My Unnecessary Upgrade

To /r/buildapc readers, this may be slightly repetitive, for that I apologize.

My personal computer recently underwent a massive upgrade. After over 3 years of trust service I gave my Nehalem build the boot. It has served me well and to be honest, it really did not need upgrading, it ran everything well and I expected to see little to no gains in performance. I had gotten the chip as a gift and decided to splurge a bit on the motherboard and picked up the Sabertooth X79, living near Fry’s is awesome. Thanks to the relatively stagnant developments expansion standards everything else carried over, in over the last few months I had already made major upgrades in the GPU, RAM, case, CPU cooler, SSD, and all the peripherals (full specs below). The carryover was a breeze, I expected to only be using 4 sticks of memory, but the motherboard explicitly stated 6 were fine and I even got to keep all 24 GB of RAM. The only close call was the Havik140, the RAM slots were significantly closer to the CPU socket and the Havik was not going to fit horizontally, which wasn’t an issue for me as I previously had it mounted vertically.

Took a day to get everything completely reinstalled, first thing I did was set the one touch overclock to 4.3ghz (awesome feature), did a burn-in with LinX and temps all were under 65, I was very impressed. I then ran BF3 on a 64 player full server, FPS floated between 50-80 with ultra-settings and maxed AA; this was not any noticeable improvement over my i7 920. Despite proving my assumptions correct, I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed in my new hardware, this was essentially a $900 upgrade on old hardware and my gaming experience was exactly the same. In my disappointment I turned to work for comfort (like most of us do) and fired up Solidworks. Generally the files I work with are rather large with a lot of parts and rendering can take a while. I decided to give rendering a spin on a case and to my surprise it was at least 4 times faster! It may not have justified the upgrade but my tech addiction had been appeased and I was reinvigorated, not to mention it runs Minecraft like nobody’s business.

To recap, anyone with a quad core Nehalem, using it for anything short of raw calculation or rendering should feel no reason to upgrade to anything right now, you got a great deal on a CPU with a fantastic lifecycle, enjoy it and don’t be envious of 3770’s.

PS: OCZ Power supply is the next thing to get the boot.

-Rob Teller
NZXT. Product Development

Full Image Album: http://imgur.com/a/ekqTz

Type Item Price
CPU Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor
Free
CPU Cooler NZXT HAVIK-140 90.3 CFM CPU Cooler
Preproduction Sample
Motherboard Asus Sabertooth X79 ATX LGA2011 Motherboard
$314.99 @ Fry’s
Memory Patriot Viper II Sector 7 Edition 24GB (6 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
$94.99 @ Fry’s
Hard Drive Kingston HyperX 120GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk
$109.99 @ Amazon
Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB 3.5″ 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
$49.99 @ BestBuy
Hard Drive Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB 3.5″ 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
$69.99 @ Newegg
Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar Blue 320GB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
$49.99 @ Newegg
Video Card EVGA GeForce GTX 680 2GB Video Card
$499.99 @ Undisclosed
Case NZXT Switch 810 Full Tower Case
Preproduction Sample
Power Supply OCZ 700W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
$59.99 @ Microcenter
Fan Controller NZXT Sentry Mix
Preproduction Sample
Monitor Asus VS247H-P 23.6″ Monitor
$174.99 @ Undisclosed
Monitor TCL LE40FHDP21TA 40in LED TV
$399.99 @ Walmart
Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (64-bit)
Free @ Intel Retail Edge
Keyboard Corsair Vengeance K90 Wired Gaming Keyboard
$99.99 @ Fry’s
Mouse Logitech Performance Wireless Laser Mouse
$64.99 @ Logitech
Fan NZXT FN-140 x 7
Samples
Fan Noctua NF-P14
Sample
Card Reader NZXT Aperture M
Preproduction Sample
LEDs NZXT Hue
Preproduction Sample
Sleeved Cables NZXT Premium Cable Starter Kit
Preproduction Sample

