PC PC GAMES

I’m sure you all have done it at some point.  You start thinking about how you would like to do something you your rig(s) and you have that extra $100 burning in your pocket.  Well, this type of thing got the best of me this past weekend.  I was on my way home from meeting a friend for dinner and thought…  hmmm…  I wonder what they have at Microcenter….    About an hour later, I walk out with this:

Yep, I decided to swap my gaming hardware from my Core i5 rig back into the i7 920 rig. Of course, doing so would require me to rebuild 2 machines into 2 cases and retire the oldest.

The former i7 rig

The hardware.

Ironically I was initially using this as a virtualization box.  I wanted to try some stuff we were planning to do at work so I installed Hyper-V server for a while.  Later I would up using it as a second box running Ubuntu.

The motherboard, CPU and RAM are the only thing getting transplanted into the Sonata Elite.

The former i5 rig.

The hardware.

The PSU, Hard Drives, Sound Card, DVD-RW, Video card and Corsair Watercooling are going into the Sonata Elite.

Needless to say, I threw in a movie and went to work.  There was hardware sprawled all over the living room floor.  LOL!   I didn’t bother to take pics during the rebuilds, but here are the finished products accompanied by their hardware lists.

The Sonata Elite.

The hardware in all its glory.

The New i7 box consists of:

• Asus P6T
• Core i7 920 OC’d to 4Ghz
• Corsair H50 Watercooling Kit
• 6GB of OCZ Platinum DDR3 @ 1600Hz
• Visiontek Radeon HD5870
• Asus XonarDX
• Samsung DVD-RW
• 640GB WD Caviar Blue
• 2x 1TB WD Caviar Blacks
• 1TB WD Caviar Green
• Antec Sonata Elite

Oh yeah, initially the fan that corsair provides with this kit wasn’t kicking hard enough to keep everything cool enough to my liking.  Especially since this case doesn’t have an intake fan in its layout. Sooo…   A few days later, I picked up a pair of these:

The stock Corsair fan with one of the new Scythe 12Ms.

I read on the forums that the H50 performs much better in a push/pull config with the fans.  Needless to say, these did the trick.  Lowered my idle and load temps by 20c!!!!  Yes, you read that right, 20c.

The Scythe’s in action.

The finished product with side panel off.

The beauty of this is that I didn’t have to re-install windows at all.  Just configured the bios the same as it was in the i5 box and turn it on.  7 detected everything, one reboot later and I was ready to game.

The new Ubuntu box.

The second box didn’t fare so well though, I had to backup my home folder and reinstall Ubuntu before I could get it running good again.

Here is the hardware list:

• Gigabyte P55M-UD4
• Core i5 750 @ 4Ghz
• Noctua U12P + 1156 mounting kit
• 8GB of Corsair DDR3 @ 1600Hz
• Visiontek Radeon HD4850 with a Thermaltake DuOrb
• Creative X-fi XtremeMusic
• Sony DVD-RW
• 320GB Seagate 7200.10
• 2x 250GB Seagate 7200.10s
• 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax
• Antec Mini P180

Thats it.  Knowing me, I’ll be fine with this config for about……  6 months!   LOL

Audi 5

ChangWizzle

Koroush Ghazi over at Tweakguides wrote a great article about PC Game Piracy back in 2008 and recently updated it. If you have not read it yet head over and take a look it is a worthy read . If you are interested in PC gaming you should check it out.

Let me make one thing clear: PC gaming is not dying. The term ‘PC gaming’ is very broad, and covers everything from casual games such as Solitaire, through to FPS, RTS, RPG, Simulation, Sport, Adventure and MMOs. There are online and offline variants of most of these genres, as well as hybrids. In short given there are an estimated 1 billion PCs currently in use around the world, almost 200 million gaming PCs in particular, and around 1.5 billion individuals using the Internet, the PC has a huge amount of potential and is most definitely not going to die off as a platform for some form of gaming in the future.

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Copyright © 2010 Koroush Ghazi and Tweakguides