One of my colleague, JG went down during the long weekend/Agong's Birthday public holiday to KL LowYat to help himself and another colleague pick up items for their PC build. He was planning to get the new Radeon 4770 card and plan to CF in the future and I thought he made a pretty good choice.
However, I did not know that LowYat traders practiced this kind of business attitude: He was told by X shop's person that they will not be selling new stock of the 4770s as it is affecting the other product's stock movement. He was then forced to get the alternative Radeon 4830. I mean, customers are getting forced to pay more for less performance here for the sake of profit. The 4770 they were selling was not exactly selling under priced at RM399 since AMD did launched the 4770 initially at USD109.99 or RM384 after all. What should have happened was they should have dropped the prices of the current cards since they do perform weaker to the 4770. I know doing business is not easy and every possible profit margin should be pursued but man I'm disappointed. Telling people the whole of LowYat not one single 4770. Just my two cents.
Anyways, I got the item and price list from JG, took a look, and was telling another colleague (SC) that was also interested to build his own PC with the beta unit that if he was OK, I could help him out to do his. SC agreed and I suggested to JG that once we were done (his was still missing the OS at the moment), we could do benchmarks to see which build ended up better just for the fun of it :P. Just throwing in a challenge to make things alittle bit more exciting (I could always cheat by OC-ing some parts hehe). Budget will be a RM1,500 total without keyboard/mouse/speakers/LCD. Windows 7 will be the OS.
Without delay, let me introduce the contenders *ding ding ding*
JG's Build
Gigabyte P45 UD3L Motherboard
2x2GB Kingston DDR2 800Mhz
Seagate 500GB 7200rpm Hard Disk
Sapphire 4830 512MB GDDR3
CoolerMaster 460W RealPower PSU
CoolerMaster ATX Casing (dunno which and have not seen it yet)
Stock shaped Intel LGA775 CPU cooler
LG 22x IDE DVD-RW
Total Price : RM1,520
SC's Build
Asus P5Q Pro P43 Motherboard
2x2GB Kingston DDR2 800Mhz
Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB 7200rpm Hard Disk
PowerColor 4770 512MB GDDR5 (PC Depot had stock!)
CoolerMaster 460W RealPower PSU
PowerLogic Quatro 200 Casing (Free 460W PSU but no 12V rail or 6pin for graphic card)
Liteon 22X Sata DVD-RW
CoolerMaster 460W RealPower PSU
Total Price: RM1,478
OK, some reasons and comments on my choices. Mainly the difference between the two builds is the motherboard and graphic card. From the budget, it was pretty obvious that CF ready mobo is going to cost too much. A CF ready P45 mobo will cost aboout RM500 (cheapest was Asus P5Q Pro P45 for RM489 @ PCDepot) and you will then be forced to break the budget to get the 4770s. Since CF is out of the question, there is no point to get a P45 board anymore. A P43 board is basically a P45 board with 1 less PCIE x16 lane and is still equally as capable as the P45 in all other aspects. This allowed me to save about RM70 and it was then well placed into the more expensive but better performing 4770.
I also chosed ASUS due to the many motherboard feature it supported including it's Quick Boot feature that allows you to enter into a ASUS mini OS with internet browsing capabilities in 5secs! The Asus mobo also came with BIOS protection and offered alot of overclocking capabilities and settings.
On to the build! Counting this time, it would be my 4th time configuring and building a PC for me or someone else but this will be the first time I'm documenting it hehe. Hope I get this right and pardon for the blur photos. Took it with my Nokia 5800 cos too poor for DSLRs :(
The traditional lay-out-everything-on-the-floor-and-take-a-picture lol:
ASUS P5Q Pro P43 Motherboard. 6x SATA and 1 IDE cable. Too bad it's a brownish color for the PCB. Black would've been perfect but rare to find in midrange mobos. However, I did find a mATX with black PCB before. The ASUS P5KPL-AM, a pretty nice G31 board.
The new Radeon 4770
With the space ship designed cooler :S
It was pretty much a nice build. The casing was a big surprise. For the price of Rm105, it really felt well made and even the plastic front did not feel cheap. The paint job on the side panels was also very well done and the aluminium-like insides gave it a slightly classier look. At one point I was complaining to SC that this cheap casing does not even provide screws or PCB stands. We actually went on to impovised and screwed the mobo on anyways with whatever screws we could find until we saw the packet of screws/PCB stands tied together with the supplied power cable that came with the case (the casing comes with a PSU ready remember?). OMG!! Should've noticed that much earlier! Anyways, my apologies to the PowerLogic casing. sorry if I hurted your feelings. I will learn to respect cheap casings from now on haha.
Completed build:
The idle temp as seen from BIOS was about 55C which is a little too high if you ask me. Thinking to replace the exhaust fan with a 120mm, add a 120mm intake at the front and a 80mm at the side panel directly moving air towards the processor area. The pleasent surprise was the system was pretty quiet. The 4770 boots up with 100% fan speed and then lowers down to nearly an inaudible level after that. So far so good.
Since there is still the OS to install so stay tuned for the bechmark results much later. I'll probably run 3dMark Vantage and some game FRAPS and will try to post up by this week. I'll also do some cable tie management for the cables and post up a few more pics. It's still an ugly jungle right now. Do you think I made the correct choices? Let me know! :)
P.S. Thanks to SC for allowing me to spend his money for him. Hope you like your new PC!
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