How to Build a PC - Part 2
Happiness is a quality case
When you buy a PC from someone else and it's their problem to fix things you'll probably not care much about the case it lives in. When you're building your own and expect to be poking around the inside both before and afterwards you'll appreciate the importance of a good case. You can spend £25 on a case or you can spend £100 or more. Lets review what you get for the extra money.
Antec produce a wide range of cases which can be viewed at www.antec.com/uk . As this PC will be used for testing various components in the future including high spec graphics cards, I have chosen Antec's new gamer's case, the strangely named Nine Hundred which has somewhat comprehensive cooling facilities as well as easily changed drives. The Nine Hundred costs around £75 but has no PSU (Power Supply Unit) so you'll need to source one of those too. In this instance it is partnered with an Antec TruePower Trio 550 costing 65 which as the same suggests offers 550 watts of power. The Trio range also includes 430 watt and 650 watt versions.
The first thing you notice with the Nine Hundred is just how damned sexy it looks in black and also how many fans it has. The most unusual of which is a top mounted 200mm fan which dominates the top of the case. There is also a rear mounted 120mm fan and two front mounted 120mm ones, the latter pair having blue LEDs which look rather good in conjunction with the case's blue power and hard drive activity lights. Each fan has a 3 stage switch which can be set to the desired speed. Getting the right balance of fan noise over cooling is a bit of trial and error. I'd suggest going for the middle setting, which is pretty quiet then notching the individual fans up or down until you get the balance right. Finally, there are additional fan points in the middle and side to add extra airflow over the CPU and/or graphics cards.
The case also offers top mounted ports in the form of 2 X USB2, 1 X Firewire, a microphone mini jack and headphones mini jack. The placement is unusual and between that and the top mounted 200mm fan, if you intend stacking your PC or are in the habit of putting things on top, this could be an issue. Antec have nicely added a small recessed space though for putting your MP3 player, keys or whatever else comes to mind.
The drive cages support up to nine devices. The top third is for DVD drives and the like (x 3) with the bottom two thirds being taken up by 2 drive cages each supporting 3 hard drives. These are all cooled by the front fans and hide behind good looking metal grills. After all, no self respecting gamer wants to hide his toys.
All the leads and connectors are well labelled and with the TruePower Trio 550 added, there is more than enough power connectors of all types to suit everyone.
Speaking of which, the very first part of the build is to add the PSU. This is easy enough although unusually, the PSU sits at the bottom in the Nine Hundred case. 4 screws at the back hold it in place with the TruePower Trio's fan facing up to help cool the unit.
The Trio name comes from the three sets of 12v cables it supports instead of the usual two. PC power supplies normally have two 12volt cables with a number of connectors along their length for connecting to the various drives and devices. With three you can more evenly distribute the power across multiple devices.
550 watts seems a lot but with more and more systems using twin graphics cards, you can never have too much. If you want a greener alternative (and in all honesty, you should) you may want to look at Antec's EarthWatts supplies which are more efficient that most for their given rating.
The TruePower Trio also comes with a number of dedicated fan connectors. These allow the PSU to monitor the system's heat and adjust the fan speeds accordingly. For Serial ATA drive users there are 4 dedicated connectors and finally, there are two connectors for power hungry graphics cards. Why two? In case you want a twin graphics card solution.
Preparing to Build
Whilst it's quite possible to handle the various components and live to tell the tale, it is all too easy, especially for novices, to damage delicate components such as the RAM. To avoid this, it's important to ensure you are suitable earthed. You can buy earth straps which go round your wrist and are attached to something like a radiator to ensure any static charge you build up is discharged safely away. A better solution is to also have a work mat which improves the dissipation of any charge you or the components may have. For this project I am using an anti static service kit from Lindy which consists of a mat and wrist strap combination. Measuring some 600x600mm, the mat contains a couple of pockets for storage and is more than big enough for putting the motherboard and associated bits and pieces on whilst you are working. It also has a wrist strap and comes complete with crocodile clips for attaching you to the mat and the mat to a suitable earth.
The pair retail for around £18 which is probably a little high unless you make a habit of working on electronic components but they're both very well made and should last a lifetime so I'd say it was money well spent. My only reservation being that with a 2.5 metre cord, you'd need to be fairly near your whatever you want to connect it to for earthing purposes. Apart from that, it's a winner.
Motherboard
If there is one component that you really need to get right, it's the motherboard. You can buy cheap and cheerful boards for £30 or so which may well work fine but when you do hit problems you'll find the support is lacking. Sticking to well known brands is the best way to be sure that updates and patches will continue to be made available for some time after you buy the board. As the motherboard is the heart of your PC, if you have trouble with that, your PC is doomed from the start.
For this project I have opted for the ECS KA3 MVP, an AMD AM2 socket board which has everything bar the kitchen sink in terms of features yet only costs around £88. The feature list includes support for all the latest AMD CPUs, up to 32GB of RAM (up to dual-channel DDR2 800), 6 x S-ATA drives (2 with NCQ, hot plug and port multiplier), 4 x ATA133 drives, RAID 0,1 & 10, ATI Crossfire for 2 graphics cards, 2 X network connectors (1 x Gigabit, 1 x 100mbit), 8 channel audio, 10 X USB2, 2 X Firewire plus the usual other connectors. On the downside, it only has 2 traditional PCI slots on top of the pair of PCI Express X16 slots and a single PCI Express X1. However, with so much built in, I'm not sure you'd need more than two PCI slots anyway.
Software wise, you get the driver CD (as a CD-R to ensure it's up to date) and a second CD containing a raft of applications and tools, the most interesting being WinDVD, Show Shifter and a data protection tool called DPU.
In part 3 I'll be looking at the motherboard in more detail plus the processor and memory and putting these first few components together.
