my programs and games when I get vista soon, gonna pop by SLS soon or maybe tomorrow to get Vista home premium with SP1 so I can get my system up and running by next week.

Now to backup about some 400GB of data… sigh.

Little background of the upcoming processors and socket, as shown on the picture on the left, the larger LGA1160/1366 chip is based on the Nehalem platform spotting between one and eight cores running on the Intel LGA1160 and LGA1366 sockets. Noteworthy is the return of Hyperthreading in this processors- capable of handling two independent software threads per core and allows a processor to execute two different code streams at pretty much the same time. So technically if it is a quad core, it’s like having almost the equivalent of four Pentium 4 CPUs in one processor. And if that is not enough, the chip will too spot integrated memory controllers for DDR3 SDRAM with 1 to 4 memory channels. Expect the see the first few Nehalems made with the using its 45nm manufacturing process out end this year.

Photo source: VR-zone forums

You know, it’s always the case in the technology sector, particularly the PC components area- just when I was about to get my first major PC upgrade in 7 years, a new LGA socket is coming around the corner making any purchases you make now this year outdated by this year end. With Intel’s processors in particular, I was eyeing the Intel’s LGA775 sockets for awhile to succeed my old socket 478 Pentium 4. But considering they had been around for many years (about 4 years now), to my dismay (yet no surprise) that is going to be replaced by the Intel LGA1160 and LGA1366 sockets coming end this year!

Yes I do need an upgrade now but I am not doing it! Come to think about sometimes I don’t practice what I peach myself- recommending people on hardware sites to get what they need now and ignore the inevitable progress of technology, but playing the waiting game myself as well. So the question now is whether I can hold till year end for the Bloomsfield or get the Yorkfield now but don’t invest so much in it (maybe a Q9300 will do).

Looking back I don’t upgrade as lavishly as most hardware enthusiasts, and prefer to get something which can last me 5 years or more at a go, I’ve skipped AGP 4x being the first few adopters in Singapore of AGP 8x from PCI graphic cards. 7 years had seen me now completely skipping and PCI-E 1.0 and the Intel’s Core 2 duo moving from a Pentium 4 to an Intel Quad Core if so. So this “tech skipping” habit is quite evident as so as I noticed. On a sideline to decisions, I might also consider investing in a more powerful and dependable PC if I were to bring it aboard for my studies as well.

Come to think about it, the only future proof item I may own could be my PC casing!