Inspired by The Chuckle Brothers'
forays into the world of PC building (nice thread Tony and Simon!), I've decided to upgrade my system to something half decent.
My current spec is an Athlon 1.3GHz, 512MB PC2100 DDR, 40GB, 15GB and 30GB HDDs, Gainward GeForce 4 MX440 64MB "Golden Sample", Creative 5.1 sound card, RAID and Firewire.
A few things bother me about my current setup:-
- The beige case is boring, boring, boring
- The noise from the PC is deafening. I want to be able to leave the PC on all the time without upsetting the family
- The case does not have enough 3.5" carriers for all my HDDs - I'll be adding more later!
- the 1.3GHz CPU is a little slow for some of the apps I use (video editing). My present mobo will take up to Athlon XP2000+ but no more.
- I'd like extra USB ports (only 2 at present) and I'd like them front mounted
- a headphone socket on the front panel would be nice
- I fancy a change
So I bought
this case from Ebuyer @ £43.19. As you'll see from the photo, it is a brushed stainless steel case with a perspex cutout side panel. But the crowning glory are the two multicoloured bubble efect tubes at either side of the case, which cycle colour between red, blue, white, yellow and green
Definitely not boring
The case takes 4 5.25" devices and has 4 internal HDD bays and 2 x 3.5 floppy disk type bays. All the edges in the case are rolled - no bloody fingers!
There are only two minor gripes with the case:-
- the drives have to be screwed into place - there are no quick release drive rails
- the supplied 350 watt PSU is a little noisy
My existing CD-ROM and CD-RW don't exactly go with the rest of the case, but EBuyer now have stock of
these Coolermaster Universal Silver Bezels @ £7.96 each, so I have two on order, arriving Friday
Since the Akasa CPU fan I had was incredibly noisy, I replaced it with one of
these @ £11.11. The Coolermaster Aero 7 Lite is an excellent fan, rated for up to Athlon XP 3200+. It has a vertically mounted fan rather than the normal horizontally mounted one. This fan has been redesigned for quieter operation and using the supplied rheostat, you can trun down the speed of the fan to a level of noise and CPU temperature that suits you best. I have set mine for near silent operation which maintains a constant 53 degC temperature.
So I have the case sorted out - all I need now is a new motherboard, CPU and memory. I've been looking at
this Epox 8RDA3G. Does anyone have any experience of this board (or for that matter any Epox board)? I'm probably going to get an
AMD Atlon XP 2600+ CPU and a pair of
Crucial PC2700 DDR memory chips to go with it. What do you think?
