Yea, yeah. Dells are overpriced, underperforming, whatever the hell you want to call it. I had the money (at the time, lol), and thought I could go the easy way out and get myself a really fast PC in a cool chassis without the associated hassle of having to pick out separate components, ordering them and assembling it all.
In retrospect I should have known it would not be that simple... This XPS box has been nothing but trouble for me. Sure it's fast - with quadcore CPU and SLI 8800GTXes pretty much only Crysis can bring it to its knees. But it crashes, randomly, several times a week. Sometimes several times a day. And after roughly 1000 support calls Dell won't help me any more despite I still got over a year left of warranty.
I used to build PCs in the past, built my first in 97, it had an AMD K6 CPU and an ASUS TX97 mobo and a Hercules Tseng ET6000 2D card with 4MB MDRAM on it. Later I added a PowerVR 3D graphics board. I loved all of those components to death, despite their flaws.
Ever since, I've been a bit of an AMD man, really. Probably because I was an Amiga man before I went over to "the dark side", and Intel was always the big Satan in the Amiga days, lol. So back in the here and now I look at the Phenom2 AM3 socket chips, and I kind of start to drool. Of course, the Core i7 is much faster in many situations, supports triple-channel an' all that jazz... Costs more money of course, d'oh.
Core i7 Extreme costs about SKR13.000 right now for 3.3GHz (crappy exchange rates inflating that price unfortunately). A black edition 3GHz Phenom 2 is about SKR3.300 or so, a much better offer. But current AMD CPUs can't run full-speed DDR3 with all DIMM slots populated I hear, so I'd have to buy a new CPU if I wanted to upgrade my RAM past 4GB later on. So that'd be another 3.3k down the road, and suddenly it's not quite as big a bargain anymore.
...Anyway, I've been thinking:
Dell 720 box - extremely unbelievably f-ing huge and heavy. Can't be moved around without causing a hernia. Solution: go mini-ATX instead.
Benefits:
* Relatively small and light PC. Can be moved.
* ASUS Rampage 2 Gene mobo is just gorgeous (except for being Intel socket only...)
Problems:
* No mini-ATX AM3 socket boards yet to my knowledge. (Yes yes, I've read the articles, DDR3 offers no tangible benefits etc - I don't care. People said same thing when DDR2 launched, and DDR, and SDRAM too might I add.)
* Some mini-ATX chassis are very small and cramped. Performance graphics cards, high-watt PSUs may not fit. Like the Lian-li PC-A03, where I fear the inverted mobo will cause the drive bays to block full-length graphics cards.
* Rampage2 Gene mobo rather expensive.
Then there are mini-tower cases such as the Lian-Li PC-A06F. It takes standard ATX mobos yet is not that big and tall, but the weirdo placing of the PSU disallows tower coolers for the CPU. I'm not sure even a cooler like the Thermaltake Meorb would fit...
Antec has some nice roomy mid-tower cases. The P182 seems well-built and solid enough. If it's one thing I hate it's cases with gimmicky looks and lots of crappy low-quality plastic details. The P182 does suffer from the "here a fan, there a fan, everywhere a-bloody-fan" syndrome of many gamer cases today. I don't need twelve thousand screaming fans to keep my PC cool... Preferably just one in, one out, and the one in the power supply of course. Any thoughts on the P182? Is it well put together? What about vibration/resonance issues? I hate it when the top or side doors rattle due to harddrive vibrations.
The P182 would allow me to use the rather nice-looking Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P mobo along with a sweet Thermalright tower cooler though, and that gigabyte board is not too bloody expensive either. And, it's AMD, which I like! Ooh choices, choices...
I will need a power supply though. The Thermaltake Toughpower XT supplies look nice. Only the ATX bundle is actually soldered to the PSU, with everything else being modular. I really like that. The XPS 720 is big as a fridge, yet it's packed chock full with cables, it's driving me nucking futs every time I have to go inside and dig around in there. Any thoughts on this PSU, is it even out yet? Antecs own supplies only have modular PCIe connectors from what I've seen, and since I plan on carrying over my current 8800 cards I'd have to plug in cables there regardless...
