Upgrades, Budgets, and vidya

Back in 2008…

I was using a 2002 Hewlett-Packard Pavilion that featured an AMD single-core Athlon XP 2400+ that ran at 2.0Ghz, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, and Windows XP Home Edition.

It was, for lack of better terms, your suitable machine for a student that was in high school and had a very fast DSL connection (which I didn’t have that in high school which was the source for going out to the public library a lot).

It had been two years since finally getting a high-speed Internet connection, finding about some free, libre open source software that was normally in Linux distributions, that had made ports for the Windows ecosystems and finally I started to hear about something that I had only heard of faintly from friends that were somewhat reluctant or didn’t want to help me much with and that was with regards to do-it-yourself Windows OS running personal computers.

These were something that some of my classmates in high school only dappled with in the manner that they could: usually just upgrading their machines here and there with some modicum of success and results desired while trying to skirt into having three to four figure total expenditures for. This was understandable as most of my schoolmates (save for one particular individual) didn’t exactly have a particular source of revenue to then burn on parts.

So, while listening to Take A Bow by Muse, I decided to start doing what I had been researching on and off while debating with myself on whether to get started or not and hop on to it.

The reason for the hesitation is because I hadn’t been able to find any forum thread or chat room that had a particular discussion with regards to builds, the intention behind the particular hardware configuration, the particular processes that was involved in calculating the costs that would take to make the build that resulted in being made in contrast to what was initially thought of and/or desired by the builder. None.

Usually it was just problems that seemed that everyone had that already built a machine had at the time that were given more attention to online: overclocking, voltages, or a particular driver problem workaround or solution. Not exactly what I would consider “beginner friendly”.

So what I did then and there is figure out what I wanted to build for sure, list the pricing, the likely tax, miscellaneous fees, and particular pitfalls that I should be aware of before getting started (such as making sure to buy certain hardwares at certain times and orders so as to not end up with a hardware component that I couldn’t return in case of defection).

I didn’t even have a particular limit of how much I wanted to spend and this is important because one of the stupidest things on the Web (or Internet in general) is the ham-handed question “what’s your budget?”. A dumb question that result in many dumb decisions and needless regrets (I’ll probably make a post about why that is some other time). There was no real , initial number that I could come up with because I had no context in either purpose or costs to begin with to determine a figure.

So with that, I set off making a spreadsheet document with different books that listed down what components I wanted, what was the MSRP, what was the asking price, the hyperlinks to the websites that were offering the prices that were lower than the MSRP (or not).

So with the first calculations I ended up with a estimated sub-total of $3,172.31 USD being the amount that I would have to had to shell out for what I wanted [see image]

Remember this was 2009, and this entire listing was the hottest stuff around for someone that was trying to get around from going even further in spending. Also keep in mind that I was making barely $10/hour. So this was an exercise in making amateur hardware pornography for myself.

So what then? I tried a second time, this time toning down much of the hardware choices and dropping the amount to $993.70 USD (see following image), I figured “Okay, this is more doable even for someone of my means.” But even so, I didn’t quite like what I was seeing, so I was frustrated that this would mean a prolonged period of having to save money to allegedly having to then spend it all at once for ordering all of these parts to put together at once.

“All at once.”

“No,” I thought “I could just buy the parts bit by bit and then build it together once I have the last critical component finally in my hands.”

So with that I, went ahead and started to take a second look on the initial, spend-thrifty, budget that I had set for myself and started to cherry pick and read up on what the opinions of the high-performance parts that I had initially picked as part of my “monster truck” build. And along the way, I started to desire less and less the noisey, performance driven, PC build that I was initially was going to emulate as of that of my friends’ - performance nuts that would never seem to stop arguing (or shutting up) about overclocking and what brand was best to move to (Intel was the shit to go with back in 2006 once the Phenom CPUs rolled out and were getting instantly bad reviews by people and journalists online).

Intimidated by the variety of initial Core2Duo and Core2Quad and what to get and what were the possible results you’d get without overheating like with the old Pentium CPUs of the past that I heard with seldom details, I started to look to AMD initially but then heard about the upcoming new Core family that would start with the “Core i7” model which would later become to be commonly known as the Core i7 920 of which most people would associate and buy.

