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General Melchett

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Janu­ary 2011: The Core i7 Update

After 38 months of faith­ful ser­vice at the front, it is time for GENERALMELCHETT to receive some internal sur­gery. The new Intel Sandy Bridge, 32nm ‘second gen­er­a­tion’ Cores; and espe­cially the 4 core/8 thread Core i7 2600 looked the cor­rect price/performance. I am glad I have waited over 3 years to update the GENERAL. An excel­lent invest­ment, it has been rock solid and stable from day 1.

The pri­cing below also provides a good example of improve­ment in tech­no­logy vs. pri­cing over the last 3 years. And I tracked dif­fer­ent replace­ment con­fig­ur­a­tions through the years. Massive.

Item Con­fig­ur­a­tion Pri­cing Com­ments
CPU Intel Core i7 2600 3.4Ghz (Sandy Bridge) $369.30 40% speed improve­ment on Q9300, for about 10% less price!
Mother­board Giga­byte GA-P67-UD5 SATA3/USB3/DDR3 $321.90  
Memory G.Skill 16Gb DDR3 9–9-9–24-2N 1600MHz $301.90 $18.90/Gb for DDR3 com­pared with $82.50/Gb in late 2007!
Preex­ist­ing Items
Video Card ATI Radeon HD 5700
Hard Disk West­ern Digital Green 1Tb SATA Drive
Power, case, monitors Same as below

 

 

Novem­ber 2007: The Ori­ginal General

Gen­eral Melchett, as played by Stephen Fry in Black­ad­der Goes Forth is the code name of my new work-at-home PC. Just for fun, the two internal drives are called Cor­por­alPun­ish­ment and Private­Plane. Both are names of epis­odes from series 4. My laptop is called Cap­tain Darling, and vari­ous external things (includ­ing my Zune: Bald­rick. Small yet thick) have Black­ad­der names. So, onto Gen­er­al­Melchett. Here is the cur­rent think­ing of the con­fig­ur­a­tion, sub­ject to change.

Item Con­fig­ur­a­tion Pri­cing Com­ments
CPU CP-Q6600X38COMBO $856.90 Grab most latest mother­board, memory and wait for more choice in the CPU front later in 2008 CPU is the Q6600 at 2.4GHz. Overclockable.
CPU, Update 21st April 2008 Q9300 $412.00 The Q6600 is a beau­ti­ful pro­cessor. But warm! The Q9300 is the equi­val­ent in the new 45nm pro­cessor series: so I upgraded. The ambi­ent tem­per­at­ure around the Gen­eral is amaz­ing! Per­form­ance in video com­pres­sion is about 4% bet­ter. 2.5Ghz of pure fun!
Mother­board MB-GA-X38-DQ6   (included above) 1600MHz Front-side-bus-able
CPU/MB Fans AL-CNPS9700LED (Zall­man) and AL-FAN-SMARTCOOL120 $135.19 Fan on CPU is best for a flat con­fig­ur­a­tion, but as this is a ver­tical mount mother­board: going for a bet­ter fan com­bin­a­tion to push back to front. Ini­tial pro­cessor tem­per­at­ure above 55degC, which is too much.
Memory AL-TWIN2X2048-5400C4 $121.00 1 x DDR2 Kits; addi­tional to 1 x kit included in combo above.
Memory Update 7th Decem­ber 2007   $660.00 1 x Geil 8Gb RAM. Shhh! Don’t tell any­one. Need the extra ooomph so I can get the rat­ing higher than 5.6
Boot HD HD-WD1500ADFD $305.00 10,000 RPM Rap­tor, 150Gb beastie
Boot HD Update 2nd June 2008 WD3000GLFS $379.00 10,000 RPM Velo­cirap­tor, 300Gb
Second HD AL-HD501LJ $341.00 500Gb SATA Sam­sung 7200 RPM. In Giga­byte SATA2 Mir­ror RAID configuration
DVD Simple SATA DVD-RW Drive $74.80 Not quite ready for HD yet in our house
Video Card Update 7th December Inno3D NVidia 8800GT 512Mb DDR3 RAM $462.00 Arrgh! Liam stole the 8800GT for Crysis. Time to pur­chase another
Screen Dell 22″ LCD x 2 $897.60 22″ LCD. Plan B is a 19″ Apple LCD monitor
Case Lian-Li black anod­ised 210 x 381 x 490mm $181.50 Whatever fits all this stuff; needs to be Midi-tower to fit into area. 230mm (w) x 430mm (h)
Power Sup­ply Cor­sair 620w modular $176.00 620w quiet, and the extra cables for mod­u­lar install­a­tion made life very easy. Lots of head room there, too
Keyboard/Mouse Microsoft Enter­tain­ment Wire­less 8000 $379.50 So excel­lent in the lounge on the Media Centre. Just gotta have another one. A bit of lux­ury, but since you spend so much time on the key­board, it is import­ant you love it.
Extra Inputs Sil­ver­stone Card Reader for 3.5″ slot $69.30 SD, CF, MSPro card reader for vari­ous pieces of sil­icon memory in the house. This nifty device also presents audio and firewire to the front of the case
Net­work     No Cat6 in the Geek­Cave, so it’s Wire­less. A nor­mal 802.11g. Draft-N is still Draft. Bil­lion sup­port for full N is the lit­mus test for me to adopt N. Dual 1Gb Eth­er­net on motherboard
OS Vista Ulti­mate x64 (OEM) $275.00 My first x64 OS, so driver fun abounds. Tim­ing is good, as oth­ers have worn the pain of early adopters
       

Build-out, dur­ing Vista x64 install: Vista Ultimate x64 Install post-8800GT 5.6? 5.6 for memory. Need to get some more out of it! cpuid-stock Presently, the memory is let­ting the side down from 5.9’s (per­fect scores). Over­clock­ing research con­tin­ues! The CPU can prob­ably mul­tiply up, and the Core Voltage can also be “upped”; but the 5−5−5−18 memory seems to be the bot­tle­neck? CPU with stock fan runs the pro­cessor CPU cores at around 40degC

Written by Nick Hodge

November 13th, 2007 at 7:57 pm

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14 Responses to 'General Melchett'

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  13. […] GENERALMELCHETT, my main PC ‘ride’ was built in late 2007. The Gen­eral is named in homage to the great char­ac­ter played by Stephen Fry in Black­ad­der. A few upgrades of video cards, one pro­cessor update to the Q9300 and some hard disk shenanigans res­ul­ted in a nice stable PC. […]

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