Introduction

I have had plans to build a high-end PC system for quite some time. Now I finally got around to it, and in this blog I share some experience from the build. The blog will start with the list of components I selected, followed by the actual build experience. The last piece for will be the result, with pictures and benchmarks. I hope it can be useful for some readers.

I need to point out that this is the very first time I actually build a PC. Thus, the blog is likely to include some trial and error in the procedure. After all, we learn from our mistakes right?

The first thing I needed to determine is what I was going to use the system for. The trend today is all about mobility and networking. Small portable devices that are all connected to each other. I'm fine with that trend (and I also enjoy it), but I have always preferred to have a centralized powerhouse with a big monitor in front of me. This is where I store all my digital content, do some video editing, play games and so on. With this in mind my criteria for this build was:
- High end components
- Plenty of space for upgrades and add-ons
- Future proof (at least for the next few years) in terms of interfaces and connections
Note that the publish date for this blog is 2014, but the actual date for the build was March 2012.

Choice of Platform

The second thing I needed to decide was what chipset platform I would use for the build. What I had to choose from was:
- Sandy Bridge on Socket 1155
- Sandy Bridge E on Socket 2011
- Ivy Bridge on Socket 1155

Socket 1155 would maybe have been the best for cost/performance reasons. Ivy Bridge was definitely an interesting option but the main benefits of that new architecture are low power consumption and an improved graphic processor. As this will be a Desktop PC and I will have a dedicated GPU, then Ivy Bridge didn't offer much to me. If I would get a Laptop, then Ivy Bridge would definitely be the best option. It will be interesting to see what else will be launched in 2012. There is some talk about Ivy Bridge E coming end of this year (or early next), but I don't want to wait that long. Besides, I better finish this project before December 22nd, or I will have no chance to enjoy it. Mayan prophecy you know ;-)

After some consideration, I decided to go for Sandy Bridge E.

Selected Components

Here I will provide a list of selected components I choose for the build, and also a brief explanation for my choice

So after a lot of reading in different forums and website reviews, I ended up with this list:

Chassi: Corsair 600T
I had my eyes on this case for quite some time. I was hoping they would come out with an updated version this year. Improved fan control and some more USB 3 ports would have been nice. Well, no update in sight while writing this. Still, the case does fulfill all my requirements. It's big, easy to work with, good airflow, and it looks good.

Power Unit: OCZ ZX Series 850W
I initially thought of getting a Corsair CMPSU-850AX 850W as I do have some good experience of PSUs from Corsair. I did see however, a lot of complains about colwine under heavy load, and that put me off. The OCZ ZX series have received a lot of good reviews so that is what I ended up with. It's rated as Gold. A Platina PSU would be nice, but they cost almost twice as much as a Gold unit.

Motherboard: Asus P9X79 Pro
Again, I started off by reading reviews and Asus almost always came out on top. As this will be based on LGA 2011, I needed a X79 version. My choices included Formula, Pro, and Deluxe. All three would fit my purpose, but I ended up with the Pro version due to the mix of features and price.

CPU: Core i7-3930K
Second to the best. The Core i7-3960X was just too expensive.

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Here I wanted something quiet with a small footprint. Big, heavy units like Noctua NH-D14 is for sure a good performer, but they often interfere with the MB layout, such as blocking RAM modules or PCIe slots. I do not plan to OC, so the 212 EVO will do fine.

Heatsink LGA 2011 Bracket: Cooler Master Hyper 212
Just a little mechanism to ensure the cooler can be assembled on a LGA 2011 board

GPU: Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition
AMD is definitely ahead of nVidia at the moment. Best card at this writing moment is the HD7970. Almost as good is HD7950. I went for a Sapphire card with better cooling then the reference design, plus a slight OC.

Sound Card: on-board sound
Thought of this for quite a while. My speakers will be connected with a digital Toslink cable where a dedicated sound card wont add much value. I decided to save some money here and simply go for the on-board sound

Hard Disk 1: Intel 520 Series 2.5" SSD 240GB
I had the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS in mind for a long time, but the reliability of the Sandforce controller made me hesitant. The new Intel 520 series seems like a more secure option. Interesting enough, it also uses Sandforce but a different version. Time will tell if it really is reliable of if that was only a marketing hoax. About the size, I need a big one. The 240 GB is expensive, but what the hell - let's go for it.

