My Buys for My New Computer.

Higher clock speeds. Overclocking. Newer graphics-heavy games. Intensive simulations. These are combing to create a big problem. Heat. Now you might be wondering where I am going with this. Computer electronics generates heat. Enough heat to destroy itself. Most of the time it isn't a problem.With some of the newer computer games and applications, using advanced cooling technology and software becomes necessary. Multiple fans, extended heat sinks, adding extra heats sinks, specialized water cooling as well as making sure the cabling isn't interfering with the airflow are now the norm in high end graphics and gaming computers. All of the above was taken into consideration when buying my computer parts.

The first buy. The case. My selection is the Corsair Graphite 600T Mesh Mid Tower.

It is larger than most mid-towers. I features a lockable panel with latches to allow easy access to the goodies inside.  So that heat is not much of a problem, in the front and at the top are two 200 mm fans.  It has an open mesh panel with the ability to add four fans to increase airflow to the Graphic Processing Units and memory cores. List $159.99. Amazon $142.62. Newegg $149.99.

This has six drive bays for internal hard drives and four bays for external disc drives. It has eight expansion slots. In this picture, it doesn't show it, but three of the internal hard drive bays can be relocated to allow longer graphics cards. Or, you can add another three bay section to add three more hard drives for a total of nine hard drives. The drive bay trays are easily removed. The bays for external disc drives feature a lock switch which allows you to securely fasten optical drives without screws.

The 600T case has this feature which helps immensely with cable installation. Not only does it help to keep it clean and neat, but it puts the cables out of the airflow. Airflow cooling is the big bugaboo in Personal Computers. Graphics Processor Units and CPU produce a prodigious amount of heat which destroy electronics in the long run. This case is a big step in correcting that problem.

This is an example of a decent installation. Notice the power cables going out and then coming back in. It is also neat and clean. This one has a CPU liquid cooler with a radiator.

This is a CPU cooler. Corsair H60. It works with any computer and a 120 mm fan. When you hear of liquid cooled computers, this is the item that makes it liquid cooled. This particular model comes with one fan. A second fan can be installed. Retail $79.99. Amazon $63.24. Newegg $69.99. It is necessary to make sure both fans direct the air out. If one isn't set up correctly, air won't cool the CPU.

i7 2600K is a Sandy Bridge CPU with 1155 socket. It has  turbo-boost and hyper-thread technology. The above item is designed to keep this CPU safely cooled down. Retail $329.00. Amazon $315.00. Newegg $329.00. It is designed with overclocking in mind. Overclocking is where you change how many instructions the computer performs per second. Increasing it means overclocking. Increasing the computer power of the computer. It also means more heat.

This is the Corsair Vengeance Dual Inline Memory Module. DIMM for short. This dimm is CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9B kit. It is a 16 gigabyte dual channel memory kit. Double Data Rate type 3. Or alternatively, 16GB DDR3 DIMM. Notice the fins coming out of the top of this memory card. Memory does heat up and again it needs an extended heat sink. I have included a cheaper version of the same thing from a different manufacturer for comparison. Retail $129.99. Amazon $89.99. Newegg $89.99. There are actually 4 dimms in this kit.

Next Up. More Buys for My New Computer.

Monitors LCD vs LED What's the diff?

Guess what? LED refers to what backlight is used to light up the LCD. LCD refers to Liquid Crystal Diode. LED refers to Light Emitting Diode.  Liquid Crystal Diodes don't emit any light. LED's do. Florescent lighting was the main way of backlighting LCD's. Now, it is being superseded by LED's .It is kind of a misnomer, misdirection, misadvertising or marketing strategy. Whatever you want to call it. When you see a monitor or TV called LED TV, it still is a LCD with LEDs used for lighting the LCD.

This is the Hewlett Packard L2105tm touch screen monitor. Speakers are included but you can over-ride them.  $299.99 List, $279.99 Newegg, $260.99 Amazon. LED.

This is the Samsung B2430H Monitor. It doesn't have speakers. Nor is it touch screen. So $331.00 List, $ $209.99 Newegg, $209.99 Amazon. LCD.

As I said before, LCD is the actual screen. What lights it up are the LED's or Florescent light bulbs. Oh, and plasma screens? Well, hehehe, the light in a Florescent tube is referred to as PLASMA. It again is a misnomer, misdirection, misadvertising or marketing strategy. I know, I know. It kinda takes the fun out of it, but still......

