Showing posts with label home pc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label home pc. Show all posts

Tuesday 5 June 2012

Building a New PC

This post is related to a couple of my recent posts, the New PC Build post that explains the kit I ordered for this build with a little reasoning thrown in for good measure, and the New PC Install Notes post where I dumped a few of my thoughts about the software installation.  However, this post is specifically about the hardware build.

This is what I started out with, a set of shiny new boxes and an old PC which would be gutted back to the case and have only the case reused.


It's a nice Antec case and I couldn't find anything much better around today so didn't see the point in buying another one even if it did mean I had to strip it out before I started.  This is the shot with the case stripped back and all the stuff I used to have in there strewn across the bed I was doing the build on.


I only had 1 case fan in my previous build and decided to upgrade to include 2 fans in this build by including this Antec fan.  It seems to me that a lot of the new cases you buy these days have moved away from the ATX specification for front-to-back airflow as they have all sorts of fans and vents all over the place.  I quite like the idea of front-to-back airflow to give a nice continuous stream of air to the parts inside.


Here's the fan mounted in the front of my old case.  It was supplied with some little rubber grommets for screwless fixing into any case.  However, my case already had the purple clips you can see in this picture in place so I had no need for the grommets and the fan just clipped into place very quickly and easily.


Next up it was the power supply.  Here's the one I chose while still shrink-wrapped.


It turns out this is probably the most over-packaged PSU in the world.  The box is designed to give the wow factor when you open it, the likes of which are usually reserved for high-end consumer products such as a squeezebox, it has a fold-out design in a glossy box to reveal a very neatly packed PSU with all the cables hidden underneath.


The fan fitted pretty quickly and easily as well, the build was going well so far.


One of the things I use my PC for most is for photos.  I decided when putting together a spec for the new machine to include an internal card reader for convenience.  I also wanted to mount a USB 3 socket on the front of the box so this little reader from Akasa seems to fit the bill perfectly.


Here's the card reader after being unpacked and fitted.  It's much like fitting an old floppy drive, being a 3½" device and you simply connect it up to power and in this case the USB 3 motherboard header and it's job done.  I've not included a floppy drive in this build so it also makes the front of the case look less bare.


One of the indulgences of this build, given they're expensive against a traditional hard disk, is the inclusion of an SSD drive.


Here's the content of the box, you get a molex to SATA converter (presumably in case you're fitting it to some ancient power supply) as well as the fixing screws, a SATA cable and conveniently a 2½" to 3½" mounting bracket - which I needed as my case doesn't have any 2½" mounts in it.  You also get the manual and CD but those are still sealed ;-)


This is round the back of the SSD after fitting, inside the case.  You can see it's a pretty simple affair as you'd expect with just a SATA and power connectors on the back.  You can also see how the 2½" to 3½" mounting bracket works from this picture.  The bundle of wires at the top of the picture is coming from the back of the Akasa USB 3 card reader and slot.


There's plenty of better pictures of the Asus P8Z77-V LX board out there, but this is my board fresh out of the box and ready to be fitted into my case.


This is the board in place in my old case.  It was really very easy to fit as I'd removed an old Asus board before fitting this one and all the mounting holes were in exactly the same place.


Here's the new Ivy Bridge 3570K CPU out of the box with some Arcitc Silver 5 thermal compound.  Interestingly the stock cooler doesn't look too bad and is certainly much easier to fit than previous coolers I've worked with.


As I said above, I was pleasantly surprised to see the stock cooler being so easy to fit.  It was (as has been usual for coolers) a screwless installation with the four plastic fasteners secured in place with a simple firm (but not too firm) press towards the motherboard.


Here's the memory in box, ready to be fitted.  As usual for DIMMs it was a pretty undramatic installation process as they slotted in very nicely next to the CPU.  These don't have any huge fins on them for cooling and have a very simple heat sink arrangement making them low profile so I had no worries about overhanging coolers interrupting the fitting of the DIMMs since I would be using all four slots in the above picture.


All in all it was a pretty painless installation process and I've been using the machine for a couple of weeks already without any real issues.

