Seems like everyone has done one of these posts. I’ve spent the better part of the last week rebuilding my workstation and my test/backup workstation. We had a power surge and my aging test/backup station just wouldn’t start up anymore. So I decided to get a new workstation and bump my current one down the line.

Because of circumstances, I decided I was going to put it together myself. So Friday night after work I went down and picked up everything. Just like Jeff Atwood, I like my workstations to be powerful, but quiet, and a quiet PC starts with the case.

Previously, I’ve been a HUGE fan of the Antec Sonata. I own 3 different Sonata cases of both the Sonata I and Sonata II variety.  My main requirement was that the fans in the case were 12cm with a decent airflow. I’m also not a fan of the flashy cases with lights and windows and the like. Eventually, I decided on the Antec P182. Here it is just barely unboxed.

And the inside:

You can’t really see it here, but on the other side of the case is about a half inch of space to run all of your cables so you don’t have to put them in the middle of the case and block airflow.

As for the components, I was actually quite surprised with how small of a box they all fit in.

For the motherboard, I chose the EVGA 780i motherboard. I guess the biggest draw for me was the 6 SATA ports and dual gigabit networking. Honestly, after years of using AMD processors, I found almost all of the Intel motherboards to be vastly overpriced. It may have made a difference that I won’t buy any motherboard that is not an NVidia chipset.

For my processor, I chose the Intel Core 2 Q6600 Quad Core processor. Compared to other processors it seems to have one of the best price to performance ratios out there.

As stated earlier, I prefer my PCs to be as quiet as possible. This stems from back in my university days when I used to have 2 PCs in my room with me.  This is no longer the case, but the need for quiet PCs has stuck with me. My first preference for CPU heatsink was the Scythe Ninja 2. I had one for a previous computer and loved how quiet it was, coupled with the excellent cooling  it provided.

However, the store near my house happened to be all out of them at the time I went to pick it up, and I didn’t want to have to go across the city to get one, so after reading some reviews I ended up choosing the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme. It doesn’t come with a fan, but I have a few 12cm fans kicking around the house, so I wasn’t too worried. However, after getting things all set up, I ended up not even putting a fan on. That’s right. I now have passive cpu cooling, and I couldn’t be happier.

Considering the catastrophic hardware failure I suffered to put me in this predicament, I’ve decided to begin doing some virtualization. As such, I decided that I needed RAM. Lots of RAM. In fact, I decided to get 8GB of Corsair XMS2 DHX ram.

And since I’m going to be virtualizing, I wanted to get as much performance out of my drives as possible. I’m also really weird about losing ANY data that I have. So I decided I wanted a RAID 0 for performance, and a RAID 1 for redundancy. So I got 4 Seagate 7200.11 500 GB hard drives, and put them in a RAID 0+1 configuration.

Finally, since I’ve recently been playing games a bit more often, I decided to splurge and get a video card beyond what I really need. I settled on the EVGA GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition. I kind of think that to go along with my brother’s thoughts that the longer your Starbucks order is, the bigger a jerk you are, the longer your video card name is, the bigger geek you are. So I guess I’m a pretty big one.

And to tie it all together, the power supply. I ended up choosing the OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply. I decided that with all the stuff I had in there, I was going to need a fairly large power supply, so I chose this one. Added bonus: its fan is a 12cm fan. Yes, I’m that picky about my cooling.

Here is the motherboard with the CPU, Heatsink and RAM mounted:

And finally, here is the entire computer put together:

As you can see, the cables are run behind the back wall of the case. Here is a better view, my socks included:

I spent a lot of time trying to make the cabling as good as possible. I’m a notoriously bad cabler, so I was actually quite impressed with the job that I did here. I just know someone who does this for a living is cringing as I say that too.

In the end since I had so much memory, I ended up putting on Vista Ultimate 64bit. So far it has been blazingly fast and stable. I’ve ultimately been very impressed with it. I haven’t yet had any time to write any code on this new machine, but I’m greatly looking forward to it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Also, I would like to say that if you live in Calgary, Edmonton or Winnipeg and you have any hardware needs, use Memory Express. I’ve been using them almost exclusively since around 2000 and am always impressed. I’ve only had one bad experience when someone was too busy showing a co-worker pictures of girls on facebook to really pay attention to the fact that he was helping me. Once in 8 years, and it wasn’t even that bad. On the other hand, every time I try another store, I wonder why I did it. Take that as you will.

Anyway, if you are a computer person and you’ve never put together your own computer, I greatly recommend you try.