case recommendations? and what I bought on Black Friday

Wed Dec 2 19:41:08 UTC 2009

On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 01:31:28PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I need to get a cheap and good enough and quietish ATX case for the bits
> that I will describe.  Do you have any recommendations?
> 
> Filtech has $32.xx ATX case with power supply.  Seemed quite light.
> They have all kinds of name-brand cases and power supplies for more
> money.  I don't know exactly what the danager-to-your-system (from
> cheap power supplies) and noise tradeoffs are.

A cheap power supply that says 500W may in fact not even theoretically
be able to deliver more than 250W because the components are not capable
of it.  In short: They lie.  The 250W it does deliver is often not even
within ATX specs.

I just picked up a PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510W power supply from
canada computers for $90.  I remember paying $300 for a 300W turbocool
years ago.  What a deal they are these days.  The Silencer line is nice
too if you want very quiet (not that a turbocool is that noisy unless
it is really fully loaded).  I used a Silencer 610W in my wife's machine.
The only thing you ever hear is the GTX275 getting noisy when it is
working hard.  The rest of the time you don't hear anything from the
machine.  Given it is almost always running 2x SMP folding at home client
(so 8 threads going full out on a Core i7 920) it is managing to stay
cool without being noisy.

> techdirect has a bunch of $38.xx cases with power supplies.  Not a 
> retailer I trust that much.

Any case that comes with a power supply is almost certainly a cheap
piece of junk case.  All power supplies included with cases are junk
and worth nothing (They don't even make good boat ankers given there is
almost nothing in them).

A cheap power supply will make the system unstable.  I have seen it many
times.  A machine that crashes at random or has random errors happen,
after getting a real power supply installed all the problems vanish.
Computers need steady clean power to work.  At 3GHz a lot happens during
a power blip.

> Canada Computers might be my next stop.
> 
> I could probably cannibalize one of my old P3 computers for a case.
> 
> What has your recent experience been with shopping for cases in the
> GTA?
> 
> [The rest of this message is intended to be amusing chatter and can
> safely be ignored.]
> 
> Why do I need a new case?  I succumbed to shopping mania on Black
> Friday.
> 
> I bought an ECS A780GM-A motherboard from Newegg.ca for $57.99 plus
> tax.  There is a US$25 rebate so the final cost will be in the order
> of $40.  It has 3 PCI slots (I want more but they are going out of
> fashion).  ECS is not my favourite brand and the board is getting a
> bit old, but the price seemed pretty good.
> http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Products/ProductsDetail.aspx?detailid=866&CategoryID=1&DetailName=Specification&MenuID=1&LanID=0

ECS is one company I do NOT trust.  Also known a PC Chips.  Long history
of very bad quality boards.  They are cheap for a reason.

> To go with this, I bought a retail box AMD Athlon II X2 240 processor
> (AM3, 2.8G, 65w) from Tigerdirect for $44.97 plus tax.
> 
> I found those prices hard to resist.
> 
> Then I discovered RAM prices had gone up since I last looked.  I ended
> up buying two 1G sticks of DDR2-800 for $36.48 plus tax from buy.com.
> Interestingly, these sticks are ECC.  Unfortunately my MB won't
> exploit that (I wish my board used an AMD 785 chipset).

Does your board even work with them?  Who makes them?

> I could have bought a cheap disk drive and DVD burner but I already
> had some more expensive ones laying around.
> 
> So the theme of this machine is to get as many parts from as many
> different places as cheaply as possible.  The parts are OK, if not the
> best.
> 
> This machine is going to audition to replace my current MythTV master. The 
> current machine has an Athlon XP 1700+.  I don't want to go all-out on a 
> replacement because its lifetime will be limited: if we go HD or digital, 
> the setup becomes obsolete (thanks, Rogers).
> 
> - noise matters.  The machine is left on all the time.  The current
>   case is an Antec.  If the replacement works, I might switch the new
>   and old systems' cases
> 
> - the old system has 5 PCI slots, each with a tuner.  The new one only
>   has three slots.  We have used all 5 tuners at once, but not that
>   often.  I don't know how often we use 4 at once.

Too bad you don't have PVR500 cards (dual tuner pci cards).  Saves slots.

> - the old system has lots of IDE ports.  They have seemed to be
>   cranky sometimes.  I was considering removing one tuner in order to
>   add a SATA controller: SATA drives are bigger and cheaper.  The new
>   system has lots of SATA.
> 
> - the new CPU is faster: twice the clock rate, twice the cores, twice
>   the wordsize.  I don't know how much Myth exploits two cores.  The
>   wordsize probably matters very little.  Likely only the doubling of
>   the clock rate makes an important difference.  The per core cache
>   size is quadrupled too.

Mythtv actually uses many threads.  Each tuner runs its own thread for
recording, each commercial flagging job is a thread (or process actually)
to itself.

> I first put the old box together seven years ago (not for Myth).  In a
> similar spirit.  It is surprising how modest the progress has been 
> (except in disk drive capacity).
> 
> In the time between these two systems, I don't think that I assembled
> any other machines.  I found that off the shelf systems had better
> tradeoffs than systems that I could have built myself.

You are most likely wrong, although if you build your own using cheap
junk then yes they would be no better than the off the shelf, and still
cost more.  The off the shelf almost always cut all the corners they can
to save cost while not cutting anything that would actually be noticed
in the spec of the machine.  Most consumers don't know any better.
If it says 500W power supply then they assume it means it is completely
equivalant to any other 500W power supply.  The fact it isn't even 500W
in the first place never occours to them.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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