Building a new PC, part 8

[philmophlegm]

Power supply, hard disks, optical drives, HSF and other stuff



PSU

Unfortunately for our electricity bill, powering all these high-end components requires lots of juice, and a high end power supply. According to most of the reviews I read, the best high end PSU on the market is the Enermax Galaxy 1000W EGX1000EWL. One kilowatt, enough to power Quad SLI and still pretty quiet.

Hard disks

Hard disks are so cheap nowadays. I decided to go for a matching pair of Samsung Spinpoint F1 750gb drives, which I intend to put in a mirrored RAID array (which means that each drive is a copy of the other - just in case one fails). Each one of these (which just got 95% in a Custom PC magazine review) is just £89. Wow.

Optical drives

DVD-RW and DVD-ROM drives are also stupidly cheap now. I had three of them on Scatha just because it saves swapping game discs over all the time. Each drive is only about £15, so I've bought three again. I got three different makes because just occasionally some game's copy protection routine will fail to work with a particular model of drive.

CPU Heat sink and fan (HSF)

I want cooling efficiency and low noise from my CPU cooler. Some research drew me to the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme CPU Cooler. This is one that needs a 120mm fan mounted on its side, so I did more research (yes, you can even research 120mm fans) and settled on the Noctua NF-P12, which is designed specifically for HSF use.

Sound card

I haven't bought a new sound card in ages (Scatha's was the one I originally bought for Ancalagon) and the Soundblaster X-Fi range is supposed to be really good, so I've bought a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer 7.1.

Comments

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Have you considered creating an iso from each game disk, stuffing the isos on your hard drive, mounting them and installing from there? One optical drive needed, many game disks supported at once.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've considered that approach in the past. In fact when I first built Scatha (as a dual boot Windows XP 32 bit / Windows XP 64 bit), I had to use something similar because of some weird incompatibility somewhere in my system that meant that the XP64 version needed to see the disc in the drive (or an image of it using Virtual CD) before it would start.

The trouble with the isos idea is that because of the copy protection on many games nowadays, it just won't let you do this. Also, I probably only have two or three games on the go at any one time.