New PC - Feb 2007

Farm News

GRAIN MILL VIDEO

Watch Sarah's video on the Nutrilmill. The Nutrimill grinds wheat, barley, oats, beans, and corn. |

Watch Sarah's video on making six delicious loaves of whole-wheat bread with the Bosch Universal Mixer. |

GARDEN PLAN |

Sarah's plan includes a combination of saved heirloom seeds and new organic seeds from the catalog.|

SARAH'S DIARY|

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Bed & Breakfast|

The old dual P3 PC was slow and has been slow for over a year. It wouldn't play MP3s or videos. We were holding buying off till Vista became available. I selected the hardware for the new PC for performance and not to require replacement for quite a while. Everything came from Newegg a dollar or two over the $1,500 budget. Buying items on Newegg's daily specials helped hold down the price. The cpu, mouse and keyboard came from other places and we already had the monitor

Picture	Remarks
	I installed an extra 120mm fan in the front. To get good airflow, I punched out the hole with a sheet metal punch. The rivets in the drive cage needed to be drilled out, the hole punched and drive cage pop-riveted back place.
	The Tuniq Symmetry case came with a 120 mm fan installed in the back. I used a punch to cut a 4" hole and improve the airflow.
	The ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard with Intel P965 chipset that holds an Intel LGA 775 cpu. The cpu socket is open ready to receive the cpu. This is one of the most over-clockable Intel boards available with a lot of tweaks in the BIOS. The DH stands for Digital Home. It has some cool features like built-in wireless, 7.1 audio and an IR remote. The remote is great because I don't have to bend over to turn on the computer.
	The Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 is installed. The Tuniq Tower 120 keeps the cpu cool. There's a 120mm fan in the middle of those cooling fins. The motherboard controls the speed of the fan along with a manual control mounted in a card slot. The cooler dissipates heat as well as a budget water cooling system.
	Two GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM ready for action. The MB holds 8 GB, but 32-bit Vista can only address about 3.5 GB.
	The power supply is a Coolmax 700W model with a built in 120 mm fan and removable connectors. The fan speed varies to keep the PS cool. The tool-less fasteners on the drive cage work well.
	An ATI X1950XT 265MB Sapphire graphics card. This is a high-end gaming card that was on sale. It does have two outputs, so I can hook up a second monitor. I'm in need of a little cable management, but that will come later.
	With the DVD drives and hard drive installed, I'm ready for the initial test. A wire pulled out of the start push button slowed me down a little. After fixing that, it started right up without a glitch.
	Installing a32-bit OEM version of Vista Ultimate. It installed in ten minutes flat. The WSAT (Windows System Analysis Tool) passed the five tested areas with flying colors. No near-term obsolescence.
	The Aerowatch Gatewatch2 monitors four places and adjusts the various fans to keep north & south chipset, hard drive and case cool.
	The Tuniq Symmetry Case with front door attached. The case has an analog meter that can monitor temperature, disk space, cpu load or whatever you set it up to do. I need to mill out a hole so that the Gatewatch2 temp monitor shows through the door. The white gizmo on top is the wireless antenna for the motherboard.
	The Tuniq case comes with a side window. I had to drill out the fasteners and turn the plexiglas 180 degrees because the 80mm fan was over the Tuniq Tower 120 cpu cooler. The fan has blue LEDs.
	Everything is working and tunes are coming out of the speakers. Life is good!
The case and cpu stay surprisingly cool. The cpu runs at 24C, a few degrees over room temperature. I did play around with over clocking a little. The cpu runs at 2.66 GHz normally and worked fine at 3.3 GHz - about a 40% boost in performance. At that speed, I have some hanging memory issues and need to load the specified timings for the RAM to get good performance. So for now, it's the pedestrian 2.66 GHz. I have a couple of hardware issues to work on. I don't like the placement of the USB ports and will probably get a 3.5" front panel USB panel. There's four more speakers to find homes for in the office. The hard part is finding all the software keys and installing software. I can see Vista has a lot of potential, but I seem to spend a lot of time in the help pages trying to figure out where things went to or how to get a feature turned on or off. I'm pretty happy with the performance of the PC. Everything is fast to open and mutli-tasking doesn't seem to slow anything down.

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