Schmee: Building of a gaming system

As I’ve mentioned it before…I’m a computer geek that has an interest in gaming and I’m not that much of a hard core gamer. I do generally attend LAN Parties that are organized by my friends and I’m not usually the one with the best computer system there thus have to play most of the games in low resolution and I can’t even be the server of the game because my system will generate enough lag for it to not be an enjoyable game.

I have always wanted to build a high end system not necessarily for gaming but just to have a high end PC so now I have decided to build one. I won’t be able to play all of the games at super high resolution but I won’t be the cause for lag or have to play games in lower resolutions because of the system that I’m building.

What’s in a name?

For many years I have given a name to my computer systems and they have been related to something I like. Most of the systems at my house right now receive a name of a character from the animated series Invader Zim by Jhonen Vasquez but there are no more characters with one word names that can be used for this new computer so I decided to look for a good name for it.

While researching I found out that Jhonen also created other works and amongst them he created a four-issue series called Squee. Now if you want to find out more about Squee then you can look it up in wikipedia. It turns out that Squee has a teddy bear which goes by the name of Schmee and it claims to be a “trauma sponge” and that caused me to laugh thus it being the name of my new PC.

What are the specs?

Since I wanted to build a high end system it would obviously have to have some of the bleeding edge technology that is out there. I have been a big fan of AMD technology thus choosing to build an AMD based system. Nowadays the dual-core processors are a really big hit amongst most gamers even though most games played by them are still designed for single-core processor technology and therefore not optimized for multi-core systems and not fully using the system resources to their fullest.

I decided to go with the quad-core processor technology with AMD’s new Phenom processor line. Now understand that this is not the most bleeding edge high-end system out there mostly because I didn’t want to go broke buying this computer system so this is the reason why I went with the AMD Phenom 9500 processor which has a speed of 2.2GHz without being overclocked. For the cooling of the AMD Processor I bought the Thermaltake V1 CPU Cooler and the Artic Silver Ceramique Thermal Paste.

The motherboard to which this processor and the other components of this system will be connected to is from MSI. I’ve had a very good experience with their products and all of the motherboards in my current computers are from MSI. I did run into one issue with the file server but it’s mostly a bug in Linux with the VIA chipset that the motherboard has. I’ve chosen the MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard for this task because it’s one of their boards that support the AMD Phenom processor and has the new 790FX chipset. I did find one drawback while carefully inspecting the motherboard which is the fact that the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) support is not added to this board since the connector was removed. Though this is not a cause for me to return this motherboard I will be in the lookout for this feature on my next system.

The memory for this system is the Corsair Dominator 1066MHz and I have the 2GB kit with two 1GB sticks. Unfortunately the latency on these sticks is not the best as it’s 5-5-5-15 but the clock speed will hopefully compensate for this. This, again, will be something that is going to be stressed out in the next system. The sticks have the heatsink embedded into them which will help with the cooling of them.

The motherboard has an ethernet port embedded into it but I have decided not to use it and it will be disabled since I have bought the Bigfoot Killer NIC. One of the reasons that I bought this card was because of the fact that Microsoft Windows’ network stack will be bypassed and instead the card will be the one that processes the data using a Linux distro that is installed on one of the chips that the card has and using it’s own processor. This actually allows for processor cycles to be released and enhancing the gaming experience…besides how cool is it to have basically another PC inside your PC handling the network traffic

The video card that I’ve chosen is from ATI mostly because this company was bought by AMD and therefore having better connection with the rest of the components that are on the motherboard. The Diamon Radeon HD 3850 PCIe video card will be installed on this system. The system is able to handle upto four of these cards connected through ATI’s CrossFire technology. My system, at least for the time being, will only have one of these cards thus not taking advantage of this technology. There is a possibility that in the near future I purchase another card or three more cards to use the quad-GPU technology that AMD claims to have.

As for the optical drives I have decided to go with a single IDE DVD-Burner. I know that some of you might be asking yourselves why wouldn’t I go with a SATA DVD drive or blu-ray or even HD-DVD well the answer is simple I hardly ever use it for anything so why go out and buy an expensive DVD drive when I don’t really use it so I went with the standard drive. I obtained a Lite-On DVD-Burner with Lightscribe. For the hard drive I will obviously go with SATA drive since the speed of this unit will most certainly matter. The hard drive will be an 80GB drive which will be replaced by other two hard drives which are faster and have more capacity in the not so distant future. As for the floppy drive…I considered it to be a waste of money so I’m going to borrow it from my other system that has one of these drives in order to install the RAID drivers when installing Windows on this machine and after that it will be removed.

For the power supply I looked for a 700W PSU so that it could power up this PC. I ended up buying the OCZ Game Xstream 700W PSU with the blue fan. Luckily this PSU has SATA power connectors which means that I won’t have use the adapters that come with the MSI motherboard and therefore being more reliable. It also brings the standard four pin plugs for the DVD drive and for the motherboard.

Unfortunately the case has not been purchased just yet which means that all of the parts are still inside their boxes at the time of this writing. But I will be purchasing the case this next weekend and building this system. The second part of this series will cover the actual building of the system and the third part will be written after one week of use and testing.

Will there be any overclocking of this system?

Well I’m not a big fan of overclocking my systems even though the Corsair Dominator memory is overclocked already but I will most definitely give the AMD’s Overdrive technology a test and overclocking my system to see it’s capacity. The cooling mechanism used on this system is the age old air cooling thus not making it perfect for overclocking but it will be tested. If I do eventually test the software I will most definitely write a post about doing so.

Will there be photographs of this system?

Most definitely and in fact right now there are photographs of the hardware that were taken for this article and they can be found in the Flickr gallery.