Next up: My buys for my new computer. With prices, pictures and everything!

Hard Drives and Solid State Drives

It is a Western Digital Black Caviar 1.5 TB hard drive. It works best when hooked up to SATA 3. It is one of the best on the Market. Normally that is covered up and you don't see it. $189.99

 It is a Corsair ForceGT 120 GB Solid State Drive. Again it works best when hooked up to SATA 3. This is the mid-range At $249.99, it has to be FAST!

Something to remember. I used to have a hard drive that stood 3" high, and 5.25" w and about 6" long. It was state of the art and it had 10 megs and I thought it was a steal at over $300. 

The Hard drive pictured above is 1" high, 3.5" wide and 4 maybe 5" long. It has 1.5 Tera bytes. The Solid State Drive is 2.5 " wide and about 3.5 inches long with height of 3/8" of an inch. 

Windows 7 has an ability to pair up a SSD drive with a hard drive to speed things up. I am going to have one of each. I will pair them up so that Windows Uses the SSD for most of the programs I use and puts the rarer programs on the hard drive. 

Everyone by now knows about defragmentors and how necessary it is to defrag your HD every so often. It isn't necessary for the SSD's. However it is necessary to run a program called garbage collection. Now, for us, we normally wouldn't think of this. It has to do with how a Hard Drive works as opposed to an Solid State Drive.

It works like this, the operating system, when erasing a program or data, erases the first bit of data and thus allows the hard drive to write over the rest when you put another program in. Well with solid state drives, it does the same thing. The first bit of data and the program disappears. Voila. The rest still are there and won't be written over until you run a program to get rid of the rest of the garbage.  If this isn't performed on a regular basis, the drive will start to slow down. Small price to pay for super speeds.



Next up. Monitors LCD versus LED. What's the difference?

TV Tuners.

This is the part where most people go hunh? TV Tuners for a Personal Computer? Don't you have enough content with Adobe Flash, YouTube and all the rest? Well, except that TV's are changing along with streaming video. It is getting to the point where people are deciding to dedicate a PC for a home entertainment center. It changes some things. 

This is ASUS My Cinema-EHD3-100 What it does is allows the PC to receive TV signals. 

Smallest PC TV card. I included it because it is designed to be put in a different slot. If you don't have a certain slot handy, you might have another one.

These basically are comparable. They all work about the same. They accept the signal and then send the signal out to TV. 

What is more important is the software that controls all this. The software from Microsoft Windows works fine as long as the Remote is certified by Microsoft

This is AVerMedia H797R. I included it because the software is NOT Microsoft. 

These boards are just input boards. It inputs TV video from antennas, cable or satellite. It also substitutes the keyboard and mouse for a TV remote. The software is the real engine here. If you want a DVR setup, you choose the software and it acts accordingly.

Now, there are some considerations. If you need to control your cable box, you get a wire which will blast infrared to the cable box telling it to change channels or to shut off or what ever. 

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Whups, Hold the presses! I have changed my mind!

Previously I had decided to go with Asrock's very fine Extreme 4 Gen 3 board.

It is a very good board. It has some really nice features, but it doesn't have a backup BIOS. A BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is the very first thing the computer looks at after POST (Post On Self Test). It tells various things for the computer to do. One of the first things it does is notes down what is on the computer, shuts down certain things, like motherboard graphics chipset. It can also shut down the LAN. I found that my wife had shut hers down inadvertently. At least, I hope it was inadvertent. Certain forms of malware can shut down your BIOS. Which basically renders the computer useless. Massive effort to reset and reconfigure the BIOS would be needed to fix the problem. Well, Gigabyte figured a way around it with putting a backup BIOS on board.

This is the one I am going with. I apologize for the poor quailty picture. Currently it is the only one I could find.

GIGABYTE   Z68X-UD3H-B3 

As you can see, GIGABYTE does not believe in keeping installers in the dark.

It has all the features the Asrock has, plus the dual BIOS and a Manual that not only is easy to read, but includes such gems as setting up a RAID hard drive Array. A subject for another column.

Asrock manual was not as detailed as the GIGABYTE.

One more consideration. The GIGABYTE board is cheaper. :-)

Next up : Hard Drives and Solid State Drives. 

Graphics Cards. Two is company, three is even better but it costs ya..

