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After waiting so long for the Thermaltake cases to arrive I decided to go with a cheaper case and although one would think that this can’t possibly provide enough or the best cooling for the CPU but that is something that actually amazed me.

Installation of Windows and performance wise didn’t go without a glitch but at least half of the issues are pretty much resolved and I’m still on the tweaking phase.

The assembly of the PC was not exactly the easiest and this is a mid-tower case that we are talking about. Like I mentioned above the case is not exactly what one calls the perfect case, I originally thought that I would purchase a temporary case while the Thermaltake cases arrived at a local shop, but after the not so easy installation and the fact that the case is actually better than I thought make me think twice about changing the cases.

The case I got is a generic mid-tower ~US$54 box. The case doesn’t have the greatest design since it seems to have some dimension issues specially with the PCI openings and the fact that there doesn’t seem to be enough of a grip of the card to say that it’s fully secure. The motherboard tray is actually removable but the CPU cooler, because of the size, pretty much doesn’t allow for that to happen, at first I took out the motherboard tray and screwed the motherboard to the tray, at this point the CPU cooler was already in place and I had a nearly impossible time getting it to go in so at the end I removed the motherboard from the tray and inserted the tray into the case once again.

The night prior to getting the case I had assembled the motherboard. I read the instructions that were in the website of Artic Silver for the thermal paste that I purchased but they didn’t seem to actually provide the best cooling solution so I decided to investigate, specially since this was my first time actually building a computer completely from the ground up, I found a post on a forum and other sites and videos on youtube which basically mentioned that the thermal paste completely cover the heat spreader of the CPU. The post on that forum mentioned that for best results during the application of the paste it should be a very thin layer and that for assistance he had placed some tape around the CPU which basically assisted him on getting a thin layer.

I took some thin tape and created a square on the CPU and applied the paste on the CPU. I used a spare plastic card to spread the paste down to a thin layer. Since this is my first time applying the paste it took me a couple of tries, including the complete cleaning of the CPU, to get it to a point where I felt comfortable with the results. I managed to get a thin layer across the heat spreader that the CPU has. The Thermaltake V1 CPU Cooler was placed on the CPU and secured. I was still concerned with the temperature and the possibility of ruining the CPU and having to buy a new one or even a new motherboard. After 4 days of running the PC it turns out that everything is as expected with the CPU and the temperature and the cooling of the CPU is as expected and even better. The first run of the system showed that the temp on idle, this being inside of the BIOS, reached 28°C and after the first 25 hours of running the computer to that temperature and then letting it cool it actually proved to lower the temperature down to ~25°C and prove to cool the CPU faster than any of my previous systems, I have installed some games on that system and after running Need for Speed Most Wanted for a couple of minutes the temperature raised to ~30°C and after closing the program it dropped to ~25°C rather quickly.

I did run into some issues on my first installation.  I got two SATA2 Seagate 80GB hard drives and set them up on a RAID0 using the integrated RAID controller that comes on the SB600 that is on the MSI motherboard. After getting to successfully install Windows XP on that system I began installation of the rest of components and specially the Killer NIC that I bought and this is where pretty much began to go downhill. As soon as I tried to run the configuration utility for the Killer NIC I got a BSOD, investigation lead me to believe that it was an issue which some had and I attempted to reinstall the card but was unsuccessful. After I attempted to install the MSI Dual-Center Utility it gave me a BSOD the instant I log into my system stating that there was a bad or corrupted DLL. After testing I came down to the conclusion that there might be an IRQ conflict that caused the BSOD or I was getting corrupted data stored on the RAID. When I attempted to reserve the IRQ 5 for the first PCI slot, which has the Killer NIC, and attempted to reinstall the Windows XP OS I ran into some problems with the installation and the fact that the RAID0 was not found at boot time thus not being able to actually boot into the installed OS. After several attempts the setup utility for the RAID controller apparently disappeared and was no longer accessible despite the BIOS reset and I have no idea what exactly caused this behavior and how to restore it to it’s original glory. I still have to try a BIOS reflash to determine if that will resolve the issue or not.

At this point the system is up and running without much glitches. The Killer NIC is working as expected and I have not gotten any more BSODs and I even have shell access to the card’s Linux, which is pretty cool btw. I’m unable to use the RAID functionality of the SB600 controller since the utility has disappeared and I still can access the RAID utility of the Promise controller card that is also integrated on the motherboard but I don’t have the necessary drivers to make the Windows installer detect the hard drives on that controller nor have I made much effort to find the necessary drivers to have that happen.

I installed Need for Speed Most Wanted and also The Sims 2 with several expansions. I did expect the games to run smoothly even at very high video settings but that doesn’t seem to be the case and that is something that I didn’t expect to happen because although we are not talking about the bleeding edge computer equipment this is pretty high end technology and having the game lag and even lock up for a couple of seconds is not something one expects to happen when having this type of technology even when only using one of the four cores that the CPU has. I’m still on the testing phase with the computer and I’m tweaking to determine the best configuration.

So far I have noticed an enhancement with the network traffic. I understand that the setup that I have to compare this is not exactly the best or able to produce the environment  that is the most scientifically correct for this but it’s all I have right now :). The online experience so far has been faster than others on my home network. I still have not had the chance to run any network games to experience the enhancement but will soon get the chance to do so.

I have just ordered the Ageia PhysX card for this PC and I’m waiting for it’s arrival even though I know that most games don’t actually support this technology I will be able to play the games that do support it with full experience.

So far I have managed to get it up and running and half way to the way I want it. I have been disappointed by some of the glitches that I’ve encountered, such as the RAID configuration utility disappearing, but I’m still working on getting this system to the best of it’s abilities.

Photos will come soon.

-LM