This was something I initially did not want to do because I knew, as principal, that AMD builds were always going to be cheaper and would be, at least what was repeated to me by those that swore by AMD, “the most bang for your buck” between the two major brands. Of course the counter-argument from Intel fans and performance nuts was that Intel was coming back into form, and hard. And that AMD would be fine but they were not on par with Intel’s performance overall.

I would always wonder why that was and would ask only to get the following kinds of answers: look at the results of the synthesized benchmark numbers at websites like Anandtech, PC Magazine, reports by users on web forums, etc.

But what I came to find out years later was that simply there was more software that was optimally compiled to work with Intel chips despite the fact that both AMD and Intel used almost, if not both had, the exact same x86 and later x64 instruction sets with the exception that sometimes either Intel had their own particular instruction sets in their chips that would only come up later on in some form or variety in AMDs offerings, hence performance output was usually better for applications such as audio-visual production, 3D graphics, raster graphics, video games, software development, etc.

But this is not entirely, absolutely true as there could be other reasons that I’m not keenly aware of that could explain the better performance. But there was no question at the time: Intel was the go-to for people that wanted the best performance output for your dollar - even if it wasn’t a bargain.

And so with that I started to buy a computer case, a power supply unit and started buying, every two weeks or so, something to put together for the build. With the following being the result [see image]

What resulted was a series of mistakes - not so much technical ones as resulting financial ones.

8/2009

I had christened my build The “SSM1” or Sonokamome System Model 1 (it was my very first build, sue me) and with that, I had finished a build that was supposed to be, at least by intention, something a cross betwen performance and quiet operation. Not a strange, or silly, notion in today’s world where solid state drives have allowed for today’s PC Do-It-Yourself builders to overcome the traditional bottleneck and heat generation issues that is often associated with conventional, mechanical storage device (i.e. Hard Disk Drives). Today, very low heat generation and passive cooling from SSDs allow for compact hardware configurations such as an Intel Next-Unit-of-Computing to be possible, but this was not exactly possible for you to get away with it without making a compromise to putting up with high volume, white noise generation given that components back then generated more heat from the surfaces with poorer dissipation of heat which required you had to work around constantly with air-cooling solutions That amounted to having loud, large fans if you can get something larger than 120mm. And if that weren’t the case, 120mm fan that could run at very high RPM speeds.

Or so I thought that was the case (no pun intended).

Steel Frame Cases with Foam: avoid them like the plague

As it turns out, the Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 did indeed dampen sound of the interior components as far as fan noise went, but it only made fans work harder and components to remain in constant ambient heat within the case that was higher than the ambient temperature of the room that the computer operated in becasue of the foam that was glued to the side aluminum panels for the intention of dampening noise.

This struck me quite a strange design in the end because, for a $200 full-tower ATX case which allowed for an EATX and even SSI EEB form factor motherboareds to be mounted, there could have been an option to remove the foam panels if needed to prevent from ambient operational temperatures within the case to be kept low. So this could’ve only meant one thing: this “cool and quiet” case was was not really for performance builds as advertised, it was meant for quiet builds - meaning low-power consuming, low-performance hardware configurations which could be comparable to something that would be found in an office computer but not in a workstation personal computer. The difference is that a non-performance oriented machine would make do for something of the following for the time:

• A mainstream CPU that clocks at the domain of 2.x Ghz from a range of 0.0 to 0.6, 0.7, or 0.8 Ghz
• The motherboard is meant for a small maximum amount of physical RAM modules in size and quantity to be introduced to it along with a chipset that is meant to work with a low power consuming CPU that can be effectively cooled off with the stock heatsink and fan provided by the manufacturer and not need an after-market performance heatsink and fan
• A light, steel or all-aluminum chasis that allows for effective disappation and good airflow that requires only two 120mm case fans along with the fan built-in to the power supply unit within the case

So because of this, the Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 was $200 that didn’t make quite sum up to making a whole lot of sense. If anything, the only thing it made sense was it’s aesthetic and internal compartmental designs for storage device placement:

