I decided it was time to replace the kids computer I wrote about here. My daughter wanted to use the Adobe suite of apps and my son is playing more demanding 3D games. The nice thing about upgrading the machine is I only need a new motherboard, cpu and memory and kept everything else from the old machine. Keeps costs down.
COMPONENTS
Didn't take much research to decide that the Core i5-750 was the way to go. At £150, it's much cheaper than getting a Core i7 and it's only marginally slower. In some benchmarks, it can match a Core i7. Best of all, it looks like it overclocks well. I hope to crank it up from 2.66 to 3Ghz.
Using the Core i5 commits me to socket 1156 which at least only uses two sticks of DDR3. Again, this keeps costs down. It turns out that it's a waste of money using high spec low latency memory. It just doesn't make a real world difference. I bought some cheap Crucial TwinX DDR3 1600. The 1600 was just slightly more expensive that 1333 but I hoped it would be me a bit better overclocking margin. I went with Crucial since it has wide distribution in the UK and would be easier to match later on if I need some more.
As usual, the hardest part was choosing a motherboard. I finally chose an ASUS P7H55D-M EVO microATX board. It reviewed well, was only about £90 and you can trust Asus for quality. I also just like the fact that their website is fast. Gigabyte has a terribly slow website which is frustrating if you want to download drivers. I also decided I don't need all the expandability of an ATX board and I can later downsize the case with only a uATX board. A nice little bonus is the board features USB 3.0 and firewire. The biggest downside is that the H55 chipset is very new which means that the BIOS and drivers can be a bit flakey. Later on, I can see moving this motherboard into a Media PC. The onboard graphics are completely unnecessary for me but might be useful later on.
For the rest of the PC, I reused older components. The graphics card is a Radeon 4670. PSU is an old Seasonic 300 watt job. Antec case.
BUILD
Putting the hardware together and getting it to boot into the BIOS was dead easy. I upgraded to the latest BIOS (0806) as a preemptive measure given how new the chipset was. Next I installed two hard disks and set them up with two operating systems: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit (productivity apps) and Vista Ultimate 32bit SP2 (gaming).
The bad news is I've got infrequent freezes and reboots in both systems.
Not sure what the exact cause is yet. I've got all the latest drivers - since the initial release, Asus has made a new chipset driver and USB 3.0 driver available. I've disabled USB 3.0 in the BIOS so that isn't it. Upgraded the chipset driver but it didn't fix it. My guess is that it's either the video driver, sound driver or chipset driver. Both OS's are completely uptodate too.
So I'm watching to see how stable it is and hopefully a new driver will appear that fixes it. Until it's completely stable, there's no point starting to overclock it but it's stable enough for the kids to use.