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It’s the moment of truth; everything is connected and you’re ready to hit the power button. But before you do that here’s a quick checklist to make sure you’re ready to go:
• Make sure all parts are properly seated
• Make sure all cables are in place
• Double check front panel connections are correct
• Plug in the power cord
• Plug in the monitor, keyboard, and mouse
• Flip the PSU switch to the on position
When you are sure everything is ready to go, power on the PC! Once the system is up and running, hit the DEL key during startup and you will be taken to the BIOS screen. Many of these options may seem foreign to you, but there are only a few sections that you will need to adjust.
Go to Advanced BIOS Features > Boot Sequence and select the CD/DVD optical drive as your first boot device. Press ESC to go back and while you are here, disable the Full Screen Logo Display and enable Quick Booting to increase your boot time. Once these settings have been made, press F10 and select Yes. The PC will now restart and during the reboot, insert your Windows CD into the optical drive and when prompted, hit any key on the keyboard and Windows setup will begin. Follow the instructions from here on out and you should have Windows successfully installed in a timely fashion.
After Windows is installed, head back to the BIOS and change the boot sequence to boot the hard drive first and the optical drive second. This will prevent the PC from trying to read from the optical drive every time you start the system. Also, head to the Cell Menu in the BIOS and make sure the CPU is running at its stock speed. The FSB frequency should be set at 333MHz and the multiplier should be set to 9 to give you 3GHz, which is the stock speed of this processor. Press F10 again and the system will boot into Windows. In Windows, make sure to install the motherboard, GPU and any other drivers that came with the parts. Some of the hardware may need additional updates online through their respective manufacturers’ websites.
We put this $800 PC up against our standard zero point machine to see how it matches up against a rig that costs twice as much. It’s not hard to guess that the zero point system with a Core 2 Quad and a Velociraptor would beat our budget rig on every test possible, but the $800 wonder did surprisingly well in some of the tests. Premiere Pro tests showed a two minute difference but in Photoshop we only experienced a 4 second difference while Photodex ProShow Producer showed a 41 second difference. MainConcept Reference hit our budget PC hard, though, and further shows that MainConcept is optimized for four cores.
We went into our gaming benchmark with low expectations from our budget card, the Radeon HD 4850. Obviously, it is no match against the dual GeForce 8800 GTX setup in the Zero Point system. With settings cranked up to the max, our card was barely able to spit out 16 FPS in Crysis. While playing Crysis at the highest settings possible and a resolution of 1920x1200 simply isn’t an option, turning down the graphic settings to medium resulted in 43 FPS made the game much more playable. Unreal Tournament 3 managed to give us a stellar 78 FPS. If you’re running at typical 22-inch LCD resolutions, this machine should kick ass.
So what can we say about this all-around budget PC? We can clearly see the difference between a budget system and performance system. However, we can also see that our budget PC is able to run every game and test we throw at it with very respectable benchmark scores. And if you spend a little extra over the $800 budget, performance can easily be increased – upgrades to video card, processor, or memory – but we are very pleased with the setup and performance we have here.
| Zero Point | $800 PC | |
|---|---|---|
| Premiere Pro CS3 | 1,260 sec | 1,380 sec |
| Photoshop CS3 | 150 sec | 154 sec |
| ProShow | 1,415 sec | 1,456 sec |
| MainConcept | 1,872 sec | 2,716 sec |
| Crysis | 26 fps | 16 fps |
| Unreal Tournament 3 | 83 fps | 78 fps |
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savage4naves
December 18, 2008 at 8:10am
Quite a deal for the not so hard core gamers out there. Another 500GB hard drive to set up a
Raid 0 configuration would do the trick.
A day without laughter is a day wasted...
Russtynailz
December 18, 2008 at 7:53am
"We have seen today that dual channel memory on the Core i7 is more than enough to keep it fed with bandwidth, especially since the CPU and memory are communicating with each other directly. There is very little lost bandwidth and it makes better use of all of the dual channel memory than the triple channel memory. However, with Intel’s plans to increase speeds and allow heavier memory usage, especially with IGP based systems, the extra bandwidth will end up being welcomed."
I Jedi
December 18, 2008 at 7:50am
Not bad at all. Certainly does help those who have a limited budget, but still want to play the newest games out there. Great article.
brockalee
December 18, 2008 at 7:04am
Beef_Wellington - A "decent case and 500W power supply" for $45? You're more likely to find a decent prostitute for that much. (Which is to say it's not very likely, nay, impossible.)