Lovin’ my new Alienware

This week I made a purchase I never expected to ever make. I bought an Alienware…

As a kid I had pined for an Alienware, then it was for Voodoo, and by the time I had enough income to support that kind of purchase, it no longer made any sense. Alienware’s business is completely built on image and marketing and it has worked very well for them, but in the end, the customer is only paying the premium for that and to different people that can have a very polarizing effect. Most notably to the people who would consume our products, I am fairly confident that the majority of you reading this were ready to hear a sob story about how I wasted my money…

I absolutely love my new Alienware. Granted, there are two caveats. The first is that it was a notebook, not a desktop and my other alternatives were generics. The second was that it was heavily discounted.

I was previously using a Compal JHL90 with a Core 2 Duo and 9600M GT video card. It had been a trooper, but my many accidents and time took quite the toll on it. The Bluetooth, webcam, female power connector, power brick, hard drive, optical drive, battery and speakers have all broken at some point with most remaining unfixed. Next Monday I will be traveling to Taiwan for CES for two weeks and was not confident it would be able to sustain my usage any more so I set out for deals. Mother’s Day weekend arrived with just what I was looking for. I picked up the Alienware M14X R2 with a 3610QM, 6gb DDR3, GT 650M 1gb, 500gb 7200RPM drive, and an upgraded screen for $650 out the door. Arguably this was the best deal I have ever gotten on a new computer.

I really wasn’t expecting to be impressed by anything other than the specs of the components, but once it was in my hands, my perception began to change. The exterior was covered an a fairly scratch resistant rubber coating, Windows included no bloatware, the power saving options were immense, the LEDs were really fun and neat especially when I loaded up Battlefield 3 and they synced with my health without any configuration, speakers sounded fantastic, the BIOs allowed plenty of options and overclocking control and was preconfigured for RAID which made adding my MSATA cache drive a breeze, and the CPU and GPU had discreet cooling systems which kept the laptop at comfortable temps while gaming. A lot of what makes the M14X different from its competitors are aesthetic features, but it is no slouch and does a great job of not sacrificing performance for beauty.

Admittedly, I would not have bought this laptop without such a deep discount and many of the features it provides are available on other laptops, however my experience has been fantastic thus far. It may have superfluous features but in no way does that make it a lesser product and after my time with it I can’t even say that I would be unhappy with the laptop had I paid $1,000 for it. Will my next desktop be an Alienware? LOL, no. I still dislike that I can’t compile my own laptop out of individual parts, and there is no getting around the fact that Alienware is charging for things no one needs in a computer which in return just makes it harder to justify the purchase. The end of the day Alienware is still doing things no one else is doing, they aren’t revolutionary, but they are still unique and I like my laptop.

-Rob Teller
Product Development

World of Colors

I absolutely adore colors. Given the opportunity I would make a case with many heavily saturated color combinations. Many people would say that they would be obnoxious and horrid but think about it. We express ourselves through color everyday; our cars, clothes, phone cases, and even desktop wallpapers. We’ve come a long way from those beige monstrosities of the 90′s but things haven’t really changed that much, the market is predominately  dominated by black cases. However with the introduction of the NZXT Phantom we began to change that. The Phantom truly was the first successful white case on the market and since it’s release many competitors have followed in our white footsteps. It’s still a shame however, that color cases still have never really taken off. It’s really easy to justify not putting them into production, too many models, too hard to make look good, not enough interest, etc…

Surprisingly, in-spite of this, the market for LED fans has never been stronger.  There is no doubt our market enjoys personalizing their system and I believe this should extend beyond just the accents and accessories of the case. Products can be clean, simple, and stylish but at the sacrifice of color and emotion is the easy route, one the market seems to have preferred as of late.

So I am going to end this blog with an open ended question. What colors and color combinations do you wish were available. If you prefer your basic black design, I’d like to hear you voice your opinion as well. :)

-Rob Teller