• It was an all-steel frame chasis with, again, aluminum panels (which had foam padding facing inward for sound damppening), and plastic adornments that made up the exterior making for a hefty computer case that had some load balancing issue that would prove a proven when trying to carry it with the handles it had bolted onto the steel frame.
• Because it was a steel frame, and with steel being a poor heat conductor, it would retain heat, trapping it and causing for ambient temperature within the chasis to rise effectively, making the CPU, motherboard, RAM modules, and case fans, work harder than necessary

All in all, a $200 bust that could, and would only $89 USD later, be slightly remedied with a new CPU heatsink and fan by Noctua. Or for another $200, be replaced with a Lian-Li all-aluminum mid-tower or full-tower case which I wasn’t up for at the time.

All Copper CPU Heatsink by Zalman: Good Idea? Not So Good Idea.

I was as weeb. There I said it. Even before the damn term was even a common parlance, it was something that showed within my choices and I, looking for something to have bragging rights, looked around for a power supply manufacturer from Japan. I didn’t find any so I went with the next best thing at the time: I bought a a power suipply unit from Zalman, a Korean personal computer components company.

Zalman had a good reputation at the time despite being a company that was seven years old (they were founded in 1999), so I went ahead and bought their power supply unit (one of a series of two to three models at the time that offered the most watts, 1000, for the price compared to other companies such as corsair, EVGA, or SeaSonic - which was having an issue with their PSUs at the time).

I heard that all-copper CPU heatsinks were the supposed best given that copper was a good heat conductor than aluminum. And while this is true but this did not mean that copper dissapated heat faster than aluminum, quite the contrary, it retained heat longer than aluminum, like steel. So, like the Cosmos 1000 case, the CPU heatsink also didn’t dissapate heat well either from the CPU itself.

So this later meant that I couldn’t do much with the PC out of fear of losing my expensive purchase. So while the Zalman PSU, which wasn’t modular at all and made for some airflow obstruction within the case despite my efforts for better cable management, was working fine, it was the Zalman CPU all-copper heatsink that I ended up replacing with an $100.40 USD purchase of a Noctua NH-D14 that had a copper, textured, base with an all-aluminum heatsink fin construction that significantly dropped CPU operating temperatures by 10 degrees Celsius average (52-56°C to 42-45°C).

This, along with removing the expensive Scythe brand case fans, with noctua case fans, that proved to be better with moving air within the case, an additional $215.92 USD purchase for eight NF-F12 PWM 120mm fans. So a total of $316.32 USD to replace components that had initially cost me $144.25 USD - a difference of $172.07 USD to end up spending as a result within a year after initial purchases and setup.

After 2010, 2011…

I had started making changes to the initial build not because they were not working as they should but because I could and did so for particular titles that I was interested to check out and for certain technologies that were starting to be employed by game developers that made the want to upgrade be more justifiable such as the release of the DirectX 11 API and the adoption of it by game developers in the next several years.

Around the end of November 2012, I changed the chasis to a CaseLabs Magnum TH10 case, an all-aluminum anodized aluminum chasis that further helped in dropping operational temperatures to normal operational temperatures as expected to run according to Intel (low to mid 40s Celsius for Core i7 920). A $667.29 USD investment that ultimately led to the complete removal of Cosmos 1000 out to where all badly designed cases belonged: in the street.

Since then, the only pieces of hardware that have remained from the initial purchase for the hardware configuration build since 2008 have been the CPU, the hard disk drives, the operating system licenses (you never know when you’ll want to still run Windows Vista or 7 Ultimate 64-bit), and the motherboard, everything else has been switched up or replaced alltogether.

“It’s 2018…”

And I was curious to what I could get away with as far as an upgrade went since the initial idea for the build, along with the concept of “quiet performance”, was to be able to graduate from the initial entry-performance level build, to something that was generally better, assuming that I was saving money from not having to spend any more on hardware or software (which would later be the reason for a lot of the spending on this computer besides video games).

But that never quite panned out and today, I am playing less and less video games becasue of other priorities that are now before me, but even so. Just recently, I had calculated how much money I had spend on just one console of the two (Playstation 4 Pro) I bought last year and found to have spent around $1,150.00 USD. That’s one-thousand too many and that didn’t include the cost of the New Nintendo 3DS XL and the three games that I bought at a premium price (this is a Nintendo platform and you are expected to be pay Nintendo Primo prices).