Hard Disk 2: Intel 520 Series 2.5" SSD 60GB
Why have only one if you can have two? This is where I will store all my private documents and photos. It's a bit overkill to use SSD for this, but the cost is more reasonable if I take a small size

Hard Disk 3: Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 64MB 2TB
Big heavy disk, for all my digital content, mainly video and music.

Hard Disk 4: Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB
This one is from my old system. I will just move it to the new one. Again, it’s for video and music.

RAM: Corsair XMS3 Vengeance PC12800/1600MHz CL9 4x4GB (CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9B)
The board support Quad-Channel memory. This is something I'm unlikely to upgrade later so I might as well buy plenty of RAM from start. 16GB of fast RAM should do it for some time ahead.

Optical DVD: Lite-On iHAS124
Not much to say here. A DVD, is a DVD, and not much differ from one unit to the other.

Optical Blu-ray: not selected
Is this really needed? I gave it a lot of thoughts. I will have the PC connected to both a monitor and a TV set, so I could stream some movies if I want. But then again, I already have a Blu-ray player next to the TV so what’s the point? I decided to save some money here, and instead I go for two DVDs (Lite-On iHAS124).

TV Card: Hauppauge PCTV Nanostick T2 HD 290e
Even though I can record TV channels directly in my TV media system, the recorded material is then encrypted. To encrypt recorded media is a technical invention from hell (movie industry), and it prevents me to move the content to my laptop while I'm on the road. So, I wanted a separate card for my PC. Too my surprise, there were very little to choose from, especially cards which supports DVB-T2. The Nanostick is one of the few. It's actually a USB plug and not a card, but that could be nice if I want to move it to another unit later.

Operative System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
I'm not convinced of Windows 8 at all. Not for a desktop. Plus the fact that it's not available yet. A 64 bit OS is what I need, so Win7 was my choice

HD Cooler: Scythe Himuro (2 of them)
Those are not really needed. In fact, they don't cool the HD at all. They do however reduce noise, and I often find the HD noise more irritating then the fans. They don't cost much and thus, I added them to my shopping list

Cables: Not much to say about those. I just needed to complement what I have with some new ones such as HDMI-to-DVI, USB 3 (for my back up drive), and an SPDIF Toslink (for sound).

That's it! I will re-use some peripherals like monitor, mouse, keyboard, USB hub, router etc, and I will not write about those here.

The next step now was to bring up my browser, and start shopping.

Preparing for build

Before any build, it's important to get the right working space and tools. I needed plenty of space since the case itself is rather big.

A tasty cold beer put me in the right mood.












You can press any image below to bring up a better view if you wish.

Looking at the case

Here is the case itself. Huge! What I want to do here is to remove the two HD cages on the right side and move one of them closer to the PSU area. The big 200mm fan will then blow är directly into the motherboard and GPU. As I planned to use 6 discs in this build (2 SSD, 2 HD, 2 DVD), the two HD drives were placed in a Scythe Himuro box and placed in the 5,25" slots.

I noticed that the case didn't come with any kind of manual. There are a lot of cables but not a single word of what should be connected to what. Hmm….

There is a guide for the fan controller, written by Carlos Pascual, which you can find here.

Installing PSU

I started with the PSU.









I was pleased to see the perfect fit into the case. There are also two thumbscrews used to firmly attach the unit.

Installing CPU

Next was the CPU. The mobo used a framed mechanism where you simply place the CPU and cover in with the frame again.

No chance to make errors here as the process is very simple. Then I placed some thermal grease on top of it and it was ready for the CPU cooler.

The CPU Cooler

The cooler was ready to be placed on the CPU, but here I ran into my first problem. How do I attached the backplate? I just couldn't figure it out. After searching online, I realized that the LGA 2011 platform does not use a backplate.

I wonder how hard it would be to write that down in the little useless installation instruction.

Placing the cooler on the motherboard

There we go. Firmly attached. Then I just pushed down the RAM modules.

Into the case

Next step was to place the whole mobo kit into the case. No issues at all.