Tuesday 22 May 2012

New PC Install Notes


This post documents how I installed Linux and Windows side-by-side in a dual boot configuration.  This isn't something particularly difficult to do but I wanted to note down what I did so I remember in years to come.  Also, my new PC build contains some very up-to-date hardware (such as UEFI and an SSD drive) and with the combination of the many changes and updates to Fedora 17 (F17) and Windows 7 SP1 (Win7) it made the installation a first of a kind for me in quite a few different ways.

This post may well be updated in the future if I do further installation tweaks and optimisations to the system.  There's also clearly a lot more you can do in terms of system set up than I've written here, installation of drivers in Win7 very much being one of those.  This is simply intended as an installation and base optimisation guide.

Create USB Boot Sticks

Due to a fault with the DVD writer I ordered, it's on its way back to the retailer for replacement.  Not one to let this stop an installation going ahead I wrote install images for F17 and Win7 onto USB stick.

F17 is still in beta with the full release delayed until 29th May at the time of writing.  I tried writing and booting from the KDE Spin Beta Live image but it stopped with a kernel panic during the boot process after the grub screen.  I found using a later copy of the boot.iso (which is the same as a netinst.iso) from the distribution nightly builds solved the problem so clearly whatever the bug is on the beta image it's already been solved.

Creating a USB stick for Fedora is pretty easy these days, no messing around on the command line, I decided to use the liveusb-creator utility.  It fires up a GUI from which you basically just select the iso image you want to write and the USB device to write to, then hit "go" and it does the magic for you.

For me, writing the Windows stick was a little more complicated as it requires a Windows system to run the stick writing utility with the somewhat strange and long winded name of the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.  Fortunately, I had a Windows 7 VM laying around so I used that and writing the image to USB stick was similarly easy as it was for Fedora.  Simply choose the image file to write, the target device to write it on, then hit "go" and it does the magic for you.

Install Fedora 17

Once I worked around the kernel panic bug I mentioned above and booted with a later F17 image, the installation process was a fairly familiar affair.

With the new PC being a UEFI box there was no need to add the GPT partition when partitioning the SSD. I simply created one large root partition and a 4GB swap partition, leaving half the disk unallocated for the Win7 install later.

Since I didn't boot from the KDE spin image, I swapped out the default Gnome desktop (I've tried hard for a long time to Like Gnome 3 but I just don't so I'm moving back to KDE) and did a lot of package selection using the installer to save me messing around later but also to optimise the amount of data downloaded since I would be installing over my ADSL connection.

Once tip when installing Windows after Linux these days is to ensure the os-prober RPM gets installed.  This was done by default for me.  This package allows grub to detect the presence of other operating systems and add boot entries for them in the grub menu.  It'll come in very handy later on...!

SSD Optimisations for Linux

Even with a distribution as current as Fedora 17, the settings chosen for SSD usage are really rather sub-standard.  There are a lot of handy tips and guides out there for which settings you should change or add to the system to enhance both the performance and longevity of your SSD.  I decided to go with the rather comprehensive information provided for the Arch Linux distribution as they have a great wiki page on SSD optimisation.


Update /etc/fstab

I've only got one SSD in my system at the moment, I've removed all my old hard disks with no intention to use them right now as all my data is stored on my NAS.

Add the "noatime" and "discard" options to SSD partitions.  The discard option is the really super-important one as it turns on TRIM.

Mount /tmp as tmpfs by adding a line similar to the following:
  tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=75% 0 0

Doing this allows the system to write temporary files to RAM instead of the SSD.  This will improve performance (RAM is faster than SSD) and reduce writes to the SSD (improving the life of the SSD).  I've added an option to increase the allowable size of the tmpfs file system to 75% of RAM from the default of 50%.  This means I can run compilations or other intensive tasks in RAM without ruining the SSD and get the performance benefits too.  With 16GB main RAM, this will allocate up to 12GB for my /tmp directory.  In normal usage I wouldn't expect to use anywhere near this but it's nice to have it there for when I'm not running too many apps but doing something else such as compiling RPMs.

