New PC Build

Update

Sorry I haven’t updated this in over a week – I’ve been busy lately. Well, here’s a picture of the open case when I finished building the system:

P180B: A Great Case

The P180B comes with 3 fans, 1 at the top blowing up and out, 1 on the back blowing out, and one at the bottom to channel heat from the hard drives out the back. I added another one in the front in middle to pull in fresh air. The middle hard drive cage is empty because the 8800GTX video card is too long. It’s okay because the bottom hard drive tray can fit 4 drives. This kind of works out because the middle hard drive cage then acts as an air duct for the intake fan straight to the video card.

That huge metallic thing up top is the heatsink I was talking about and there’s another fan attached to it to blow hot air towards the back and out through the exhaust. Those gold bars are the memory modules which look quite nice with the gold heat spreaders.

That monster horizontal board in the middle is the 8800GTX video card and the red card below it is the sound card. This case features a raised motherboard tray so a lot of the wires are routed out of sight behind the tray. This is so you don’t have a bunch of tangled wires disrupting airflow.

Another unique feature of this case is that the bottom area is separated from the top, creating a separate thermal compartment. Heat from the power supply (bottom left) and the hard drives will not affect other heat sensitive components above. I didn’t take a picture but there are 2 dust filters on the front intake grills that can be easily removed and washed. I love this feature because it’s so convenient! This greatly reduces the amount of the dust that gets sucked into the system.

Outside the Case

This is the completed system sitting on my desk:

I kept the plastic wrapping on the sides to prevent scratches. No harm keeping them on anyway.

The front door actually swings open up to 270 degrees but I forgot to open it and take a picture.

Final Note on Temperatures

My system, which is overclocked to 3.2GHz (8 x 400MHz), idles at about 38C and at full load it goes up to about 59C-60C which is perfectly fine. I’m sure if I lapped the CPU I could hit 3.6GHz but that 400MHz doesn’t make much difference and it’s too much trouble. I’m thinking about adding a Scythe Kama Bay in place of the 3 empty 5.25″ drive slots up top to provide a fresh air intake for the CPU/memory area.

This would also help reduce negative pressure inside the case. When you have more exhaust than intake it creates negative pressure inside the case, causing it to suck in air through any openings and edge slots. Obviously you want all incoming air to go through a dust filter to reduce dust buildup. Considering I have 2 exhausts and 1 intake fan, there is definitely negative pressure. The Kama bay would relieve that to a certain degree and probably cool the CPU another few degrees.

Conclusion

I’m very happy with my new system and it performs beautifully. Resource-demanding apps like Photoshop load up and operate much faster and multi-tasking is a breeze. The 8800GTX allows me to pretty much max out all the visual settings for games and it doesn’t break a sweat.

I’m really glad everything is working and nothing was DOA (dead on arrival). I hope this helps others interested in building their own PC. If you need a new computer now, don’t wait – the Q6600 will significantly future-proof your system and memory prices are going down the tube right now. You can build a very powerful system for a reasonable price.

A prebuilt system with the same specs at Dell, Alienware, or other PC vendors costs roughly $1,000 more! If you know how, DYI is definitely the way to go and it’s really not that difficult.