Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I’ve now completed building out the new desktop PC and thought I’d detail the hardware component choices I made. As I said last post, one of the key advantages of building your own PC is that you can pick the exact components you want, so its worth going over the list of those components and why I picked each one. In a future post I’ll fill out details about the challenges I encountered putting this thing together.

Finished view of my new PC in a Mini-ITX case

Component List

Processor: Intel Core i7- 2700K (quad core, 3.5ghz, 3.9ghz turbo)
Motherboard: ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT (Intel Z68 chipset, Mini-ITX)
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaw 8GB (2×4GB DDR3 1333)
Graphics: HIS IceQ X Turbo Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Boot Drive: OCZ Agility 3 240GB
Other Drives: 2x Raptor 150GB Drives (from my old machines), Blu-Ray/DVD/CD burner (from my old machine)
Case: Lian Li PC-Q08B (Black aluminum Mini-ITX Tower Case)
Power Supply: Antec NeoPower 550W Power Supply
USB3 Hub: Syba SD-HUB20058 USB 3.0 4-port hub (internal/external)

Component Details

Before I dive into the details I’d like to reiterate my goals for the system. The idea is to build out as high end of a system as possible while staying within as small of a form factor as possible and not buying any of the extremely-expensive parts. This is my main workstation machine for my home office so I use it for coding, running VMs, browsing and playing games.

Processor- for a brief window of time the Core i7- 2700K was the top of the line processor available. For some time Intel has always had a “top of the line processor” that cost close to $1000. But this past year the best processors have been under $400 so its been a fairly easy choice to get the high end one. Intel just came out with the new Core i7- 3960X that costs $1049, but that takes a new chipset and socket type and there aren’t any mini-ITX motherboards that support it. So I get to stick with the 2700K which is just as good for most games, and even better for most encoding tasks (since it has the on-chip GPU that can be used for encoding).

Motherboard- There are really only two choices here. I wanted the Z68 chipset since it improved a bunch of things over the previous ones for a high-end system, and only Zotac and ASRock make motherboards in Mini-ITX form factors. The Zotac board I just couldn’t get to work. It fails pretty consistently on boot. I’ve tried it with multiple CPUs and RAM, so the problem is definitely the board. Also its impossible to upgrade the BIOS without booting to Windows (as far as I can tell) and since I can’t boot to Windows without crashing, that ends up being a pretty serious problem. The Zotac board has some nice video outputs, but they don’t matter for this system, and the ASRock adds an eSATA port which is really nice. The only problems I have with the ASRock board are that the eSATA port doesn’t support port-multipliers. I had been hoping to use it with an external Sans Digital 4-drive eSATA box, but it only shows one drive when I plug it in.

RAM and Power Supply- I got both of these on New Egg “Shell Shocker” specials. No special logic for these other than that I wanted brands that are generally well known, I wanted 8GB of RAM (tempted to get 16GB but the 8GB DIMMS are still way too expensive) , and I wanted a “modular” Power Supply that lets you just connect the specific connectors that you need to reduce cable clutter inside the box.

Graphics- I’ve generally liked the ATI/AMD boards lately and this one seemed to be this generations sweet spot of being able to drive 3+ monitors and give enough performance at 2560×1600 without being in the stratosphere of pricing and heat. This board seemed like it would be relatively quiet with decent cooling for the system which I was expecting to have a fairly crowded box.

Boot Drive- I’ve been using an Intel X25M 80gb and the boot drive was getting a bit cramped. NewEgg had a killer sale on this OCZ Agility 3 and 240GB gives me plenty of room for boot-drive stuff. One interesting note- because my old system was on my old drive as a VHD, I was able to copy the VHD file over to the new drive using a “VHD Resize” utility, reinstall boot-loader stuff, and it made it fairly easy to just switch all my existing OS over to the new machine.

Case- The Lian Li PC-Q08B case was one of the few choices in this range. I was looking for something that was as small as possible, but would still accommodate a full-sized video card. This case supports plenty of drives and overall ends up far smaller than what I had before. Overall the case was a pain to setup, but that usually goes with the territory when you are trying to build a smaller form-factor system (although plenty of big systems are a pain too). The way the USB3 ports on the front work are especially weird. They didn’t include a normal USB motherboard header (which the ASRock board wouldn’t have had anyway- the one advantage of the Zotac is it has extra USB3 ports). The front panel connectors just terminate in USB3 plugs that you have to work through the case and plug into the back. Instead I bought a small “internal” USB3 hub that can run off a standard floppy power connector and stuck it in my internal drive bay. Now, that thing is plugged into one of my back USB3 ports, but at least both of my front ports work and I still have one in back.

As I said, I’ll fill in more details about the various challenges putting this thing together shortly. The results appear great right now though- instead of taking up a huge amount of floor space, I have a small mini-tower in the corner of my desk. The CPU doesn’t exactly run cool (its ~40C at idle and maxes out at ~70C under high workloads), but its well within the expected limits. And best of all the overall result is acting very stable and is snappy fast.

Here I go again. I’m starting to feel like a bit of a masochist building my own PCs rather than just buying something nice off the shelf. A colleague asked me the other day why I build my own and sometimes its hard to actually figure it out.

