It's here :)

JohnMalcolm1970

JohnMalcolm1970

Active member
I had my PC set to be delivered to my parents' house as I wasn't sure what day of the week it would appear. Luckily today was also my day off work these week, so I headed over their about an hour before the DPD time slot and amused myself with playing with their labradoodle Murphy. The van rolled up within the alloted time and the heavy box was delivered. I didn't realise how big the box was until I had to cram it into my car. I didn't realise how heavy the box was until I had to carry it up several flights of stairs to my flat. That's my exercise for the week.

Before I actually get it set up I've some stuff to do - backing up data on old PC and giving my computer room a right good tidy (we're talking several hours btw). There will be another round of images once it's set up and in place as well as a full review of the PC. I also ran a few tests and benchmarks on my old PC involving Blender, which I'm going to carry out again on the new one.

Here's the first round of photos for now though (in no particular order). Spec is at bottom under photos.

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Case: InWin CENTINAL BUC BLACK GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™i5-2500 Quad Core (3.30GHz, 6MB Cache) + HD Graphics
Motherboard: ASUS® P8Z68-V LX: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, ATI®CrossFireX
Memory (RAM): 16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (4 X 4GB)
Graphics Card: 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti - 2 DVI,HDMI,VGA - 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk: 2TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD2002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive: 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Memory Card Reader: INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply: 600W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£59)
Processor Cooling: SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE INTEL CPU COOLER (£19)
Sound Card: ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Facilities: 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options: 6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Operating System: Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Office Software: NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus: NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Warranty: 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Delivery: STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time: Standard Build - Approximately 10 to 12 working days

Processed Date 03-02-2012
Pre-Production Date 07-02-2012
Build Date 22-02-2012
Test Date 28-02-2012
QC Date 28-02-2012
Awaiting Dispatch Date 29-02-2012
Dispatch Date 29-02-2012
 
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L

lolliver

Member
That looks great! Darn quick delivery too.

Your cat looks quite pleased with its box too =)

Out of interest why was there such a long time between the build date and the test date?
 
JohnMalcolm1970

JohnMalcolm1970

Active member
I think it was one of the PCs affected by the shortage of WD Caviar black HDDs. I'd imagine eveything but the drive was in and waiting on the HDD delivery come.
 
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lolliver

Member
Ahhh I see! I'm paranoid about everyone else's build/delivery times at the minute =P
But yeah, awesome rig, hope you enjoy it!
 
JohnMalcolm1970

JohnMalcolm1970

Active member
:) I'm still in the middle of the installathon stage, but I'm very, very happy with this new desktop. It's now up and running and in it's new home. I'm not sure about keeping it on the desk like this though. On one hand I want it to be off the floor where dust tends to gather, and I want to look at it and show it off, but on the other hand, I fear my cats might try and use it as a launching pad to get onto the top of my bookshelves. They are pretty light and the PC is fairly heavy... but I'm still not sure.

It's running every game I've thrown at it excellently: Skyrim looked good before, but it looks amazing now (added the HD textures thingie as well), Battlefield 3 looks fantastic, and some of my older games like Arma2 run very well also with most of the settings maxed out. My problem now is having too many games that I want to reinstall and try on this PC: Silent Hunter 5, Empire Total War, Napoleon Total War, Red Orchestra 2, TF2, Tootal War: Shogun 2, DCS Blackshark and A10 to name but a few.

Applications are likewise running very smoothly. Photoshop CS5 is blindingly fast. Sometimes when working in Photoshop I change my ruler measurements. When I change them to centimetres, I often forget when going to do a crop meaning to specifit a pixel x pixel size. Photoshop resized an image to 1200cm x 1200cm so fast that I missed it until I went to 100% scale.

Painter 12 likewise is a dream to work with. I was lucky enough to be a beta tester for Corel on Painter 12. Many of the niggly performance and stability issues have just vanished. The new Real Watercolor brush category used to be a bit laggy at times. Not any more. The load time which was an issue on my last PC has disappeared too. Now I just wish Corel could harness people's GPUs as Adobe does with Photoshop. Painter is my favourite digital art tool and this new PC from PCS has made it much more enjoyable to use. The money for buying this PC came from a couple of cheques for freelance illustration, so it's heartening to know that money has been well spent and will assist me in future jobs.

