I picked up my new PC yesterday, installed Vista last night and have been playing with it for a few hours now. So far everything is going pretty smoothly, except for the fact that my old PC wasn’t very happy about being replaced and, in a stroke of envy I guess, decided not to boot anymore.
That turned out to be because I’d yanked out the Hauppauge PVR150 MCE TV tuner board that I hadn’t used for ages. The drivers for that board are pretty crappy, and apparently they paralyse your system if the board goes missing. I put it back in and will remove it later when I reinstall XP on that machine. I’ve decided to give the old rig to my parent, whose PC is far worse.
Cooler Master Centurion 534
Love it. It looks great, and you can just see how well its made. The plastic thingies that are designed to keep expansion boards in place are a joke, but luckily there are screw holes as well. The case fan produces a moderate amount of noise at full speed, but a 1000 rpm it’s inaudible.
Asus P5B-E
It’s great to be back with Asus. My very first PC had the magnificent P55T2P4 motherboard. Although designed for Pentium I processors, it was so well-built it ended up running an AMD K6-2 at 450 MHz. Rock solid. It even had pre-standard USB headers which I used successfully for mice, etc. Since then I’ve had motherboards by Abit (great!), MSI (great until the capacitors exploded) and Asrock (cheap but great value). But none of them were as good as the P55T2P4, and this new board feels great. I didn’t want to get a cheap board because my Vista OEM license will be “married” to this board.
The P5B-E’s Q-fan feature controls fan speeds based on component temperatures and has quieted the machine down so much all I hear now are the harddrive and my external MyBook drive (which is pretty quiet and usually off or spun down). Great stuff.
Zalman ZM360B-APS power supply
Inaudible. I know Zalman is all about making thing quiet, but this thing is a marvel.
XFX passively cooled GeForce 7300GT 256MB dual-DVI
0dB, two DVI outputs, handles Vista Aero with ease despite running at lower clock speeds than some other 7300GT cards. Why they bundle three ancient game demos is beyond me. And one of them uses a technique called ‘voxels’, which doesn’t even use the card’s 3D acceleration. Oh well, I’m not into gaming anyway.
Samsung Spinpoint 500GB harddrive
This is currently the only component I can hear without pressing my ear against the case. Seek noises are clearly audible because of slight case resonance, but a good suspension thingy should be able to fix that. And it’s nowhere near irritating. It’s simply the least silent component. As for speed, it’s definitely faster than my old system drive, but I do not have the benchmarks to back that up.
Samsung SH-S183A DVD writer
I wanted a SATA burner, and this was the cheapest one. According to Samsung it has all these nifty anti-vibration technologies to keep noises to a minimum. We’ll see. I use my DVD-RW only occasionally. The tray does feel awfully flimsy and makes lots of noise when it comes out or goes back in. I guess they don’t make them like they used to. But for $35, what would you expect.
Performance
I have yet to give the Intel E6600 any real work. Will keep you posted. It’s supposed to be roughly six times faster at things like media encoding than my old Athlon XP was. At pretty much the same TDP (Thermal Design Power), that’s no small feat.
Vista (Home Premium)
I opted for the 32 bit version because some of my peripherals do not have drivers for Vista 64 bit. I hated the standard XP “teletubbies” theme, and used the “classic” look on all my PCs. Aero however is an entirely different ballgame and looks very OK to me. The new [windows key]-[tab] feature is little more than a gimmick, but it’s good at being just that. The Start menu is also far better than the one introduced with XP, and in general things seem to be more in the place where you’d expect them. For a Microsoft product, this is quite an accomplishment ;).
