Building Anduril

Prologue

Over three years ago I built a new gaming rig named Narsil, and my intent was that it would inaugurate a series of cheaper gaming boxes that could be replaced more frequently to keep the hardware up to date. The irony is that it lasted longer than any other gaming PC I've built, and the only update I did was to install a new video card when the original got a bit long in the tooth.

Today I'm writing about its replacement. Narsil was named for the sword that cut the ring from the hand of Sauron (i.e., Gorthaur, my previous gaming rig), so the new build is named Anduril, which as any Tolkien-geek knows is the name given to the shards of Narsil reforged. Wow. This paragraph pretty much guarantees I won't have sex again in my life, doesn't it?

The Build

The Buy

At any rate, I had the components picked out for quite a while, but the video card I wanted was perpetually out of stock at Newegg.com. I made it a habit to check every few hours on the days it was supposed to be back in stock, hoping to catch it before others, and I must have gotten lucky: when I saw the "add to cart" button enabled I raced to my wish list and dumped the whole thing in my cart. Here's what I bought:

The grand total, for those hostile to math, comes to $2,464.47 including tax and shipping, though I should get a $20 rebate on one of the items. That's more than I paid for my previous gaming rig, by about $800 if I recall correctly, but I had a pretty good year with the home business so I figured I could swing it.

Hardware

A few days after it all arrived I sat down to build. The first thing that surprised me was the case. I've been using CoolerMaster for a while, and I thought I was accustomed to their style, but the HAF has a rather different feel. For starters it's noticeably bigger than the other cases I've bought. I didn't exactly stuff it, but it still has an absurd amount of room for something like a dozen more drives and/or other devices. It's huge. It also has an interesting feature in the lowest bays that looks like you can plug SATA devices straight into a simple backplane connector, which is pretty neat.

Oh, and speaking of huge, the fans are the largest I've seen yet in a case and CoolerMaster didn't scrimp on numbers: I have three of those monsters spinning with rooom for another two, I think, and they're so quiet I literally can't even tell the machine is turned on. I don't know whether it gets any louder when I play games or not; I've never once heard the system over the ambient sound. It's the most quiet machine I've ever built and that's very welcome.

The best surprise, though, was surely the ASUS "Q connector". I don't know why other vendors haven't thought of this, but the part of building a system I've always hated most is the hooking all the little case wires to the motherboard. It's such a pain to get the polarity right and fight to get my big hands into such a small space. I've used a pair of forceps for years because it makes the job a lot easier, but the new ASUS connector made it a snap. Literally. You connect all the wires to the little thing and then it snaps right down onto the motherboard. It was wonderfully simple. It took me maybe a minute to plug everything in and have the motherboard connected to the case. How awesome is that?!

I was a little worried that the audio card wasn't seated properly, because it seemed a bit loose, but apparently I got everything right on the first try. The first time I applied power it fired up and gave me what appears to be another neat feature from ASUS: the board has some kind of built-in OS that lets you do simple web surfing and other stuff without even having a hard drive in the box. I might play around with that some more when time permits, but for the sake of the build I disabled it in the BIOS and kept working. Because everything seemed operational, I packed up the case and moved on to the software.

Software

I'm happy to say Windows 7 did a much better job with this motherboard, which was released after Windows 7, than it did with the motherboard in my previous system, which was released before Windows 7. I don't know how that makes any sense, but whereas Windows 7 gave me at lot of install problems on the old hardware it got almost everything right with the ASUS board. I did have to download the latest NVIDIA drivers to unleash the full potential of the video card, I did have to download drivers for the X-Fi, and I did have to download chipset drivers to get the USB 3.0 ports working, but that's it. Windows 7 gave me a working video driver, slow though it was, and got the all-important networking right all by itself.

Microsoft Office 2010 installed smoothly as did Quicken 2011 and a host of other general software I use. I was even able to copy all my Steam games from my old machine to the new machine, though for whatever reason I did have to use the function to verify file integrity to get Call of Duty: Black Ops working. All the Steam games I've tried so far run beautifully. I haven't put my video editing or software development tools on the machine yet, and I haven't even begun thinking about how to migrate all my pro-audio tools, but so far it's working well with my various USB doo-dads.

The one software pain thus far has been the failure of Stardock's Impulse software to restore from backups. On this point I can't sing Steam's praises enough: if I couldn't simply have copied my game data folder to the new machine, I could have restored the backups I have of my games. The small ones I can download quickly enough but when you're talking about 20+ GB monsters (I'm looking at you, Napoleon: Total War) the restore feature is a godsend. No matter what I did, no matter what archive I tried to restore, Stardock's Impulse just kept bombing out—and without so much as an error message most of the time. I'm sorry, Stardock, but your software sucks compared to Steam.

Odds and Ends

I've been using the new machine on and off for the last few days and have run into two issues so far. The first was simple ignorance on my part: I couldn't seem to get any audio out of the rear speakers in my 5.1 setup nor could I get the microphone working. The solution to the first problem was to download a manual for the new X-Fi audio card because Creative Labs has moved the rear-audio jack; on their 7.1 channel card the ports from top to bottom are the "flexi" jack, front speakers, side speakers, center speaker, and then rear speakers. I had the rear input in the side channel output. Oops.

I also had trouble with the microphone. The on-board audio apparently sucks in that regard, insofar as the signal-to-noise ratio is uncomfortably low. I tried using the on-board audio features with a microphone in Ventrilo but I got tons of noise and hiss whether I used the input on the front of the case or the back, though the back was noticeably worse. Only when I figured out the "flexi" jack was I able to get the mic working with the X-Fi card. I've never had a "flexi" jack before, so here's the trick: open the Creative Labs audio console, switch to game mode, and click the little "Settings" box on the front. That will give you a property sheet with a "FlexiJack" page where you can tell it to be a microphone (it's a line-in by default).

The second issue I've run into is that the board doesn't handle power-saving states gracefully at all. When I first installed Windows 7 I thought I had some kind of serious problem: every time I walked away from the computer and left it running I would come back to a completely locked-up box. As soon as I disabled the sleep feature I stopped having the issue. It may be possible to fix this through some kind of chipset update but I'm not going to bother because I haven't ever been able to use sleep mode on a PC anyway; it never works properly.

Epilogue

There's no question about it: Anduril is a much faster machine for gaming. I played a few minutes of Call of Duty: Black Ops which was giving my previous system periodic fits. On the old box I was running at 1920 x 1200 with 8x AF enabled and averaging 25 - 35 FPS most of the time. On the new box I'm running at the same resolution but with 4x AA and 16x AF with Fraps pegged at 60 Hz. all the while. It's beautifully butter-smooth gameplay and loads so much faster it's an extremely refreshing change. I fired up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion just for kicks and found I could finally up all the sliders to max, even with all the graphical mods I have installed, and get completely butter smooth play as well. Oh, and the loading bar fills up so fast you don't even need one, which is rather nice.

I think the SATA 6.0 Gb/s drives are living up to their specs too. When I copied my Steam games across I watched the transfer rates and found I was getting a solid 70% utilization on my 1 Gbps home network. The one machine was feeding the other reliably at 0.7 Gbps and that's while I was downloading stuff from the Internet and installing other software. Only two or three of the CPU cores were showing any activity, and I had plenty of free RAM, but the network was pegged, the drives were cranking, and the system stayed pretty responsive. So I'm impressed.

I'm sure I'll have more to say as time goes on, but for now the verdict is overwhelmingly positive. This is the smoothest and best build I've had yet.

12/20/2010 15:33 hrs.