Hey, I'm sort of a hardware geek and a bit of a math geek 
. I recently bought parts to build my very own gaming monster on a budget. For the grand price of 750 euros I got a:
- MSI 5670 1GB graphics card (I must really say, if you can, get MSI graphics cards, they're more durable and usually have 1% faster memory, not a lot, but it's a bonus nevertheless)
- Quadcore AMD Athlon II at 2900 MHZ (which I overclocked to 3,5GHZ thanks to my motherboard)
- 4GB of 7-7-20 DDR3-1333 GEIL memory (again overclocked, not sure about the current specs)
- 600 watt power supply
- Aerocool VX-E PRO LE (the thing has 5 fans which I keep running nice and fast so it sounds very powerful and manly)
- 1TB Western Digital advanced format drive
And perhaps the best of all, my motherboard, ASRock 890GX Extreme 3.
So what's so special about this motherboard? Well you get some nice things on it, like an auto-overclocker in the BIOS which enhances your entire system performance automatically by 25 or 30%. It also has a OC Tuner for your desktop to go even further if you want, and it's a nice hardware monitor aswell.
Anyway after assembly and installation of Windows 7. I installed the drivers I got on the disc and noticed something. I also had something called ASRock Intelligent Energy Saver.
So I turned it on and it had this nice little power meter proudly stating how much energy it saves.
After some calculations (Yeah, I couldn't resist my math-geek instincts) I knew how much energy the thing saved me. It saved one kilowatt hour of energy every 500 hours the thing was running. Which comes down to about 21 cents every 500 hours. Not, very, impressive at all.
Also, my motherboard comes with Turbo UCC which it proudly exclaims everytime you turn on your PC in a bright blinking logo: TURBO UCC OFF PRESS X TO TURN ON TURBO UCC.
Which wasn't the most appealing offer seeing as it looked like my BIOS was throwing a quick time event at me..
Anyway, I finally turned it on after consulting the manual, appearently what it's supposed to do is turn my quad core into a 6-core by unlocking it's hidden cores. After checking the Windows Experience Index it claimed it had found new hardware. YES I THOUGHT! So I re-ran the score and I came at exactly the same. I checked my task manager and it still only detected 4 cores. So I turned it off again, still no difference.
I guess my CPU just doesn't have any hidden cores. After that I tried the increase system performace by 30%, which worked like a charm, if it didn't totally neglect to overclock my GPU. No matter though I thought, I'll use the MSI afterburner for that. Which btw, DON'T USE IT. It will only overclock your GPU to a minimum because even after unlocking the voltage control, it still had the annoying tendency to shoot the slider back to normal whenever I clicked apply. So yeah I could only overclock so far without needing any additional power. And even when I did that it still made my system very unstable just by being active, it would crash my graphics driver, it would restore shortly after though, but still .
And am I the only one who thinks that Windows is bloody expensive? Down here you'll pay 100 euros for the OEM of Home Premium, for some reason you can't buy Home Basic. A hundred, euros. Seriously, it's just a disc. Microsoft is probably making 1000% profit on it.
Overall, I'm very happy with my new PC, only exception being the harddrive which is 7200 RPM and doesn't run too fast (5,9 on Windows Experience Index, my RAM and CPU are at 7,4 and the rest at 7,1 so yeah, big difference). It makes a nice humming sound which I like, I don't really like those silent PCs. I want it to sound powerful and intimidating, I want to be able to have my eyes hit by a blast of acid and still being able to know if my PC is on from the other side of the house just by listening to it .
I'm not sure if there are a lot of hardware geeks on the escapist, but if there are, I hope you enjoyed this little.. rant/praise/review whatever you'd like to call it.
. I recently bought parts to build my very own gaming monster on a budget. For the grand price of 750 euros I got a:- MSI 5670 1GB graphics card (I must really say, if you can, get MSI graphics cards, they're more durable and usually have 1% faster memory, not a lot, but it's a bonus nevertheless
)- Quadcore AMD Athlon II at 2900 MHZ (which I overclocked to 3,5GHZ thanks to my motherboard)
- 4GB of 7-7-20 DDR3-1333 GEIL memory (again overclocked, not sure about the current specs)
- 600 watt power supply
- Aerocool VX-E PRO LE (the thing has 5 fans which I keep running nice and fast so it sounds very powerful and manly)
- 1TB Western Digital advanced format drive
And perhaps the best of all, my motherboard, ASRock 890GX Extreme 3.
So what's so special about this motherboard? Well you get some nice things on it, like an auto-overclocker in the BIOS which enhances your entire system performance automatically by 25 or 30%. It also has a OC Tuner for your desktop to go even further if you want, and it's a nice hardware monitor aswell.
Anyway after assembly and installation of Windows 7. I installed the drivers I got on the disc and noticed something. I also had something called ASRock Intelligent Energy Saver.
So I turned it on and it had this nice little power meter proudly stating how much energy it saves.
After some calculations (Yeah, I couldn't resist my math-geek instincts
) I knew how much energy the thing saved me. It saved one kilowatt hour of energy every 500 hours the thing was running. Which comes down to about 21 cents every 500 hours. Not, very, impressive at all. Also, my motherboard comes with Turbo UCC which it proudly exclaims everytime you turn on your PC in a bright blinking logo: TURBO UCC OFF PRESS X TO TURN ON TURBO UCC.
Which wasn't the most appealing offer seeing as it looked like my BIOS was throwing a quick time event at me..
Anyway, I finally turned it on after consulting the manual, appearently what it's supposed to do is turn my quad core into a 6-core by unlocking it's hidden cores. After checking the Windows Experience Index it claimed it had found new hardware. YES I THOUGHT! So I re-ran the score and I came at exactly the same. I checked my task manager and it still only detected 4 cores. So I turned it off again, still no difference.
I guess my CPU just doesn't have any hidden cores
. After that I tried the increase system performace by 30%, which worked like a charm, if it didn't totally neglect to overclock my GPU. No matter though I thought, I'll use the MSI afterburner for that. Which btw, DON'T USE IT. It will only overclock your GPU to a minimum because even after unlocking the voltage control, it still had the annoying tendency to shoot the slider back to normal whenever I clicked apply. So yeah I could only overclock so far without needing any additional power. And even when I did that it still made my system very unstable just by being active, it would crash my graphics driver, it would restore shortly after though, but still .And am I the only one who thinks that Windows is bloody expensive? Down here you'll pay 100 euros for the OEM of Home Premium, for some reason you can't buy Home Basic. A hundred, euros. Seriously, it's just a disc. Microsoft is probably making 1000% profit on it
. Overall, I'm very happy with my new PC, only exception being the harddrive which is 7200 RPM and doesn't run too fast (5,9 on Windows Experience Index, my RAM and CPU are at 7,4 and the rest at 7,1 so yeah, big difference
). It makes a nice humming sound which I like, I don't really like those silent PCs. I want it to sound powerful and intimidating, I want to be able to have my eyes hit by a blast of acid and still being able to know if my PC is on from the other side of the house just by listening to it .I'm not sure if there are a lot of hardware geeks on the escapist, but if there are, I hope you enjoyed this little.. rant/praise/review whatever you'd like to call it
.
