Aesthetics: It looks quite neat and has a pretty small footprint on my desk.Performance: It runs TF2 at 1920x1200 at around 20-40 FPS which is fine by me. Maya loads a lot faster but Photoshop only marginally more. It seems to run fairly nippy but then a fresh Windows install always feels nimble compared to a stale one.
Noise: It's extremely quiet, but that's all pretty subjective isn't it? Well, I can only notice the noise when it's the only sound being made in the room. Low volume music drowns out the hum pretty well. My PS3 is an order-of-magnitude-and-a-half louder. Never hearing data being accessed from the hard drive is bliss! The 'crunking' sound of a HDD really ruined the tranquility of my previous PC.
I worry about being far too obsessive about noise, but something about silent stuff attracts me. I might buy some acoustic padding for the inside of the case and see if that helps at all (without affecting the thermal conductive properties of my case too much).
Heat: Most of my case is lukewarm, the only real source of heat is my graphics card. My HSF is lukewarm to the touch most of the time (I used good thermal paste and applied it as appropriately as I could). My PSU is very efficient and doesn't need to draw that much power either. SSDs emit no real heat at all. I'm no expert though, so I plan to do a stress test on it sometime and see if it all survives.
Problems: For some reason my PCI wireless network adapter isn't working anymore. I hope it isn't the PCI slot that's not working! I've ordered a new card and am using a spare USB adapter meanwhile.
Conclusion: So-so. I'm generally pleased with the results. I'm trying to convince myself that it's OK for my PC to emit a whisper of noise. I can play TF2 at 1080p adequately. If I were to build another PC I wouldn't go for mATX again, it's just too small for a real PC. I don't regret making it though, I think I've actually got what I wanted!
2 comments:
That's cool. How is the SDD performance compared to HDD? Did you install Vista or XP? Have you considered installing Linux or Hackintosh?
Wifi PCI cards are rare things. I got one for my Grandad years ago and it never worked in Windows, ever. It did work in Linux but the driver wasn't integrated into the kernel and you had to issue commands to manually load the firmware, set the channel, etc. Last year I installed Ubuntu for him though and it just worked with no configuration.
I don't notice any life-changing improvements in performance by using SSD to be honest. Nothing seems a magnitude of difference faster. Some apps load faster but that's more likely to be me having 3x more ram and a faster CPU than previously.
I haven't considered installing a non-Windows distro, definitely not out of the question once I get some more HDD space though.
If you don't use a Wifi PCI card, what else can you use? I'm currently using USB wireless, but I want to go back to PCI since I seem to get a lot of lag!
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