Change the Scheduler

The recommendation for an SSD is to move away from the default cfq IO scheduler and switch over to the noop scheduler.  This can be done in a variety of ways that are documented in the Arch Linux wiki page I've linked above.  Since I've only got 1 disk in my machine and it's an SSD I changed the scheduler option using grub.

For Fedora 17 this consisted of an edit to the /etc/default/grub file and adding elevator=noop to the existing GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX stanza.  Then rebuilding the grub configuration with the command:
grub2-mkconfig > /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Optimise Kernel Parameters

With 16GB main RAM I'm not expecting to do much in the way of swapping.  However, I did add a couple of lines to /etc/sysctl.conf to make the system less likely to do so:
  # make the system less likely to swap
  vm.swapiness=1
  vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50


Install Windows 7

Similarly to the F17 install, the Win7 install proceeded with little in the way of drama.  I did select the advanced install option when given the chance but that was just to ensure Win7 installed into the free space I had left on the SSD rather than rudely splat my shiny new F17 installation.

And yes, for those of you wondering why I'm installing Win7 at all, especially dual boot rather than in a VM, it's simply for those times when only Windows will do... so gaming mostly I should think.

There's not much else to do with Windows after installation.  Unlike current Linux distributions it's said to  detect the presence of an SSD drive and apply the appropriate optimisations automatically.  Whether this is entirely true or not I suspect I'll never be any the wiser to.

Update the Boot Loader

So Win7 didn't kill off my F17 installation which is always a bonus, but it does assume divine rights over the entire system so writes its boot loader all over the existing grub installation allowing you only to boot windows with no menu options for anything else - not ideal.  Now I need to re-install grub which I've always found easiest to do by booting a rescue Linux CD and using a chroot to the installed OS.  This has changed slightly with the inclusion of grub 2 so here's what I did.

Boot the F17 USB stick once again but this time choose the "troubleshooting" boot option and select to boot the "rescue environment".  Red Hat based systems have always done a great job of rescue environments so you'll boot into a text based system that asks you if you want various things turned on in the rescue environment such as networking (although they assume you want that these days) and if you want to attempt detection of installed Linux systems (which you do).

Drop out to the shell prompt and chroot to /mnt/sysimage.  Then rebuild the grub config (this is where os prober installed above comes in very handy) to include an entry for booting Win7.  Then re-install grub.  Job done.  Once you've booted to the rescue shell, the commands are something along the lines of:

  chroot /mnt/sysimage
  grub2-mkconfig > /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
  grub2-install /dev/sda
  exit
  exit
  reboot

This assumes you want to install grub to /dev/sda of course.  You'll need to exit (or ctrl+d) twice, once to get out of the chroot and once more to return to the rescue interface.  Then choose to reboot from there as it'll cleanly unmount your file systems and do a better job of clearing up than if you simply rebooted the system yourself.

Sunday 13 May 2012

New PC Build

It's been quite some time (about eight years) since I last built a PC for myself and I've been promising to build a new one for quite a while, now I've finally got round to ordering some parts.  Not that I need to, but I've justified the expense as a treat to myself after our annual bonus came through, having never really spent the bonus on anything particularly exciting before.

This is a short post detailing what I've gone for and why, not to show off, but so in years to come I can look back (as I have before) on what was available at the time and I'll have a record I can get to should I forget the detail of which parts are in my current PC.

I'm still the sort of geek that likes to build my own computers.  I like to do the research and put them together but it's still definitely the best way to get a good deal and the only way to get each component to be the exact one you want.  I also still like to have a PC for some reason, I have a laptop for work so I've already got something mobile and a PC just feels like the right solution for home use.

So with no further ado, on order are:

Case: I'm sticking with my old Antec SLK3700 case, okay so strictly speaking this isn't on order.

