Agnivo Roy

Yes, even being a technology enthusiast, I was using a pretty outdated PC as my work desktop. Personally, I am a non believer of frequent upgrading; why scrap a thing while it servers you right? It was a Socket-A AMD Sempron 2200+ on Biostar nforce2 board based system I assembled myself in late 2003. It served me faithfully for more than 4 years working avg. 16 hours a day in this hot tropical Indian climate (yes, I don’t have AC). The mainboard failed in early August and system won’t even power on. As I need to remain online everyday due to my nature of work and profession, I needed to quickly think of some hardware, go buy and assemble them to get back to my online life and work ASAP.

I’m a believer of researching and hunting for reviews online before purchasing any item; but my PC was dead. Gladly, I got the indication that the PC was going to fail sometime ago and had made a rough list of components I should upgrade to. My work didn’t involve high resource consuming applications; I’m not a gaming  freak too. Still, I wanted to build something that’s stable, reliable,value for money yet is modern enough and has room to upgrade if I decide to game a bit.

Getting quality stuff in this part of the world is hard, especially in the state of West Bengal.People here seek for low priced items and as a result, Kolkata has become the dumping ground of cheap and crap computer parts. You won’t get premium stuff even if you’re willing to pay as there is no demand and suppliers are unwilling to order one just for you. However, my dealer has a good relationship with me for years and spent hours over the telephone to bring my desired stuff from the distributors directly. I thank him for his efforts. I spent total Rs. 32110 or about U$ 800 on this PC.

Here’s what I bought finally :

CPU :

Yea, I’ve been a fan of AMD but their recent down going trend made me choose Intel. I was stuck between Pentium Dual Core and Core2Duo range. I didn’t need bleeding edge CPU but performance for value. That way, PDC was a clear winner but it had lower FSB, cache and is nearing EOL. The 1333MHz Core2Duo’s were costlier. The FSB800 allendale ones were priced close to the E7200.

I was looking for a CPU that runs cool and consumes less power. The budget penryn (45nm) E7200 was a clear winner among the C2D range due to it’s newer 45nm architecture with metal gate fabrication technology, decent speed (2.53Ghz), acceptable FSB (1066MHz), cache (3MB), TDP of 65W and good value for money. I had to shell out Rs. 5500 or US$ 135. Warranty: 3yrs.

Mainboard :

Lots of options available for Intel mainboards with wide range of chipsets and features. Intel original mainboards caught my eye. these have good warranty and are priced right. Though you can’t tweak the BIOS like you can do on ASUS etc. boards, it hardly matters for me. I don’t overclock or do crazy stuff with my PC, so who cares! I needed a stable board that is built using good quality components selling at good price.

Chipset wise the Intel G35 looked quite well and I chose the Intel DG35EC motherboard. It features 4 RAM slots (upto dual-channel 8GB total), 4 built-in SATA ports, 1 IDE channel, 12 total USB ports, gigabit LAN port, Realtek HD audio, Firewire port, integrated x3500 graphics (DX10 compliant), PCI-E slots for graphics and other addon cards in a Micro-ATX form factor. Northbridge is G35 and southbridge is ICH8. It even had a built in DVI out port along with the analog D-Sub. DVI port was very important to me and it was one of the main reasons why I chose this board. I paid Rs. 4700 or US$ 115 for it. Warranty: 3yrs.

RAM :

I was initially planning to populate 4GB of RAM as the prices of DDR2 has hit rock bottom. However, I wondered if I really needed 4GB considering the type of work I do. Vista should run good enough on 2GB system memory. However, I was going to use the integrated graphics, so that was going to dynamically share the system RAM. Still I took 2GB of Transcend JetRAM DDR800 (1GB x2) and set them up in dual channel mode. I have 2 free slots if change my mind later.

You can’t go wrong with brands like Transcend/Kinston/Corsair. Transcend is more readily available in our area. It’s better to avoid Hynix or locally assembled RAM modules; I have had bad experiences with these in the past. I was charged Rs. 2100 or US$ 51 for 2GB RAM. Warranty: 3yrs.

Hard Disk :

I was looking for a speedy SATA2 Drive with lots of cache and high RPM. The Western Digital Caviar SE16 series looked impressive. But sadly, the supply for WD HDD’s in our area isn’t that great; I had to settle for a Seagate OEM SATA2 360GB ST3360320AS hard disk. Yes, the capacity sounds odd enough and you can’t even find the product on Seagate website as like many OEM drives in the market.

It is a 7200 RPM Barracuda 7200.10 series drive with 8MB cache. Seems I have to be content with this one instead of the much longed for WD drive. The capacity is too much for me, my old IDE Seagate 40GB drive is still doing well though. They billed me Rs. 2550 or US$ 62 for the drive. Warranty: 5yrs.

LCD Monitor :

Yes, I was eagerly waiting for the day when I’d have a big LCD monitor on my desk. I’ve been using a refurbished Dell 17″ CRT and was kinda pleased with it. But I always wanted to use a very good quality LCD monitor. I liked to have widescreen, fine dot-pitch and good response times on the display. DVI port was must as I believe one can’t use the full potential of the LCD without DVI.

After much hunting around, I got a ViewSonic VX1940w 19″ widescreen LCD featuring native resolution of 1680×1050 (super-HD) and <5ms response times. I connected it through DVI and set color to sRGB and everything was clear, crisp and smooth; colors are richer and live than CRT’s! It has a few dead-pixels though within permissible limit, but the super-small pixel size makes you overlook them easily. One can use the menu to set to 4:3 aspect ratio for legacy games too. It supports DCR but I didn’t want to use it.

Guys, this is a great buy! In fact it was the first LCD to offer such super-HD resolution on a 19″ panel. Yea, it’s vista certified and it even downloaded the needed update driver for this monitor automatically through windows update. This baby lightened my pocket by Rs. 11900 or US$ 290. Warranty: 3yrs.

DVD Burner :

I didn’t have any idea about the optical drives in the market. My dealer recommended the Asus DRW-2014L1T DVD-multi burner drive. It features lightscribe and SATA port. Came in a nice packaging and box. It can be the best packaging I’ve seen for a retail optical drive; the drive neatly placed in foam channel with required CD and manual in place.

I burnt a few DVDs but it has problems recognizing blank CDR! I updated the firmware yet the same problem exists. SATA optical drives have known incompatibilities on various OS’s these days; maybe that’s the reason. I hardly burn disks and that’s not much of a problem; guess a newer firmware would solve that issue in the future. Or maybe my dealer would allow me return this for a Samsung Writemaster DVD burner. Price: Rs. 1400 or US$ 34. Warranty: 1yr.

ATX Case :

I decided to drop my old ATX case for a new one that is compact enough. I kinda dislike full height ATX tower cases and I’m not a pro gamer; so a smaller case with good cooling can easily suffice my needs. I decided not to spend much on the case; ya I know many of you go for hi-fi gamer cases from Antec, cooler master but it’s useless for me.

I opted for a  i-ball Engine-X mini tower ATX case with built in 400W power supply that can easily handle all components inside it. Comes with front panel USB+audio ports, 120mm fan and a plastic heat vent from the side to top of CPU fan.

I had recently bought a Microsoft keyboard+mouse set that I put into good use. Yeah, I didn’t have a pen drive (weird, isn’t it?) and bought a Transcend 8GB value series for Rs. 1150 or US$  28.

Hope you enjoyed reading about my new desktop. I didn’t have the chance or means to run benchmark on it but all individual benchmarks and reviews on the items can be found on the net. Please leave your comments!