SATA cables

Even though the case is big and offer plenty of working space, I decided to attach all SATA cable now as the GPU would block that area once in place.

Six cable where attached, were I used the 6Gb/s ports for SSD drives and 3Gb/s ports for everything else. I didn't use the Marvell controller as I heard that one got issues.

Installing the GPU

The big GPU was placed into the first PCIe lane. Looks nice…

So far so good

Picture of the case just before the SSD went in.

The backside

This is how the backside of the case looked. Plenty of work ahead to sort out all those cables. Again, I felt frustrated that there is no manual.

Installing SSD

The two SSD drives are placed into a HD cage. I only connected one SSD to make sure MBR is stored on the correct drive. Then I plugged in all the cables I could find from the case and plugged them into the motherboard. Some were obvious, some were not. Time to install OS.

Error in BIOS

I pressed the power button and was greeted with this message. CPU Fan Error! That can't be right, as I clearly see the fan spinning and it was correctly plugged into the right "cpu_fan" connector on the mobo. Should I troubleshoot or should I ignore the message? I went for the ignore option.

Installing Windows

Windows 7 was installed without any issues. It went faster then I expected. It was a pretty scary sight when I looked in the Device Manager as I had those exclamation marks all over. Windows obviously had issues here, but then again, that was to be expected as no drivers were installed yet.

Installing drivers

So the next move was to bring up the DVD that came with the motherboard. I installed all the drivers I could find, and one by one, the exclamation marks in Device Manager disappeared. But that CPU Far Error still annoyed me after each restart.

HD cages

Here is a picture of those Scythe Himuro boxes I will use for my two HD drives. I realized I got a new issue. The SATA cables I had got this 90 angle to them at one end. I needed straight cables to fit into the HD cooling boxes, so one more tip to the store was necessary.

SATA cables (again)

The issue was however not solved by just getting new SATA cables. I also needed to attach them. My initial plan to plug in those SATA cables before the GPU was obvious in vain now. To remove the GPU is not a heavy work, but instead I tried to use a small bamboo stick, the ones used for BBQ grill, and gently press down on the locking mechanism. It worked.

Almost done

All drives was now in place. The build was almost done. One thing I was not very happy with was the cable for USB 3 front connection. It goes right through the case out of the back through a PCI plate, then is expected to be routed back into the I/O USB port of the motherboard. That is not what I wanted.

USB3 header

After searching the web for a while, a small USB connector from Lian-Li caught ny attention. It's called Lian Li UC-01 Intern USB3-adapter and you just push it down into the USB3 header on the motherboard, connect the front cable and then you are set to go. Much more elegant solution

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Cable management

The final step was to do some cable management. The case feature a lot of options here, plenty of pass-through options to route the cables in. Great!

I don't think my work here was anything to brag about, but still good enough.

Benchmarking

I made some tests to see how much faster this new PC would be compared with my old system. The benchmarks included:

- Boot Time (from power on until all icons loaded in system tray, in seconds)
- PCMark Vantage
- 3DMark 11
- Excel Number Calculation (macro code generating calculations, lots of them. Measured in seconds)
- Game loading Civ V
- Sweet Home 3D picture rendering
- CrystalDiskMark (seq) - read
- CrystalDiskMark (seq) - write
- WinZip compression (3GB of bmp images)

My old system have the following specs: Windows Vista 32-bit, AMD 64 X2 dual core at 2,8 GHz, 4 GB RAM (300 MHZ) , Sapphire HD 5870 GPU.

Never got that PCMark Vantage to work though. The first time I ran the benchmark, an error came up saying I didn't have the right registration code. The second time I tried, the the error message said the registration code can only be used once. Never mind - I took PCMark Vantage out of the benchmark test.

Here is the result of the benchmark. It’s pretty much in line with my expectations. I’m particularly happy with the improvements for boot; CrystalDiskMark, and compression. That’s were the SSD come in play. The gaming benchmark (3DMark 11) is also great.

Should I now over-clock to jack up these numbers? Maybe another day. With this little benchmark test, I conclude this blog. I hope it showed some useful information, or at least provided some joy for those of you who red it.

Cheers!