And seeing that what I had in sights was going to cost me around $1,400 USD, just more than half by two-hundred dollars of the downpayment I had made nine years ago and just about the same amount that I have put into video games on consoles as is, a PC hardware upgrade was no longer a good idea this point, considering that I don’t have pressing needs or “killer video game” applications on the PC that I would want to justify to make the expensive purchase today.

No, if anything, it’d have to be because of the following, sequential, upgrades following almost immediately from the initial CPU, Motherboard, and RAM upgrades.

And I still feel that I have not taken fully advantage yet of the capabilities of my initial build just yet. But who knows, in three, four, or five years time, I’ll just end up upgrading my system and take it to eldritch proportions and move on to something else, like cheesecake, audiophile equipment, digital photography, writing (with stationary), reading (an actual physical hardcover) or some other hobby that doesn’t involve monitors, keyboards, and mouses. and instead involves loose sex and no neckties - although I’m afraid that won’t be so.

For Yuks

But let’s say that money was no object and I wanted to go for what I figured out I could which is something of the following:

Now consider the following:

Parts	Make	Model	Price	Essential
Motherboard	ASUS	WS X299 SAGE LGA 2066	$480.02 USD	Fuck, Yes. No. Really. Fuck you for making that face
CPU	Intel	Core i7-9700K (not pictured)	TBA	Yes. Duh.
RAM	Mushkin	Redlines DDR4 2800 2x 16GB	$359.99 USD	Yes durrr.

And yes I know that an after-market heatsink-fan is going to have to be included in that listing but the point is that this is pretty much what we’re looking at to start with because it this combination will allow me to :

• Start using 2x M.2 form-factor NVME SSDs (I’d go for 512GB for dual booting from hardware Windows 10 and Linux respectively)
• It’d allow me to use all 8 SATA III connections for spare HDDs, 2.5” SATA III form-factor SSDs for a combination for the stability, recoverability of HDDs, and two optical hard drives (BDRWs and BDXL support along with with M-Disc capability).
• It has U.2 connection for allowing me to use U.2 form-factor SSDs, allowing me for using even faster solid state storage for dedicated applications where the most speeds that I can get from the motherboard is possible.
• All LGA 2066 CPUs that’d debut between the time of this past and later on are guaranteed to be, although not as powerful with the lack of the Hyper-Threading technology (a feature that needed to be removed due to HT tech being used for sidechain attacks, making the performance boosting technology a system-wide security threat), it is still going to be a lot better than my current Corei7 920.
• It is a natural successor to the ASUS P6T7 WS model that was of comparable specifications in terms of the number of i/o ports, internal storage devices i/o offferings and a chipset that is simply proportionally more powerful but not dramatically different.

The number I’d be looking at to spending? Well ideally it’d be third or fourth of what I had initially paid in hardware in 2009 ($2,473.29 USD), so we’re looking at $1,250.00 USD for roughly half; anything less than that amount would be reaching a third. But given the WS x2999 SAGE is running at $480.02 USD MSRP, that’s not going to be possible unless I compromised on RAM (which I won’t fuck you), and I will not compromise on the CPU this time around like I did then with staying with an entry-level model of the high-end platform (LGA 1366 CPU lineup). This time, I’d rather ride with the big boys and get something that clocks at stock, 3.6 Ghz or around there in the mid 3.xGhz and unlike the initial Corei7 920 that I bought, is unlocked for overclocking.

So why this to start when I can get something that’s still better than what I have for less? Quite simple really: as one reason pertains to gaming and the other pertains to IT and both are instances involving emulation and virtualization which are very, very hardware resource hungry and would be best for me to have resource overhead for other applications to run alongside these applications.

As far as gaming emulation goes, going beyond the sixth generation of consoles already is pushing things to the limit: Playstation 1, 2, 3 emulation in particular are quite demanding as it is and so a really beefy system with a beefy CPU is a must for emulation to run on so as to get as close to the physical performance as possible.

Anyway, that’s it for this post and with that I say this: fuck computers.

Here’s another Bianca Beauchaump image: