Building A PC

Some of my reasons.

Another blog post about computer price trends.

Here’s one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1515357 Note that this is not necessarily a good CPU from my first tip, but I’ll let you find the convergence. But you can see that such things are out there. In one swoop, you get a better deal and solve any incompatibility problems between CPU and mobo. I picked this one because I wanted to make the point that I’m kind of a fan of ASUS. But use product ratings by customers wisely. They are worth paying attention to.

My very rough thinking these days (2015) is that AMD gives better performance per purchase dollar while Intel gives you better performance per watt. This may be backwards, but it highlights the thinking you should be doing. Note that a better performance per watt means a quieter machine, other things being equal.

Too bad they don’t make these any more: Asus Fanless MiniITX C60M1-I D2M0CS077437

I used to have a superstition about buying Asus. Now it is a policy thanks to nonsense like this from Gigabyte. You’d think that 5 years later, they might be shipping boards that weren’t so broken, but you’d be wrong.

Next you need memory for the motherboard in question. One trick here is to look at the "others who bought X also bought" and look for memory. Note this is not fool proof. You have to double check. But it gets you started. You can also go to http://crucial.com and generate a compatibility report. Memory has about a dozen parameters that all must be compatible. But annoying as this can be, it’s actually not too hard in practice to home in on the right modules.

Note that CAS (Column Access Strobe) timings are in clock cycles (so lower is generally better) but may be misleading depending on the clock speed. For example, compare two units from the same vendor; which is better if the price per byte is identical?

This shows the operation times in nanoseconds (so lower is better) for 1st, 4th, and 8th word access operations. These are actually very similar and it probably doesn’t matter. I would tend to favor the 1600 because I would assume (incorrectly?) that it enjoys a greater back compatibility.

a good Wikipedia chart breaking it down.

Keep in mind physical setting too. Many times memory modules with fancy cooling fins have a hard time coexisting with a large CPU cooler/fan.

NOTE It looks like Intel’s Optane memory system is toxic. Here they say this.

Then you need a power supply. I don’t have a brand name here, but I look for user reviews that gush about the quietness. You’ll thank me.

Here’s a new thing to think about - just had a protracted power outage where 1/2 of my computers died and half didn’t. The odd thing is that not all power was lost; the voltage was cut in half down to 50-60VAC. I don’t know exactly how to test for this but handling a robust diversity of input conditions should be considered worthwhile.

This modular Seasonic PRIME Ti 600 Fanless with a 12 year warranty may be worth $200. Apparently the cheaper ones (which I have used) are being phased out.

Fans suck. Fans fail about twice as often as mechanical hard drives and for often the same reason, mechanical wear. Fans are noisy and bulky. If at all possible it is best to prioritize fanless designs. If that is not possible, buying high quality fans or parts using them is not wasted effort. The larger the fan is, the slower it can turn to move the same air. The slower it turns the quieter it is. The small high speed fans are not just noisy, but obnoxiously high-pitched and especially prone to failure. This can be especially awful on GPUs with small fans.

Here’s a nice site to get ideas to avoid the problem entirely: http://www.fanlesstech.com/

As an example of a reasonable choice for modest needs, I have on my desk an "Arctic Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2" which still seems quiet enough for me after a year or so. https://www.amazon.com/ARCTIC-Freezer-Pro-Rev-Multi-Compatible/dp/B002G392ZI

You need a hard drive, but this is not really a critical component. You can freely change this around any time. Consider buying two 1.5TB drives instead of a 3TB drive. Or buying a small solid state drive and a large mechanical drive (speed and capacity respectively). For hard drives, a long warranty is good (3 years or ideally 5). Even a very small $50 hard drive will get you going just fine and you can add drives as you need them for actual capacity. Or start by running only Linux from USB sticks and buy hard drives when the need arises and is better specified.

Most motherboards have a built in video chip (the GPU I spoke of). But this will often be an Intel graphics chip which are much lamer than Nvidia or ATI. I would strongly favor Nvidia which is really the gaming standard (and important for molecular visualization in my case). Be careful with video cards since they often have little fans which means faster rotation to do the job. And that means higher pitch (whiney). These fans are premounted on the card. Try to find reviews that are happy with the low noise of the GPU fan. Also, lots of video RAM is good (1GB should be a minimum these days probably). I actually like the GeForce 8400 http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-Passive-Graphics-01G-P3-1303-KR/dp/B004KABG18 Because it is fanless and dirt cheap. These cards never fail and have surprisingly great performance (as good as a PS3, for example). But check specs and see what the latest hype is. I see that this has DirectX 10 and you might want DirectX 11 these days for the new breed of games that will be coming. If you’re a molecule worker, these passive cards work great.

My blog post thoroughly detailing my attempts to evaluate and compare graphics cards. Includes a side by side comparison video.

Wondering how awesome your awesome GPU is? Check out GPUBench.

What do the inscrutable GPU model numbers mean?

What does the Ti on Nvidia card models mean? (The card I’ve used since about 2016 is a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and it runs my 4k display adequately.)

Then you need a case. It can be decent to buy all the other stuff first and assemble it on a table top and just make sure it all works. Then its simply a matter of buying a case with the right "form factor", probably ATX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_form_factor Oh, and make sure your power supply and motherboard agree about form factor.

I recently was impressed with a be quiet Silent Base 800 case that went out of its way to dampen vibrations. A lot of time noisy computers are a result of resonant frequencies from fans and hard drives vibrating the panels of the case like a speaker element. Cheap low tolerance, light weight cases will suffer more from this problem. Expensive cases will suffer from being expensive.

Here’s an interesting case, SuperMicro 7045A-WTB, for a serious build that can be a super tower or rack mount. It has an optional rail kit.

People typically spend huge sums of money fussing over the details of their computer and then neglect the most important part of the build, the human interface. Unless you’re building a server that is only ever accessed remotely, you need to physically interact with it. If you are a toddler, habitual drunkard, or farm animal it probably doesn’t matter much what kind of keyboard you use; in such cases you can probably even use something nonsensical like a mouse or a touch screen. But if you are a serious computer professional you will (by my definition of that term) be a proficient and exacting touch typist with specific and stringent keyboard requirements.

If you don’t know what the difference between a membrane keyboard and a mechanical keyboard is, then read this article. If you believe you are a serious computer professional and you’ve accepted that such people require mechanical keyboards, the next question to tackle is which kind of switch do you want.

To learn all you need to know to get started in the world of keyboard nerdery, this fine video is fine.

I’m pretty sure I’m currently using Cherry Brown switches. Here is a collected summary of what I know about switches.

The key caps are the things between the switches that you physically touch with your fingers. You can get replacement key caps to better suit your ergonomic preferences or color highlighting requirements. You may see keycaps made of ABS plastic or PBT which is another type of plastic Polybutylene terephthalate. PBT may be better for outdoor applications as ABS does degrade in UV (this SD company should know).