Interesting comment on the Antec brand - I too have lost faith in them. Hundreds of dollars and hours of troubleshooting lost to their PS that have crapped out on me. You always get what you don't pay for, yet you don't always get what you do pay for... Such is life.
Primus2112
December 19, 2008 at 6:59am
I had the same frustration, go for a PC power and Cooling or Corsair PSU.
beef_wellington
December 18, 2008 at 6:20am
I just built a new system, and I must say it's pretty impressive. For under $900 you can't beat it. Starting with
- MSI X-58 Eclipse Platinum Motherboard MS-7522 $220
- Core I7 920 2.66GHz $309
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB $145
- 1x Kingston 2GB stick of DDR3 10600 $68
- Generic Case and a decent 500Watt PSU $45
- Western Digital 80GB 3.0 Gb/s $36
- LG 20x SATA DVD+-R Burner $24
Newegg Total $847 plus $30 shipping
I've got it overclocked to 3Ghz with the stock cooler and it's as solid as a rock. It doesn't get hotter than 45 degrees C even when playing Far Cry 2 maxxed out. Granted the hard drive is small, it's a generic case and I've only got 2GB of RAM all of that stuff can be upgraded really easily later on. All in all the price to performance ratio is pretty much outstanding.
Xyonix
December 18, 2008 at 10:05am
Make no doubt about it, the memory controller will run that ram in either single, dual, or triple channel configurations. Although it begs the question of the memory bottleneck of a single dim of ram defeating the purpose of going with that fancy 920 processor. I guess the only way to tell would be to compare benchmarks.
One thing is for certain though, he's left himself one hell of an upgrade path. Very interesting build on a budget for sure.
Nice article from MaxPC too.
silvershad
December 18, 2008 at 7:13am
there is no way that can work. the i7 requires tri-channel memory. aka, you need 3 sticks of memory to run the compy. even if you only have 2 sticks, then it will have boot errors. i dont believe that it will run far cry 2 (let alone boot) without crashing. that is just how the memory controller works on the i7. i dont beleave it. anyone want to back me up?
savage4naves
December 18, 2008 at 8:14am
it's recommended that you use 3GB memory (tri channel memory) for optimal performance but it should run just fine on 2GB. There are some pretty handy tri channel memory bundles out there...
A day without laughter is a day wasted...
silvershad
December 18, 2008 at 9:15am
its not that he has only 2 gb but that he only has one stick. it shouldnt be able to run based off of the i7 memory controller. you have to have 3 sticks of memory. it expects 3 sticks of memory (aka, tri-channel). i have seen ppl run 2 sticks but NEVER 1 stick.
willsmith
December 18, 2008 at 10:24am
Running in single-channel mode works fine. You'll lose some memory bandwidth (1/3rd from a 3-channel config, or 1/2 of a two channel config), but it will work fine. It shouldn't be unstable or throw any boot errors.
silvershad
December 18, 2008 at 12:16pm
thanks for clearing things up. i have had a lot of people say that they have tried to use less than 3 sticks and they keep getting boot errors or crashes. perhaps it was just bad memory or a bios issue.
gothliciouz
December 18, 2008 at 5:52am
i would've gone with the classic Q6600...dualcore is becoming so... out of style.:)
killerxx7
December 18, 2008 at 4:08am
I would swap that Antec psu for a corsair 500hx-tx i dont trust antec when it comes to psu's.
Primus2112
December 19, 2008 at 6:57am
I was having the insuffient power prompt on my Nvidia control panel with a ANTEC 550 NEO... powering the 8800GTX.
After many emails to Antec and how they insisted that it was a overheating problem and not the PSU... I switched my Antec PSU to a generic 500 PSU that I had gotten from Best Buy that powered my non-gaming rig and Voila! My Problems went away. I would go for PC Power and Cooling and not any ANTEC PSU. No more Antec for my power rigs.
bamache
December 19, 2008 at 1:18pm
Why has Antec on there 900 and 1200 cases and here the 300 started putting the PSUs in the bottom of the case? Is it for stability, heh? Show me that it's for thermodynamics in the case... heat rises, right? My, very old, Antec mid-towers came with a 400W, upgraded to 550W that are mounted in the very top.
Any clue? Thanks!