Credits to anyone who made it this far, lol! I'm sorry I'm rambling like this, I like writing long posts.
In retrospect I should have known it would not be that simple... This XPS box has been nothing but trouble for me. Sure it's fast - with quadcore CPU and SLI 8800GTXes pretty much only Crysis can bring it to its knees. But it crashes, randomly, several times a week. Sometimes several times a day. And after roughly 1000 support calls Dell won't help me any more despite I still got over a year left of warranty.
I used to build PCs in the past, built my first in 97, it had an AMD K6 CPU and an ASUS TX97 mobo and a Hercules Tseng ET6000 2D card with 4MB MDRAM on it. Later I added a PowerVR 3D graphics board. I loved all of those components to death, despite their flaws.
Ever since, I've been a bit of an AMD man, really. Probably because I was an Amiga man before I went over to "the dark side", and Intel was always the big Satan in the Amiga days, lol. So back in the here and now I look at the Phenom2 AM3 socket chips, and I kind of start to drool. Of course, the Core i7 is much faster in many situations, supports triple-channel an' all that jazz... Costs more money of course, d'oh.
Core i7 Extreme costs about SKR13.000 right now for 3.3GHz (crappy exchange rates inflating that price unfortunately). A black edition 3GHz Phenom 2 is about SKR3.300 or so, a much better offer. But current AMD CPUs can't run full-speed DDR3 with all DIMM slots populated I hear, so I'd have to buy a new CPU if I wanted to upgrade my RAM past 4GB later on. So that'd be another 3.3k down the road, and suddenly it's not quite as big a bargain anymore.
...Anyway, I've been thinking:
Dell 720 box - extremely unbelievably f-ing huge and heavy. Can't be moved around without causing a hernia. Solution: go mini-ATX instead.
Benefits:
* Relatively small and light PC. Can be moved.
* ASUS Rampage 2 Gene mobo is just gorgeous (except for being Intel socket only...)
Problems:
* No mini-ATX AM3 socket boards yet to my knowledge. (Yes yes, I've read the articles, DDR3 offers no tangible benefits etc - I don't care.
People said same thing when DDR2 launched, and DDR, and SDRAM too might I add.)* Some mini-ATX chassis are very small and cramped. Performance graphics cards, high-watt PSUs may not fit. Like the Lian-li PC-A03, where I fear the inverted mobo will cause the drive bays to block full-length graphics cards.
* Rampage2 Gene mobo rather expensive.
Then there are mini-tower cases such as the Lian-Li PC-A06F. It takes standard ATX mobos yet is not that big and tall, but the weirdo placing of the PSU disallows tower coolers for the CPU. I'm not sure even a cooler like the Thermaltake Meorb would fit...
Antec has some nice roomy mid-tower cases. The P182 seems well-built and solid enough. If it's one thing I hate it's cases with gimmicky looks and lots of crappy low-quality plastic details. The P182 does suffer from the "here a fan, there a fan, everywhere a-bloody-fan" syndrome of many gamer cases today. I don't need twelve thousand screaming fans to keep my PC cool... Preferably just one in, one out, and the one in the power supply of course. Any thoughts on the P182? Is it well put together? What about vibration/resonance issues? I hate it when the top or side doors rattle due to harddrive vibrations.
The P182 would allow me to use the rather nice-looking Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P mobo along with a sweet Thermalright tower cooler though, and that gigabyte board is not too bloody expensive either. And, it's AMD, which I like! Ooh choices, choices...
I will need a power supply though. The Thermaltake Toughpower XT supplies look nice. Only the ATX bundle is actually soldered to the PSU, with everything else being modular. I really like that. The XPS 720 is big as a fridge, yet it's packed chock full with cables, it's driving me nucking futs every time I have to go inside and dig around in there. Any thoughts on this PSU, is it even out yet? Antecs own supplies only have modular PCIe connectors from what I've seen, and since I plan on carrying over my current 8800 cards I'd have to plug in cables there regardless...
Credits to anyone who made it this far, lol! I'm sorry I'm rambling like this, I like writing long posts.
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