Here we go again

My wife's computer is dying ... A moment of silence ... And now, YEA! Diane said "Yes" to my offer to build her a new machine. YEA! Ack! I need to do it this weekend! I can't stare at specs for two weeks. I can't send my proposed machine off to my hardware guru friend Judy for her blessing. I can't even order it from Newegg and then wait impatiently for it to arrive. I have to do this now. Fortunately, I have this blog to refer to find out what I did last time. But, let me back up just a bit.

Diane's current machine is a Dell mini tower and, to be honest, I couldn't have asked for a better machine for her. Usually Diane needs a new machine every two or three years, but this XP class machine has been with us for maybe 9 or 10 years. (The previous machine was a ME class machine.) Anyway, this weekend it started having problems connecting to the network. It appeared to be connected, but it couldn't see any machines on the Internet and barely could connect to the router. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out what was wrong. At first, I thought it was the network card, so I put the NIC from the ME machine (I really need to recycle that machine) into the XP machine, and it didn't help. I thought that perhaps it was a problem with the DNS on the router, but doing some simple tests seemed to eliminate that possibility. I thought about taking the machine up to my work to see how it behaved on another network to eliminate the router. I also searched the Internet for similar issues, but I didn't find anything useful except that the error code 0x5b4 is a Time Out. Ultimately, I decided that Diane has been waiting for a new machine since she discovered in 2010 that she couldn't play Civ 5 on her XP machine, so I just decided to get her a new machine rather than chase this problem any further. I should have done this in June when she and I first discussed it. If I had done that, I wouldn't be making a crash job, so I have no one but myself to blame.

Anyway, I started with investigating the current state of hardware since my last foray into HTPC land. I purposely stayed with AMD CPU's. I worked at Texas Instruments for 8 years and Motorola for 2, so I'm afraid that I still see Intel as "the other guys". And, even though Steve from work tells me that Intel is making better CPU's than AMD these days, and Rick the IT guy at work is empathic that Intel is the best and "AMD is crap", I'm going to stick with AMD because I see them as the home team. After some investigating and looking at the Civ 5 specs, I decided on an AMD Athlon II X4. From this I found a couple of ASUS mother boards that I liked, the M5A97 and the Sabertooth. However, since I was gearing up for a shopping trip to Fry's and I didn't have a clue what they had a stock, I decided that I was going to have to take the plunge and decide on the remaining items on the fly.

At Fry's I started with looking at the available motherboards. They had the Sabertooth in stock, as well as the M5A97. Even though the M5A97 is based on the AMD 970 north bridge chipset, and Sabertooth on the 990FX, I ultimately decided that the M5A97 was sufficient to run Civ 5, and was cheaper. Ultimately it turned out the M5A97 was a closeout item and I have no problem with eating the last piece of cake. Unfortunately, even though the warehouse inventory said that there was one in a package in the store, the Fry's guy couldn't find it, so I ended up with the display model. It was up high in the display and difficult to get down, so I'm hoping it was not handled too much. Also since it was the display model, I got 20% off of it. There's a 15 day return policy, and I should know way before then if there's a problem.

From there, I went graphics card hunting. I was trying to stay with AMD, so I settled on a HD6450. I could have gotten a lot cheaper and a lot more expensive Radeon graphics card, but I decided on a middle of the road card. The thing that troubled me the most is that the card said that it used a PCI Express 2.1 Bus, and the M5A97 had only a 2.0 bus. So I took the HD 6450 and asked the Fry's guy over in the motherboard department if that was going to be a problem. He said that there's a PCI Express 3.0 socket on the board. That was not my recollection, but I hope that the card could probably handle a 2.0 bus too, so I decided to stick with the M5A97. (I just checked, and I was correct, it does not have a PCI Express 3.0 socket.)

The next problem was that they didn't have any Athlon CPU's. So I got an AMD FX-4100 mostly because it had 4 cores (a Civ 5 recommendation) and the lowest wattage of the available CPUs, 95 watts.

Then I looked at ATX cases. I must admit that all of the cases looked like something out of a bad science fiction movie, with all sorts of weird shapes. I settled on a CM Elite 371 because it looked like a normal computer case and because it didn't have a power supply. I wanted to get a modular power supply, and I didn't want to trust whatever cost reduced piece of junk might be in an inexpensive tower case.

From there, it was a flurry of buying the remaining items. I'm afraid that not a lot of thought was put into them.

So, here's what I finally ended up with:

Item	Size	Description
AMD FX-4100	95W	AM3+, 64-bit 3.6Ghz, Quad Core CPU
ASUS M5A97	AM3+	Motherboard with AMD 970 Northbridge, 950 Southbridge, 4xDDR3 2133 (OC), 32 GB, USB 3.0, and 6.0GB/s SATA
CM Elite 371		ATX Mid Tower
DDR3 Memory	4 GB	1333 Mhz Memory
Antec HCG-620M	620 W	80 Plus Certified Bronze Modular Power Supply
HD 6450	1GB	XFX 6450 graphics card with 1 GB DDR3 memory, Direct X11 support, HDCP, 2560x1600, HDMI, Dual Link DVI, VGA, 650 Mhz core clock
WD 100000 CSRTL Green	1 TB	Hard drive with SATA/300, 16 MB buffer
LG Internal BD-W Drive	10 X	BlueRay internal drive, SATA interface, MDISC Compatible, 3D Playback
Windows 7 Home OEM SP1	32-bit

The final cost, about $670, not including tax.

Tomorrow I'll build this beastie and we'll see if I know what I'm doing.