23 Jan 2004 10:45
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Your next PC needs to last two or three years (preferably longer), and be a workhorse capable of running applications ranging from email and browsing (easy), to ripping MP3s and burning CDs (harder), through to editing videos and images, creating music and playing games (maxed out). But to buy off the shelf, or build your own? That is the question. |
When buying off the shelf, you normally start with an affordable base model but, as you option it up -- adding a fast CD/DVD burner, plenty of memory, hard drives, a fast (even if not the latest) CPU and motherboard combination, a good-looking case and a quietening kit -- the price starts to rocket.
At this point, building your own PC can start to look attractive. However, experience suggests that it isn't. By self-building, you can rarely beat PC vendors' prices because the latter get bulk discounts. But you can gain from the ability to shop around for high-quality hardware and, since noise pollution is now one of the biggest issues for desktop PCs, by emphasising quietness.
With a little care, the result can be a machine that costs the same or little more than an off-the-peg model, but which has exactly the specification you need, uses top-quality components and is quieter than anything you can buy off the shelf. What’s more, because you know exactly what’s in it, you should be in a better position to diagnose any problems that arise.
So we decided to evaluate the benefits of paying the same for a self-build as for a top-flight machine from a big PC vendor. For a maximum of £1,500 (ex. VAT), the idea is to create a machine that looks good, is close to silent, and is fast enough to be productive for the next two or three years. To discover how we fared, read on.
Basic platform
At the heart of the machine sit the motherboard and CPU. The first choice was tough: Intel or AMD? The latter offers cheaper computing and has lots of support among the overclocking community. However, that's not primarily what our system is about, so we chose Intel’s hyper-threaded Pentium 4 in order to optimise CPU-intensive tasks such as MP3 compression and video rendering.
One critical criterion for our self-build system is quietness, which is achievable by keeping the interior as cool as possible so as to reduce the need for potentially noisy fans. One of the best ways is to achieve quietness is to ensure that as many features as possible are integrated on the motherboard. The fewer cards you plug in, the better the airflow and the slower fans need to run. Such a system ought to be more stable, too.
So we specified a fully-featured motherboard that included Gigabit Ethernet, which is now cheap enough to be good value and can significantly reduce the time taken to move large files around (especially when you’re backing up). In addition, we wanted Serial ATA RAID to boost the performance of storage -- usually the slowest subsystem.
With that in mind, we plumped for the Gigabyte 8KNXP (£133.61 ex. VAT), whose Intel 875P chipset supports the hyper-threaded Pentium 4 and DDR400 dual-channel RAM. We selected the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 -- the OEM version, since we planned to use a quietened cooling system. This processor isn’t the very fastest available but, in practice, it's not noticeably slower than a 3.2GHz chip and costs considerably less at £155 (ex. VAT). A gigabyte of memory (two 512MB modules costing £91.98 ex. VAT in total) was supplied by Crucial, which is well known for its reliable products and straightforward online memory configurator.
The final element of the basic platform is the power supply unit (PSU). In line with our ‘quiet PC’ philosophy, we chose the chunky but almost silent
Q Technology Ultra-Quiet 350W PSU (£65 ex. VAT), whose slow-spinning 120mm fan creates very little noise.
Internal peripherals
Next up for consideration was storage. We opted for a two-disk RAID0 subsystem that offers a good compromise between speed, noise and cost, and selected a pair of 120GB Seagate 7,200rpm Barracuda SATA drives (£65.11 ex. VAT each), which operate very quietly.
For removable storage, Plextor's £135.32 (ex. VAT) PX-708A is an excellent device, can handle DVD+R/RW and –R/RW media, and writes to CD-RWs at 24-speed (24X) and CD-Rs at 40X. As well as delivering a range of cutting-edge features, the PX-708A is also quieter than most DVD burners.
Graphics next, and the GPU of choice here is ATI’s Radeon 9800 in the shape of a Hercules 3D Prophet All-in-Wonder 9800 SE with AGP 8X and 128MB of DDR memory. Although this is a top-end product costing £165.85 (ex. VAT), it allows the latest games to be played. And just as importantly for our purposes, the All-in-Wonder 9800 SE also includes a TV tuner, allowing our system to be used as a digital video recorder.