Blender is running very well, and the new render engine, Cycles, which uses CUDA cores is dramatically faster. I ran a benchmark on my old PC, which was 200 passes of an image of a car, with lots of shiney reflective surfaces and stuff like depth of field. I ran it once using the CPU and once using the GPU. The benchmark is here is anyone is interested.

Old PC CPU render: 16 minutes and 17 seconds (AMD Phenom 9600 quad core @ 2.30GHz)
Old PC GPU render: 5 minutes and 29 seconds (Nvidia 9800 GT)
New PC CPU render: 6 minutes (i5-2500)
New PC GPU render: 1 minute 3 seconds (GTX 560 ti 2GB)

Now I have no excuse not to actually properly starting to learn Blender.

Overall I am very happy with PCS. :) The only niggles are very small or insignificant things, which I'll mention anyway:

  • I ordered on 3rd February. My PC didn't go into the Building stage until 22nd February. I know now that this was down to PCS being very, very busy. I had to phone up to get this info though. It might be better emailing customers to explain possible delays due to factors like this.
  • My PC went into Building on 22nd February and stayed there until the 28th February. This was due to PCS awaiting delivery of WD Caviar Black drives. I found this out from reading these forums, but again, I think it would have been helpful to have had an email explaining this.
  • In both the above cases, if I'd known earlier that I was facing a slight delay I might have considered fast tracking my build if possible.
  • When I unboxed the PC i noticed the expansion slot cover above the video card was missing (seen in the third picture down in my first post). There was however a loose expansion slot cover in the welcome pack. I thought no more of it and had been happily using the PC for a while and I took the side off to take a lok at something. I suddenly noticed to my horror that there was a loose expansion plate cover wedged in there. I switched off and carefully removed it. You can see it in the second to last image in my first post wedged behind the blue metallic Z68. I'm 100% sure that this was either a simple accident or something that could have happened in transit - the only reason I bring it up here is to remind people to give the inside of their cases a good visual examination when getting them.
  • I have some SATA HDDs that I wish to put in the new PC. The case has numerous yellow plastic cages to take drives. I'd assumed that once a drive was prepped by screwing it into one of those, I'd be able to simply slide it back into place. I thought there'd be a plate with power and data connectors that it would click into... otherwise drive swapping would require the other side of the case to come off as well and cables to be unplugged. There's a hotswap SATA thingie externally on the top of the case which does this but I'm getting BSODs when plugging anything into it. I've emailed support asking for some advice on both matters - What do I need to buy to connect additional HDDs and why the BSODs when using the external one. Both show my ignorance of SATA and reasonably modern computers. It's been a long time since I bought and added a drive to a PC or built one for that matter.

Anyway, as I've perhaps mentioned... I am delighted and it was well worth the wait. Here's a pic of my computer in it's new home :) and another couple showing both side of the case in the HDD bay areas and the top SATA connector.

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vanthus

vanthus

Member Resting in Peace
To install your sata hard drives you will need sata cables,
there should be spare power connections available unless your PSU is modular.
I know with my case I need to take both sides off,yours might be different
 
JohnMalcolm1970

JohnMalcolm1970

Active member
JohnMalcolm1970 said:
I have some SATA HDDs that I wish to put in the new PC. The case has numerous yellow plastic cages to take drives. I'd assumed that once a drive was prepped by screwing it into one of those, I'd be able to simply slide it back into place. I thought there'd be a plate with power and data connectors that it would click into... otherwise drive swapping would require the other side of the case to come off as well and cables to be unplugged. There's a hotswap SATA thingie externally on the top of the case which does this but I'm getting BSODs when plugging anything into it. I've emailed support asking for some advice on both matters - What do I need to buy to connect additional HDDs and why the BSODs when using the external one. Both show my ignorance of SATA and reasonably modern computers. It's been a long time since I bought and added a drive to a PC or built one for that matter.
Click to expand...

Solved my problems. I've got myself a bunch of Molex to SATA power cables. There are free SATA power cables, but they are very neatly cable-tied. There are plenty of Molex power cables tucked under the drive bay area, so I'd rather put a couple of them to work.

The PC crashing when plugging SATA drives into the external connector on the top of the case also has been fixed. Hotplugging wasn't enabled in the BIOS. I've enabled it for everything. Is there any disadvantages to having this turned on? Using that docking area makes checking HDDs contents prior to putting them inside a breeze.
 
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