Power Supply, Optical Drive, And Video Cards
Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling S75QB Silencer 750 Quad
With a power-hungry Core i7 as well as dual graphics cards, we wanted a power-supply unit (PSU) with a little "oomph."
Read Customer Reviews of PC Power & Cooling's S75QB Silencer
Enter PC Power and Cooling’s S75QB Silencer 750 Quad. It is SLI- and CrossFire-certified, has 750 W of continuous power available, is 80+ certified, and offers an impressive 60 amps of juice on a single 12V rail. At $120 after an instant rebate, it was an easy choice for our build.
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS422 DVD±R DVD Burner SATA
Read Customer Reviews of Lite-On's iHAS422 Burner
There are so many reasonably-priced optical drives out there, but we wanted to choose something with more than basic functionality for our $1,300 machine. Lite-On’s iHAS422 is a great optical drive with some unique features. Among them are SmartErase, which Lite-on claims will completely remove existing data from a disk with no chance that it might be recovered, and LightScribe, which allows the user to burn images and labels directly to special LightScribe-compatible DVDs.
With the iHAS422 practically the same price as its barebones competition, there’s little reason not to opt for this fully-featured drive.
Video Card: 2 x BFG GeForce GTX 260 OC in SLI
Read Customer Reviews of BFG's GeForce GTX 260 OC
Here is the heart and soul of our $1,300 Micro-ATX LAN box: not one, but two GeForce GTX 260 cards, which are factory overclocked to 590 MHz on the GPU core. This should give us enough power to approach GeForce GTX 295 performance for about $200 less.
The downside, of course, is that these cards will use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat. But we’re building a LAN-sized PC here, and that means gaming is the primary goal. This is a no-compromise choice that will pay off in frames per second, although it remains to be seen how these cards will handle the heat in the portable Micro-ATX case.
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I wonder why this system builder marathon was limited to Micro-ATX cases. Is there a general trend towards these things or what? I'm looking to build a whole new system soon and I can't see any reason to go Micro-ATX.
I don’t think it’s a trend, think of it as more of a challenge. Some people don’t want to have a giant full/mid tower sitting next to them.
Right, I don't mind that at all, so I'll stick to a normal case when assembling my next system. Thanks!
Nice challenge but what's the point when the system dies a couple of months down the line due to shorten life span of all components as a result of high temps. Then you spend another $1300?
I can't remember if it was this or one of the other SBM articles this month, but they mentioned something about these PCs being LAN boxes - if so heat is going to be even more of an issue (much higher ambient temps, cases right next to each other) so this system would be pretty unviable.
I know that my PC runs as much as 10 degress hotter in that environment - if it's in the low 90s on the CPU and at the limit of GPU stability already, another ten degrees will see it constantly throttling, making errors or shutting down.
Assuming that we were building a full ATX system, what would have been the motherboard of choice for this PC?
Can I also remind everyone that these articles are irrelevent on this side of the Atlantic? Intel and nVidia prices in particular are far, FAR lower in the US - such a system would be over 30% more over here! SLI GTX260 for £200 my arse!