External peripherals
Choosing a keyboard and mouse was straighforward enough: we selected Microsoft's new Wireless Optical Desktop Elite, a recent ZDNet Editors' Choice. Not only is this £51.05 (ex. VAT) combo competitively priced, but the keyboard is comfortable and the mouse both innovative (the scroll wheel moves horizontally and vertically) and attractive.
The display was more of a problem since we initially wanted an LCD screen. Flat-panel displays look modern, neat and compact, and can deliver a pin-sharp image. However, many applications for our self-build PC demand a fast pixel response time and high resolution, yet typical 17in. LCD monitors -- which deliver equivalent screen space to a 19in. CRT -- offer native resolutions of only 1,280 by 1,024. LCD technology can also blur fast movements. The final nail in the LCD coffin for this project is the fact that current prices, although falling fast, would bust our £1,500 (ex. VAT) budget.
So in the end, we plumped for a good-quality display from Iiyama -- the £223 (ex. VAT) 19in. Vision Master Pro 454. Although the company couldn’t supply a black-bezelled model, its DiamondTron tube, integrated speakers and 4-port USB hub make it a useful addition to any top-end PC.
Cooling and quietening
We turned to Quietpc.com for both our midi-tower case -- the black Acousticase C6607B, which, although bland in appearance, does a superb job of deadening system noise -- and for cooling/quietening components.
This £85 (ex. VAT) case is superbly finished, with no sharp edges and thoughtful internal design, including removable drive cages. It includes sheets of acoustic deadening material with which to coat internal surfaces, while the removable front bezel includes a washable fine mesh filter. A pair of 120mm temperature-sensitive, transparent fans snapped into the front and rear of the chassis, while our Q-Technology Ultra-Quiet 350W PSU with its heat-sensitive fan system only revs up when things get warm.
With the internal hardware installed, we fitted a CNPS7000A cooling system on the Pentium 4 CPU, which consists of a large, finned heatsink wrapped round a 92mm temperature-sensitive fan. We had no clearance problems with this £29 (ex. VAT) assembly, although the first RAM module has to be in place before the heatsink is fitted. Quietpc.com suggests that few boards are physically incompatible. The heatsink is heavy though, and includes warnings about taking care when moving the system. A £10 (ex. VAT) gold-finned Zalman ZM-NB32J heatsink replaced the 8KNXP’s Northbridge fan, keeping it both cool and quiet.
The Hercules All-in-Wonder 9800 SE graphics card sports a small and rather noisy fan. We removed that, and fitted the Zalman ZM80C heatpipe and ZM-OP1 fan combination to cool the GPU. This £32 (ex. VAT) assembly is simple and Meccano-like, and took just 20 minutes to install. Although this custom-cooled graphics card requires plenty of room inside the box, space wasn't a problem as no PCI cards needed to be fitted.
The hard disk drives, with their skinny SATA connecting cables that minimise airflow disruption, were initially each fitted with a Zalman ZM-2HC1 liquid-filled heatpipe. This acts as a heatsink, and means that the assembly needs to slot into a 5.25in. bay. However, we found that the drives were quiet enough to eliminate this step, and that they could be more firmly mounted in the removable 3.5in. drive cage; we secured them with rubber bushes to reduce residual vibration noise.
Finally, we specified four squidgy QuietFeet (£15 ex. VAT) to acoustically decouple the system case from the floor.
Performance
Having built our system, we needed to ensure that it performed satisfactorily. So we ran the following benchmark:
PCMark 04 This provides 12 system-level tests designed to mimic real-life PC usage, delivering an overall PCMark 04 score. There are also component-level tests covering CPU, memory, graphics and hard disk subsystems.
We compared the results from our self-built PC to an off-the-shelf Dell Dimension 8300 with the following headline specification: a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Processor with Hyperthreading Technology, 512MB of DDR400 RAM, 72GB of RAID0 SATA storage (2 x 36GB), and a 256MB ATI Radeon 9800 XT graphics card. This PC costs significantly more than our self-built system -- £1,852 (ex. VAT) as of 22 January 2004, compared to £1,495 (ex. VAT) -- but gives an indication of today’s leading-edge performance.
