The Madness of PCs

I agree. Up until just a few years ago, building a PC was still a matter of putting a CPU and RAM onto a motherboard, clamping on an ordinary square heatsink and fan, mounting it in a case, and connecting the power supply to the board and drives. The process was more or less the same as it was in the Pentium I days. Now, there are all kinds of weird heatsinks and fans which mount sideways, unfamiliar power connectors and card slots, separate coolers for the RAM modules, all kinds of different solutions for wiring USB/FireWire/eSATA ports and memory card slots at the front of the machine, and cases that are still as ugly as sin. Sometimes I think that overclockers are partly to blame for this, since the added "tweaking" options in the BIOS and the increasingly complex ventilation apparatus were designed in part to accommodate these people.

I still prefer desktops to laptops, so I've become a lot more interested recently in small computers (Mini-ITX boards and cases), as these are convenient and powerful enough to suit my purposes. If I needed a more powerful rig, I'd have to do some homework first for fear of choosing incompatible hardware, which is something I haven't had to do very often in the 18 years I've been building my own PCs.

One of the nice things about ATX was that it consolidated and standardized all the various add-ons that had been made to the old Baby-AT form factor (I/O port selection and placement, power connectors, etc). Now that ATX has metastasized into all these different variations, perhaps it's time for another standard to emerge. One thing I wish everyone would agree on is how to wire up the LEDs and switches at the front of the case into one connector. They also need to weed out the old 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch power connectors; just give us a bunch of SATA connectors and provide adapters for peripherals that still need the old ones. And yes, all the little power connectors that have been added to the original 20-pin ATX connector are a pain; just consolidate them all into one cable.

The problem with MiniITX is the lack of slots. I really wanted to enjoy having PCI-Express slots
for the first time. That meant going with a fullsize board.




Also, I've noticed that while CPUs are becoming more energy-efficient, graphics cards are now the main energy hogs, especially with (gasp) SLI. What should really have happened by now is to be able to use mobile CPUs and mobile graphics cards on regular motherboards. Use adapter boards if necessary, but make it happen. You see a little of this with stuff like the 9400M on some Macs and Ion on nettops, but why not fullsize desktops? There is a radical difference in power consumption between mobile and desktop hardware.

The reason I went with the Core i5 is that it has embedded graphics, all within the 73w TDP. That's now on the low end of the power cycle compared to the quad cores, but it still sucks compared to things like CULV and Atom.

If I plug in my ATI HD5770 then even if I turn off the display, the thing is still idling at whatever watts. God knows what it will consume when running DirectX 11.

Really, the hardware manufacturers still haven't gotten the memo. These power supplies are now capable of pushing upwards of a kilowatt.

I want to have fun, but not at 20c a KW/hr and not with the carbon emissions guilt.

If I can't power up this board maybe I should take it as an omen and RMA the whole package back to Newegg. They have a pretty good return policy.

For my new PC I just bought a Dell desktop (which arrives tomorrow, woot!). Sure I could have done the research to find the perfect motherboard+CPU combination and painstakingly chosen each part and assembled it myself. In fact, I did that for my last desktop. But really, what do I get for my time & trouble? It might be slightly cheaper and slightly higher performance, but at the end of the day I just want a computer.

Quote

A couple of years ago laptops reached the point where they are "good enough" for most purposes, other than CPU/GPU heavy games. So the trend tipped from "get a desktop unless you need a laptop" to "get a laptop unless you need a desktop".

I just tried another PSU and the board won't even power up. The fan on the power supply won't turn over and the HD won't spin up. I think it's DOA. Back to Newegg.

EricBall, on Tue Jan 26, 2010 7:59 PM, said:

We're in the same boat. My next PC will probably also be the first one I will not assemble myself. If I find one that suits my needs (be quiet!).

Thomas Jentzsch, on Fri Jan 29, 2010 10:12 AM, said:

I don't know what I did right but my Dell Inspiron 545, Core 2 Quad Q8300 (2.5 GHZ) is near silent, even when transcoding. It's quite a shock given it's 50 times faster than the 7 year old than the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ it's replacing. I could even use it as an HTPC without modification.

EricBall, on Fri Jan 29, 2010 5:53 PM, said:

Maybe its time to replace my old 2000+ too.

Thomas Jentzsch, on Sun Jan 31, 2010 11:01 AM, said:

I may not have, except it started spontaneously rebooting and spitting out errors which sounded like a hardware problem.

EricBall, on Mon Feb 1, 2010 12:13 AM, said:

Ok, now I am afraid of my PC failing soon.