{"id":1403,"date":"2013-05-23T22:28:01","date_gmt":"2013-05-24T05:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/?p=1403"},"modified":"2013-05-23T22:32:42","modified_gmt":"2013-05-24T05:32:42","slug":"my-new-pc-circa-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/?p=1403","title":{"rendered":"My new PC, circa 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Order placed! It&#8217;s my first new PC <a href=\"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/?p=362\" target=\"_blank\">since 2008<\/a>, and the first I haven&#8217;t built myself since the late 90s. I went with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibuypower.com\" target=\"_blank\">iBuyPower<\/a>\u00a0because people I trust had good experiences with them, I can pick up the build locally and not even risk damage during shipping, and because their prices were crazy low &#8212; on par or better than me doing it myself. And I won&#8217;t panic about bending CPU pins or frying chips with static electricity during install!<\/p>\n<p>For the folks who like to get into details, my goals were silence, a fair amount of future-proofing, and good H264 encoding performance. I don&#8217;t overclock. So, after polling some pals and the advice of Tested.com columnist Nathan Edwards, here&#8217;s what I cooked up:\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Case: Corsair Obsidian Series 550D Gaming Case &#8211; Black<\/li>\n<li>Processor: Intel Core i7-3770 Processor (4x 3.40GHz\/8MB L3 Cache)<\/li>\n<li>Processor Cooling: NZXT Kraken X40 Liquid CPU Cooling System w\/ 140mm Radiator<\/li>\n<li>Advanced Build Options: Tuniq TX-2 High Performance Thermal Compound<\/li>\n<li>Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V LK &#8212; 2x PCI-E 3.0 x16, 4x USB 3.0<\/li>\n<li>Memory: 16 GB [8 GB x2] DDR3-1600 Memory Module &#8211; G.Skill Ripjaws X<\/li>\n<li>Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 &#8211; 2GB &#8211; EVGA Superclocked<\/li>\n<li>Primary Hard Drive: 240 GB Corsair Force GS SSD &#8211; Single Drive<\/li>\n<li>Data Hard Drive: 2 TB HARD DRIVE &#8212; 64M Cache, 7200rpm, 6.0Gb\/s<\/li>\n<li>Optical Drive: 12X LG BLU-RAY Reader, DVD\u00b1R\/\u00b1RW Burner Combo Drive<\/li>\n<li>2nd Optical Drive: 24X Dual Format\/Double Layer DVD\u00b1R\/\u00b1RW + CD-R\/RW Drive<\/li>\n<li>Sound Card: 3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard<\/li>\n<li>Network Card: Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10\/100)<\/li>\n<li>Power Supply: 650 Watt &#8212; NZXT HALE82N-SI \/ 80+ Bronze<\/li>\n<li>Addition: Internal USB Expansion System<\/li>\n<li>Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium + Office Starter 2010 &#8211; 64-Bit<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I had an Antec Sonata II silent case back in the day and loved it; the 550D looks like a worthy equivalent. It&#8217;s unfortunately not hot-rod red and has no fancy lights inside, but when it comes down to it, I really value performance over visuals, so I almost disappointingly stuck to my core goals. This will be my first liquid-cooled rig (the X40 is a closed unit &#8212; no maintenance, quieter than air, and totally fine for my non-OC usage) and my first 64-bit OS on PC. I have had a nightmare experience with Creative sound cards in the last two builds so I will try onboard first and only upgrade later if I need it; this mobo has both 6-channel and optical, and I use Tritton Black Ops headphones on the former and Logitech Z5500 speakers for the latter. I almost went Win 8 but I haven&#8217;t heard enough good reasons to move to it yet, and I really like Win 7. And yes, I still like having a second optical, as I still burn things to disc as backups or to give to friends. It was a whopping extra $20, so why not?<\/p>\n<p>Since I&#8217;m an independent contractor, this is a work-related expense for my taxes (some personal embarrassment trying to run Black Ops II actually spurred this purchase, so it&#8217;s very legit) and Kat will inherit my current rig &#8212; the 2008 build, albeit with a few upgrades from over the years, the latest and most crucial being an SSD boot drive and a GTX 570. Since her current card is an ancient 8800, this will be a great upgrade for her. I will do a fresh install of Win 7 before I hand it over&#8230;which will be sometime after the first week of June, when the new machine should be ready, if iBuyPower hits their estimates. And I know they are sometimes late.<\/p>\n<p>Feel free to tell me what I did wrong, other than not waiting for Haswell. \ud83d\ude42 Anything that needs upgrading from here can be upgraded over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Order placed! It&#8217;s my first new PC since 2008, and the first I haven&#8217;t built myself since the late 90s. I went with iBuyPower\u00a0because people I trust had good experiences with them, I can pick up the build locally and &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/?p=1403\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1403"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1406,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403\/revisions\/1406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bunnyears.net\/dan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}