Processor: Intel Core i5-3570K (£175)
Sandybridge was a real game changer when it came out and firmly handed back the power to the hands of Intel  in the processor market.  I've been waiting for Ivybridge to come out for a while, either so I could buy a cheaper Sandybridge or plump for the Ivybridge if the price difference wasn't too great.  Well, for those who know their processors you'll see I've gone for the Ivybridge option.  Currently it's only 20-odd quid more than the equivalent Sandybridge processor and I think the extra expense is worth it to get the better on-chip graphics capabilities and minor improvements in speed and energy efficiency.

Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V LX (£94)
I'm a sucker for a good Asus board, I've used them in most of my PC builds so that's where I start looking when I want a new machine.  I nearly went for the LE version of this board, it was another 20 quid, but I decided I wouldn't be using the extra features it provides (surround-sound audio and extra sata sockets) so I pocketed the difference and went for this one instead.

Memory: Kingston (4x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMP HyperX (£65)
I very nearly went for some Corsair low profile DIMMs but was swayed by the vendor support list for DIMMs for the motherboard chosen above.  I'm still in shock that you can get 16GB RAM for 65 quid!

Storage: Intel 120GB 520 Series SSD (£140)
I've got 4 hard disks in my PC at the moment, one of which is not connected, another is hardly used and the remaining 2 are coupled together in a striped RAID array in an attempt to get some sort of speed out of them.  Hard disks really are the bottleneck in your PC these days so I've decided to shove in a top notch SSD from Intel.  They're the only manufacturer to offer a 5 year warranty and also came highly recommended (under the Hitachi brand, Intel and Hitachi work together on their SSDs) from one of my respected colleagues in the storage department at work.  120GB should be ample for my storage requirements on the PC, the disk will be split to dual boot both Windows 7 64-bit (for those occasions when only Windows will do and a bit of gaming) and the main stay of Fedora x86_64.  My data other than the operating system already lives on a NAS.

PSU: CoolerMaster 600W Silent Pro Modular (£63)
Unfortunately my current 620W ATX power supply only has a 4 pin CPU connector rather than the currently common 8 pin EPS so I've begrudgingly had to fork out for a new PSU.  This CoolerMaster one gets some decent reviews for being quiet, efficient and delivering good consistent power within the tolerances required by ATX.  The 600W rating will also leave me with some overhead should I decide to whack in a high-end GPU at some point in the future.

Thermal Paste: Arctic Silver 5 (£5)
I've got some really old unbranded thermal paste knocking around somewhere but decided to invest in some decent stuff for this build so the Arctic Silver was the way to go.

DVD Writer: Samsung S222AL 22x with Lightscribe (£15)
I've got 2 optical drives at the moment, both are IDE and with the new breed of motherboards (or not necessarily even the ones that are particularly new) IDE is long since dead so I've opted to get a Sata DVD writer for this build.  Similar to the memory, I'm amazed you can pick something like this up for 15 quid!

Front Case Ports: Akasa USB 3.0 Card Reader (£20)
My current case has a couple of USB ports on the front, I thought it would be useful to throw a couple of USB 3.0 ports to the front of the case too.  This unit also has a built-in multi-card reader so I'll no longer have to hunt for my USB SDHC reader every time I want to copy pictures from my camera.

Case Fan: Antec TrueQuiet 120 (£7)
A 12cm fan for the front of my case, I've got a slot to fit another one in so I thought why not given the heat output I'd expect from this build.

Keyboard and Mouse: Logitech Desktop MK120 (£13)
My current keyboard is PS/2 and has seen better days.  I still like a simple keyboard with none of these funny curves or multimedia keys you can get these days so went for this cheap set from Logitech.

The obvious note in this build is a lack of a GPU.  As I mentioned above, I've left overhead in the power supply to put in a GPU in the future should I choose to do so.  I'm going to do this build and run on the GPU built into the processor.  I'll be interested to see what the performance of the HD 4000 is for my needs, if it's sufficient then great, otherwise I'll be tempted towards an NVidia GTX-560 card.  I guess it all depends on if I do a little more gaming then I do currently (which is next to none on the PC) and whether the HD 4000 is up to the job.

The other thing I've got my eye on is an up-rated cooler from the stock cooler supplied with the 3570K.  I quite like the look of the Corsair H60 Hydro should the need arise.