Graphics Cards. Back when I built computers, I installed video cards and what not, there were two types. Color Cards and Monochrome cards. Now, computer motherboards have chipsets which do the job of color cards. So why put in a graphics card, when one is already on the motherboard? Well, the onboard graphics don't run the latest computer games and if you are into design or creating videos, you need the extra power and abilities of what is known as a Discreet Graphics Card. If you are just using the computer to blog,  read news, shop or play a few flash games, you probably won't need one. However, if you want to do more, you need a graphics card.

The next question is why install two? Well, speed mainly. It takes a lot of number crunching and two split up the tasks. One does the top half, the other does the bottom and then sends it to the monitor. Since, two do such a good job, a third one would help also right? Well, yes. It would help. Pricing is the usual bottleneck. To work properly, you need two identical cards with the requisite technology and the operating system that can handle it.  With three, you need three identical cards and there is even one that has four graphics cards.

Here is the deal.

SLI also known as  Scalable Link Interface makes it possible for a computer to use more than one graphics card. It helps speed up creating pictures. It also helps with zooming. It makes it smoother and easier to use.

Two considerations. First costs. Second cooling. I'll deal with cooling first. Because of imperfect knowledge, I burned up two boards using a new game. Now, I will set up two boards and add heatsinks to the backs of the boards. My hopes are that using  the two boards with heatsinks will keep me from burning them up again.

Now Costs. The video/graphics cards I am getting are EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Superclocked  01G-P3-1563-AR. I need to get two of them. These are the mid-range ones. Just one costs $249.99. A heatsink which improves the cooling characteristics cost $19.99. That brings the total for two cards to $536.96. Since a motherboard and processor are less than $500, you can see how getting a mid-range card is expensive. Getting more than one card, while it improves the graphics it starts getting expensive. Going with three, $809.94, and four $1079.92. I am saved from the folly of buying more than two because the Mother board I am getting only supports two nVidia style video cards.

The second picture shows the end of the card. These cards need an extra little bit more power, so you need to plan ahead with connectors. Also, you can see the top connectors for SLI. The last one has one mini HDMI port and two DVI-I ports. It is obvious these cards take up two expansion slots in the computer.

Next up: Hard Drives, and Solid State Drives. 

Computer Cases - No longer just a box.

With my last two graphics card burning up and then the motherboard crashing every other day, I decided that now it is extremely necessary to get a case designed to prevent those problems. 

This the Corsair Graphite Series 600T Mesh Mid-Tower Case.  With two latches the side doors are easily removed.

Open side shot. The hard drive bays caddies are on the bottom right. Enough for six of them.

This is one of the flexible drive bay caddy. It is very easily removed.

Now, I can wax poetic about this case. It has some great features. More room than you can shake a stick at. You can almost swing a cat inside it. J/K to the cat lovers. :-) It stands 20" high, 10.4" wide, and 23.3" in length.

I comes with two 200 mm fans and a rear 120 mm fan that ensures good air flow. Cooling being the large bugaboo with gaming computers right now.

It has 4 optical or floppy drive bays, that slide in and out. No screws. Just a lock-down.

The power supply area has it's own removable/cleanable filter with a slide lock should you choose not to use screws to lock the power supply down. It does have screws for the suspenders and belt types, like me. The front intake fan , 200 mm (Over 7" wide), is fairly quiet with a removable/cleanable filter. The other 200 mm fan is located on the top. The 120 mm fan is on the top back. In the picture you can barely make it out.

Now, the most interesting feature is the cable management system, complete with neoprene rubber. It makes for a cleaner area above the mother board and allows air to flow freely through out the case. 

Now,  as you can see, all the cabling can be wire tied and tucked away so that cables can't impede air flow.

The case looks sleek and menacing. With the wire mesh, I can add four more fans to augment it, or I can install a plastic clear cover to show off all the neat things in side. Some people go so far as to add LED's inside. That is a little too much for me, but I still like this one.

This is the one my wife likes.

Fairly soon, I will upgrade her computer with this case and a perfect motherboard as well. :-) This is Antec Lanboy Air Yellow. It comes with five 120 mm fans with room to add TEN more.  This one is actually a little smaller than my pick. 20.3" high, 8.7" wide and 20.2" length. It has some nice fold away carrying handles as well.

Some more pictures to drool on.

Exploded view.

Rear View.

The whole idea now with computer cases is getting more air flow and cooling to overheated boards.

Next up, Graphics Cards. Two is company, three is even better but it costs ya..