Last week I’ve assembled my newly bought PC. I didn’t want to spend more than 800 EUR so it doesn’t contain the latest bleeding edge technology but on the Windows Experience Index (WEI) it scores 7,4 out of 7,9:
The boot time from “power on” to “Windows 7 desktop” is 37 seconds due to the SSD 🙂
My wife and I will both work a lot with the new PC so it runs almost all day. Because of that I wanted hardware that is both silent and has a low power consumption. I ended up buying the following pieces which cost me exactly 780,89 EUR. I bought everything from Mindfactory, except the SSD (Amazon) which wasn’t available.
- Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 2.1
- CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T AM3
- CPU cooler: Scythe SCMG-2100 Mugen II
- RAM: Kingston ValueRAM KVR1333D3N9K2/4G PC3-1333 4GB
- Graphics card: Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 OC (PCI-e, 1GB DDR 5, MINI-HDMI, 2x DVI)
- HDD (System): Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB
- HDD (Data): Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 8,9cm 3,5″ SATA 7200RPM 32MB Cache
- DVD: LG GH22NS50 black bulk S-ATA
- Case: Sharkoon Rebel-9 Economy Edition ATX
- Power: be quiet! Pure Power 530W
The PC is almost completely silent even if the case is open. The loudest noise is the harddisk (not the SSD!) access. If I put it under the table you cannot hear a thing (except for the harddisk). On average, the PC consumes 80 Watts under “normal” load (Windows, Office, etc.). Under full load (Gothic Arcania, 1920×1680 pixels, full details) the power consumption goes up to 250 Watts but it remains almost as silent as before. Here are two photos of the PC’s hardware. The CPU cooler is humongous, between the heatsinks and the case there is only about a centimer of space.
Thanks to Torsten Weber, Scott Hanselman, and PC Games for the inspiration on silent and powerful hardware respectively.