Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. How to Build a PC - Part 5
Graphics cards and more
In Part four, we fitted the drives, both hard drive and optical. Now it's time for the graphics card. The last time Practical PC looked at building a PC, we were faced with AGP 4X as being the state of the art. Since then, AGP 8X has come and (almost) gone and now there has been a complete change to PCI Express. PCI Express provides far more bandwidth than AGP plus a few other useful features that have resulted in PCI Express taking over very quickly. The ECS KA3 MVP motherboard is capable of taking two PCIe graphics cards which can work together using ATI's (well, AMD's, now) Crossfire technology. Somewhat perversely we're going to ignore all that and go for a single GeForce card.
BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC
BFG have been making quite a name for themselves as purveyors of decent cards, often supplied pre overclocked to give them an edge over the competition. The 7600 GT OC as the name implies (the OC is the giveaway) is an overclocked, albeit only slightly, version of the NVidia 7600 GT. This card is priced at a very reasonable £100-£110 and as such falls in to the mid range of graphics cards. Coupled with the fast AMD 4600 X2 processor, this should provide some pretty satisfying gaming without breaking the bank and should satisfy most gamers apart from the serious hardcore ones who are far happier spending £350 upwards on a single card.
The BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC comes with a fairly minimal package consisting of the card, driver CD, DVI-I to VGA dongle, HDTV dongle and guide. Unlike some cards, there are no bundled games but frankly, we'd prefer that and not to have to pay for any 'free' software we aren't really interested in. The card sports 256Mb of DDR3 RAM onboard which is a nice healthy amount given the price. As noted, the card is supplied overclocked running at 580MHz as opposed to the default 560MHz as would be expected for this chipset. The memory too is faster - 1450MHz rather than 1400MHz. Whilst these are small steps, it does imply an element of cherry picking of components so the chances are good you can coax even more out the chipset should you want.
The card supports DirectX 9.0 shader model 3.0 making it suitable for all the current crop of games and with the HDTV dongle should make for some impressive results on a suitable TV. The card also supports Vista and will allow the new Aero interface to be shown at its best. The card is also one of the cheapest that supports SLI mode whereby two suitable graphics cards can be used along with an appropriate motherboard (not the one we used!) to almost double the performance.
Installation is as easy as it can get - simply insert the card in to one of the 2 PCIe X16 slots (the motherboard manual shows which ones are which) and the jobs done. Unlike many modern cards, it doesn't need an additional auxiliary power connector.
We'll come back to review the BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC card later, once Windows has been installed.
Finishing off
We're almost there for the hardware. There are one or two other things to finish it off. First of all, we'll be fitting a card reader in the front panel, in this case a Lindy 22-in-1 with USB and Firewire ports. This costs £29.99 including VAT which is slightly pricier than some of its competitors but it does come with a choice of blue, silver or black bezels and all the leads you'll need for connecting it up internally. As our case is black, we're naturally (ed: ?) going to choose the black Bezel which clips on easily but tightly.
As with the DVD drive, we need to remove a front blanking plate to make room for it and the procedure is the same as before. Rather than fitting the card reader and then wiring it up, we're going to do the reverse to make life easier. The card reader uses a cable which connects to one of the internal USB connectors on the motherboard. We have one free, the others being used for the back panel and the top panel of the case. USB cables can be labelled in various ways and in this case the motherboard naming convention didn't match that of the Lindy supplied installation manual. A quick Google helped match them up though with the main difference being the naming of the power wire. The cable was then fed out the front of the case through the space where the card reader would go.
At this point, we had a choice. The Lindy device offers 2 USB and 1 IEEE 1394 Firewire connectors as well as the four slots needed to support the various memory cards. With all the motherboard's internal Firewire and USB connections now used, do we leave the Lindy's connections unused or lose some of the rear panel's connections in favour of the front? This is really down to personal choice. In our experience, you don't tend to have that many things plugged in the front - when you do it's temporary for a USB hard drive or camera. We decided the case's top panel offering would suffice with the majority of connections staying at the back. Your needs may be different in which case the Lindy's extra ports will be useful.
Once all wiring is in place and hanging out the front panel, connect the Lindy Card reader and then slide it in to the case and screw it in to place - one each side. Once done, the device looked the part and with the black LG DVD writer too made the front of the machine look pretty smart. Note that the photo makes it look rather shinier compared to the rest of the system than it actually looks.
Keyboard and Mouse
The last part of the system we need to worry about is the keyboard and mouse. In this instance we have chosen a Logitech Cordless Desktop S510. This rather sexy pair have some nice features which will compliment our PC. The obvious one is that they are both cordless making them easy to manage whether on your lap, a table or wherever. They are both in a rather fetching black and silver matching the rest of the system. For us though, the really nice feature is how thin the keyboard is. We are talking really thin. Despite this, it still manages to get some decent travel on the keys, a comfy wrist rest and a whole bunch of extra buttons.
With the supplied software installed, you have such nifty features as volume, mute and shuffle as well as next track/previous track for when listening to music. Photo fans will like the addition of a zoom rocker switch as well as a 100% button and a rotate one. Finally, all the function keys offer additional functions as well as some programmable ones for adding your own features.
The mouse is more basic but still offers a wheel with tilt function and is optical making it easier to use on different surfaces. We did find the mouse slightly small and we had to use a different grip to work with it easily. Within ten minutes or so it was fine though and in general was very responsive - if anything too responsive, we had use the control panel to calm it down a bit but that's no bad thing and just a reflection of its higher resolution.
The keyboard was fine for typing although it had a slightly strange double height delete key which always felt as if we were about to hit the wrong key. The keys had a nice distinct action with a slight click making it easy to touch type with confidence.
A final nice touch is that both keyboard and mouse have battery warning lights. A must in our opinion as there's nothing worse than having your keyboard or mouse die when there's no spare batteries in the house. The list price is £39.99 and for £20 more you can have the same keyboard and mouse bundled with a nice Windows Media Centre compatible remote control.
With all the hardware now ready, we're now in a position to install Windows and get the system up and running.
