Pardon my partition, but my Egg has arrived...

[AE1PT]

I had been planning an upgrade of my office machine for a couple months now. Thinking to make it less painless as a total 'at once' cost I had started to pick a few things up. A box copy of Win7 Pro 64 topped the list--as I did not want to get stuck with 8 somewhere later in the year. And surely the prices would drop in the later months of this year for big ticket components...:snooty:

We came back from 4 days in NYC to find my beloved stuck in boot with the message "system disk missing or corrupt. Insert boot disk and restart." Fuck. Seems that something cobbled up the partition table. Time to bite the bullet and build the new system. I just could not get very excited about 3-4 days of reloading and configuration to get back to where I was. And the silly thing? The OS side had been RAID 1 until I needed a disk one night to get the wife's workstation back up again and went back to single disk boot...

So on the way is the following:



Intel i7 3770 Ivy Bridge CPU
ASRock Extreme6 Z77 mobo
some G.Skill DD3 2400 sticks @ 16gb
and the usual hardware crap to pull it all together


Oh, and 3 WD Black 500g disks (2 for RAID, 1 spare) for the OS... This marks my departure from AMD to Intel. The i5 in my ThinkPad Edge sold me--as did the performance of the i7 platform. This weekend will see the build!:cool2:

[WØTKX]

Partition Commander saves my ass every six months or so.

[AE1PT]

I have downloaded that as a tool.

The Newegg box arrived yesterday, and after numerous interruptions I started the OS install around 10PM. No dead memory, CPU, or mobo issues. UEFI bios (such as it is) is a dream with a Windows box. I have had the install for Office Enterprise 2010 through work--so did the upgrade from 2007. Outlook has been a pain in the ass with porting accounts from the registry (10 POP3 + 2 Exchange) but my google fu has been strong.

Just loaded Photoshop CS 5.5. Double clicked on the icon after installation and my chair was blown 2 feet backward by the speed of the load. Sweet Babbah Jaysoos--7 seconds. Image transformations are done before I can get my finger off the mouse button. Loaded ESRI ArcGIS 10.1 next, and set up a geocode of my 5 county service region with survey demographics and zips. Typically it has taken about 2-3 minutes to crunch this and spit out a map with layers. 38 seconds...

I did not put the EVGA GeForce GT 430 card I had been using with the other mobo in--opting instead to see what the Intel HD 4000 onboard graphics would do. Mudder O' Gawd! Running dual monitor mode and the 'pop' on my matched Hanns-G monitors is startling. The 430 will stay with the Biostar board I replaced when I put it all together for the shack upgrade. I see another card of somesort in the near future--I already have another matching monitor ordered and in my hands next week. That will put me back to 3 displays (what I had used before with standard VGA aspect monitors). Not being a gamer any more strident than solitaire, my interest in pipes and shaders is limited.

Video is nice. Did a quick h.264 encode of a 6 minute training video I shot. I was sitting like a dumbass waiting for it to finish--only to find it was already done... Regular video is super as well. This has given new life to my porn collection.

[AE1PT]

The build is finally done. Some things got replaced as time went on, such as the G.Skill RAM. Just could not get it to stay stable at any timings or voltage. RMA and replace with Kingston.

I finally decided on a GeForce GTX 650 Ti graphics card. With what I will ever do it just did not make sense to enter the $300+ market with a jump to a 680, and the 660/70 did not really add a lot for my purposes as the 650 is the same architecture and engine with fewer resources.

The CPU is stable on OC at 3900MHz (and anything below), 4100MHZ, and 4300MHZ. I have it running at 3900MHZ right now. To do more the stock cooler would have to be replaced--now it it fine. RAM is running at 2600MHz, and it is stable as a rock. Running Prime95 in any of the 3 modes does not push the cores beyond 72C at 8 workers, and with 4 workers at 100% temps stay in the 50s. Graphics hardly break a sweat. Of the three monitors, two are on the graphics card (center & left), and the right (docking/boot-start screen) is running off the native Intel HD 4000 from the CPU and Z77 bridge. Most everything except the hard disks are scoring a 7.8 or 7.9 on the WEI. Still need to pick up a good 1-1.5KVA UPS, as mine is very old and the batteries are about shot.

The final lineup:

.



Intel i7-3770 3.4/3.9GHz Ivy Bridge CPU
ASRock Z77 Extreme6 SATA III/PCIe 3.0 MB
Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3 2400 RAM 16GB (4 x 4GB)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB DDR5 PCIe 3.0 x16 Video




WD Black 500GB SATA III HD
WD Black 750GB SATA III HD
WD Black 1TB SATA III HD




ASUS 24X DVD Burner
LG 14X Blu-Ray Burner




SeaSonic 620W Bronze 80 Certified M12II Modular PS
StarTech 4 Port Powered USB Hub 3.0 PCIe x1
AFT XM-5U Internal Kiosk Memory Card Reader
(3) Hanns-G HL249 24” LED Monitors


I figure that build will last for quite a while... :cool2: