i7-2600k build. Please critique. *build complete*

[mfenn]

But I do. 🙂

Hey man, your funeral when there's a conference deadline coming up and your machine is crashing left and right. 😀

I don't want to compromise on the CPU or the RAM. Some of my colleagues who have built their systems for similar purposes are complaining about 6GB RAM not being enough.

That doesn't really address my comment about Hyperthreading not being useful.

 

[totallystubby]

All right. So finally the build is complete. Here are the pics:

















My first impressions are very positive. All components are top-notch. I really like the case. Its build quality is superb. It looks very nice and the finishing is great. A tad on the small side but that's mainly due to the ginormous heatsink/fan (more on that later).

The Antec PSU also feels very solid and performs just as well. There's really good black netting on all the power cables coming from the PSU for protection. Really nice.

All RAM sticks worked perfectly fine the first time and had no issues at all. All 16GBs of it!

Now, the Noctua HSF...well it's massive! Weighs a ton and easily is the first (and the only) thing you see when you look inside the case from a distance! The two fans it comes with are not really needed because the heatsink is mostly enough for cooling due to its sheer size. Something I didn't anticipate was that since the HSF is so huge, the optional side fan on the case cannot be installed as the HSF gets in the way. I removed one of the Noctua fans and tried to install it in the side panel, fits fine but the panel won't close as it bumps into the HSF. Oh well, a minor issue.

The Samsung HDD's fast too. After I installed the USB 3.0 drivers, I was getting sustained write speeds of 117MB/s and 126MB/s at times as well. I haven't gotten the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD yet. It's currently not available in my area and I don't really need it at this point in time. I'll wait until the prices drop considerably.

I haven't really done any benchmarks yet. What do you guys normally use for benchs? I tried SiSoft Sandra and something weird happened. I did the CPU bench and got 107.38 GOPS initially. Then I did some windows updates and other software updates and now that I run the same benchmark, I get 52 GOPS. It's halved! I have no idea why this is.

I tried SuperPi and for 1M digits, I get 15.869s. Is that normal?

Any other benchs I can run to see if my system is performing on par with similar builds?

 

[mfenn]

I wouldn't worry too much about Sandra synthetic benches. They are weird to begin with. Your SuperPI results look about right for stock clocks, maybe a little low. I'd recommend running the apps from Anandtech's bench and seeing how they perform.

 

[nublikescake]

I wouldn't worry too much about Sandra synthetic benches. They are weird to begin with. Your SuperPI results look about right for stock clocks, maybe a little low. I'd recommend running the apps from Anandtech's bench and seeing how they perform.

Solved that problem. In msconfig, the number of cores was selected as 4. I changed that to auto and it's ok now. I get around 107GOPS again.

I'll try to run the apps from Anand's review. Good idea.