Kerry D. Wong » Picture

Some Pictures of My New Rig

kwong — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:05:33 +0000

In yesterday’s post, I listed all the components I used in my new rig. Here are some of the pictures I took while building it:

Q9450 Retail Box

Q9450 Retail Box (Top)

Intel Q9450

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Versus Stock HS

I cannot believe how small the stock cooler is. It’s barely the height of Freezer 7 Pro’s bottom heat pipe (and Freezer 7 Pro can only be considered as an average cooling solution)! Intel’s new High-K 45nm process lowered the overall processor heat dissapation significantly, so it’s not surprising that the heat sink of this new chip is smaller than previous ones.

Stock HS

8GB (4GBx2) G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ

8GB G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ works quite well here. In fact, no voltage adjustment was necessary for the motherboard (Asus P5E) to recognize it. But G.SKILL does recommand manually setting the RAM voltage at 1.9V (the voltage range for F2-6400CL5D is 1.8 ~ 1.9) to ensure maximum stability.

The BIOS came with the motherboard is version 303, which is quite old (released 10/31 last year). Nevertheless, I booted up with Q9450 with no issue except an unsupported CPU message at boot time. I then flashed the BIOS to version 605 which officially support this stepping of Q9450. I am not sure why Asus distinguish on its website a "DOS" version of the BIOS, maybe it’s named specifically for it’s DOS utilities to recognize it. Anyway, you can safely flash it with the EZFlash utility inside the BIOS.

My Q9450 Arrived

kwong — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:37:46 +0000

My Q9450 finally arrived yesterday.Originally I had thought that Intel’s new 45nm processors would be readily available, but as it turned out most places did not have them in stock. The only 45nm processor that is readily available right now is Q9300, you can find both OEM and retail versions in many major online stores. Anyway, I got mine (retail box) from TankGuys right after they received their first batch of shipment. With this chip in hand, all the parts were in place for my new build.

I spent a few hours last night, quickly put my new system together. By the time I was done, it was already late. So I have not got a chance to install OS yet. Nevertheless it posted first time without any issues.

Here is a list of the parts I used in my new system:

Case/Power: Antec TITAN650 (with 650W power supply)

DVDRW: SAMSUNG SH-S203N (SATA)

Video Card: EVGA 256-P2-N751-TR GeForce 8600GT 256M

Motherboard: ASUS P5E (X38)

Harddrive: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB

Memory: 8GB (4GBx2) G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ

CPU: Intel Q9450

CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro

Like my previous builds, I tend to put more emphasis on processing power and memory than the graphic system as I only need the horsepower for scientific calculations and data processing.

I had planned to use ASUS P5K-E WIFI-AP motherboard originally, but I noticed that there is still no current BIOS support for Q9450 (C1).

Anyway, in the next couple of days I will post more information on my new build and possibly a few pictures as well.

Storm Pictures From the Plane

kwong — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:23:52 +0000

The weather was pretty stormy on my trip to Dallas last week, I happened to bring my camera and here are a few pictures I took on the plane…