Ultimately it comes down to being able to spec out exactly the parts that I want. I can get the exact processor, video card, dvd drive, hard drives that I want. When you buy from a vendor you have to deal with their choices which are often optimizing for very different things. They also tend to have weird pricing where certain crappy components are cheap but the ones you want are a huge upsell (SSDs are still in this category- they charge far higher than market prices for them when you configure one with a PC now). Also by buying pieces I can more easily roll over components that are still working fine from the previous PC.

Either way the biggest pain is dealing with broken pieces. This is frankly where Apple has it nailed lately- bring your broken stuff into an Apple store for the first year and they just fix them (although sometimes you wait around for a year). Dealing with replacements and RMA shipping whether from Dell, HP or NewEgg is just a huge pain.

For components in general I’m a big fan of NewEgg. Buying stuff from them is great, their prices are decent, they ship things quickly, and its easy to find the right stuff on their site. But when something doesn’t work the RMA process can take hours to the point where I often just give up rather than try to get the component replaced (which I suppose is the point). I’ve discovered you need to be careful about buying the components of a system early since after 30 days returns become an extra-nightmare. I bought a nice slim blu-ray drive for the Media PC but took more than a month to try it out. It turns out it was DOA. So I contact NewEgg. They say “too late, contact the manufacturer for their warranty”. So I contact Sony Optiarc and they reply “we are just an OEM, contact your retailer for warranty support”. And thus we enter Kafka land… Eventually someone worked it out and $10 and several hours later my drive is on its way back to them to be replaced, but I assume it will be weeks before I get my replacement.

This year’s upgrades are both pretty similar. Both my Media PC and my main home workstation are getting new Sandy Bridge processors and new smaller cases with mini-ITX motherboards. The old Media PC was in a fancy “media case” which was about the size of a big receiver and the new one is more like 10″x12″x3″. It doesn’t have room for 5 drives in it like the old case, but then again I bailed on putting 5 drives in the old case since the heat and noise was a big problem and I didn’t need more than 2TB storage in the actual media center box anyway (all the big movies are off on the server anyway).

The workstation has moved from the huge and heavy Antec P182 case to a new mini-tower that is more like 14″x10″x12″ and is about as small as you can get with a mini-ITX motherboard, high-end CPU, a few drives, and a full double-width video card. Its still super-tiny compared to the huge old tower and I should be able to stick it in the corner of my desk behind my monitors and free up a ton of floor space.

More details on both systems in later posts.

As with many others, I received my Kindle Fire yesterday and thought I’d write up my initial impressions. My main frame of reference is comparing it to older Kindles and my gen-1 iPad which probably sees 50% of its usage as a Kindle reader.

I should start off my with my expectations. First of all the price point is low enough for me that I was willing to take a chance with it to learn what its like to live with an inexpensive mini-tablet. I’m hoping that it fills a role in my multi-device household that includes ePaper kindles, the iPad, many PCs (laptops and desktops) and the xbox. I should be able to use it to read a book, to check recipes in the kitchen, or watch some TV shows on Hulu, NetFlix or Amazon. I’m also putting my entire music collection into the Amazon Cloud Drive so checking out how they pull off the seamless integration with their cloud services should be obvious.

First of all, overall the device is really nice. The display looks good although its pretty reflective and certainly shows fingerprints pretty easily. The lack of any hard-buttons other than power means that simple things like increasing/decreasing volume require hunting around on the screen (& multiple steps) which makes it pretty inconvenient as a music playback device.

Again, the general impression was that its a solid effort but with some rough edges. It should actually have plenty of CPU compared to my gen-1 iPad and WP7 phone but lots of simple animations “tear”/drop frames. The best test of this I did was that I used my iPad & Fire to read exactly the same book side by side and flipped pages. The iPad page transitions were smooth, the Fire ones would glitch. The same sort of thing happens in the flip UI on the home page (which is actually not a very practical UI anyway although its nice eye-candy when it works smoothly).

Overall video playback worked pretty well, although NetFlix seemed like the audio was slightly out of sync with the video. Hulu seemed like it was better enough that it wasn’t annoying (watching a TV show on NetFlix was off enough that it bothered me).

The browser is ok, although it also just “felt” a bit rough. Pages just felt like they were loading in a bit of a funny way. Also it will be interesting to see how I feel about the 7″ form factor after using it for a bit. For reading fiction in the reader it was fine, but reading a technical book felt really squished and most web-sites wouldn’t fit in portrait so I had to switch to landscape which was a bit awkward.

I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t have audio-in of any sort. If it did you could see amazing apps like Amplitube run on it. At $200 for an amazing guitar/vocals effects box I’d probably buy a few. Of course if Amazon is losing money on every one sold that might not work out so well for them. It will be interesting to see if the USB port can ever be used for any peripherals?

The lack of any option for 3g is too bad also. The whole billing model for cellular network devices is a mess right now but I’m assuming by 2020 we will have that all figured out and these super-portable devices will be much more killer when they are just automatically internet connected, always, everywhere.

One other frustrating thing is that the on-screen keyboard is terrible compared to those in iOS and Windows Phone. I don’t really have any experience with other Android phones or tablets- is keyboard input this bad on all Android devices? Or maybe the Fire has a less expensive touch digitizer so its less accurate at reading the positions of my taps?

Overall, its still a very solid inexpensive media consumption device and it seems like it could open up this category for a much broader audience. Further, its realistically a v1, and I’d expect to see lots of improvements polishing these rough edges in the future.