All tests were performed under Windows XP Professional at 1,280 by 1,024 resolution in 32-bit colour, unless otherwise specified. The results are graphed below:
Overall, we're pleased with the performance of our self-built PC, which holds its own against Dell's more expensive system quite well. Remember, we weren't seeking to build the fastest PC in the West -- just a high-quality, quiet system that performs well enough across a range of tasks to be good for two or three years. We think we've achieved that. We'll continue to tweak our system and post more benchmarks in due course.
Conclusions
Building our own PC was straightforward, with only the disk drive mountings causing us to change our original plan. Once plugged in, everything worked first time. We transferred data from our old system to the new one using Microsoft's Files & Settings Transfer Wizard, depositing the resulting data on the server, since most commercial solutions seem to offer little more. You can achieve the same result without a server, simply by connecting up the two machines with an Ethernet cable and manually assigning them sequential IP addresses. As long as they're not connected to anything else, it doesn't matter which addresses you use for this purpose.
The new PC’s small noise signature remained in the lower frequencies, which are far less disturbing than higher ones. Better still, it was subjectively very much quieter than the three-year-old 1GHz system it replaced, even though the new system performs much better and generates more heat. It’s worth noting that our customised cooling system made up just over 10 per cent of the total cost.
But is it cheaper to build your own PC? We specified a Dell Dimension 8300 PC as closely as possible to our self-built system, and arrived at a price of £1,504.34 compared to £1,495 (ex. VAT). The Dell PC included a one-year on-site warranty, a copy of Microsoft Works and Windows XP Professional. Note that in our price table (see next page), we’re assuming that you already have a copy of Windows and need only buy an upgrade version, and that you have all the application software you need. Also, we didn’t include any speakers in our system.
So, a PC from a major vendor costs about the same, but comes with a warranty and includes a potentially valuable software bundle. However, if you wanted a warranty, you wouldn’t be self-building, and lots of people already have all the software they need. And by building a PC similar to the one described here, you get the satisfaction of knowing that your system is unique, very quiet and precisely specified to your requirements.
Components and prices
This feature is to be continued, as we upgrade our self-build PC and add to its functionality. Here is the bill of materials for the current model:
| ZDNet UK’s self-build PC: model 1.0 | |||
| Component |
Unit price |
Quantity |
Total price |
| Acousticase C6607B system case |
£85.00 |
1 |
£85.00 |
| Zalman Super Flower CNPS7000A CPU heatsink |
£29.00 |
1 |
£29.00 |
| Zalman ZM-NB47J Northbridge heatsink |
£10.00 |
1 |
£10.00 |
| Zalman ZM80C-HP & ZM-OP1 VGA heatsink and fan |
£32.00 |
1 |
£32.00 |
| 120mm Acoustifan chassis fan |
£17.00 |
2 |
£34.00 |
| QTechnology 350W Ultra-Quiet PSU power supply unit |
£65.00 |
1 |
£65.00 |
| 4 x QuietFeet (large) insulating feet for system case |
£15.00 |
1 |
£15.00 |
| Gigabyte GA-8KNXP motherboard |
£133.61 |
1 |
£133.61 |
| Intel 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with HT Technology CPU |
£155.00 |
1 |
£155.00 |
| Crucial DDR400 RAM (512MB module) system memory |
£45.99 |
2 |
£91.98 |
| Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA drive 120GB hard disk |
£65.11 |
2 |
£130.22 |
| Hercules 3D Prophet All-In-Wonder 9800 SE graphics card |
£165.85 |
1 |
£165.85 |
| Plextor PX-708A multiformat DVD burner |
£135.32 |
1 |
£135.32 |
| Iiyama Vision Master PRO 454 19in. CRT monitor |
£223.00 |
1 |
£223.00 |
| Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Elite keyboard and mouse |
£51.05 |
1 |
£51.05 |
| Microsoft Windows XP Professional upgrade operating system |
£139.00 |
1 |
£139.00 |
| TOTAL (ex. VAT) | £1,495.03 |
||
Acknowledgements
ZDNet UK would like to thank the following companies for their assistance with this project:
Crucial (RAM)
Hercules (graphics card)
Iiyama (monitor)
Intel (processor plus a test kit including motherboard, RAM and drives)
Microsoft (Windows XP Professional, wireless keyboard & mouse)
Plextor (CD/DVD burner)
Quietpc.com (cooling/quietening components)
Seagate (hard drives)
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