It’s been a long time coming, but 8 years after I put my previous machine together, I finally have a new PC.

I thought the motherboard and RAM a few months ago. My dear sister got me the insanely expensive CPU for Christmas. And then I went out and bought the case, harddrive and a copy of Windows 7 (64-bit).

I ordered the case online, so I didn’t get to see it until it turned up. It’s an Antec 1100, priced at £100. Now, considering you can buy cases for about £20 to £30, spending £100 seems like quite a lot of money. On the other hand, you do get what you pay for. The cheap cases are usually fairly flimsy, small and cramped, and often have dubious design features which just don’t seem to be very well thought-out.

The new case is supposed to be bigger, have smoothed off edges, and it’s painted inside. It also boasts washable dust filters throughout. And fancy cable management options. Unfortunately, as soon as you start spending real money on a PC case, everybody assumes that you must be a 1337 gamer, so you want something with ridiculously over the top aggressive styling, glass windows in the side, bottom-mounted PSU, and insane amounts of ventilation, with multiple (illuminated) fans and mounting points for additional fans, plus water cooling options.

So how did the case measure up when it arrived?

Well, it’s huge, that’s for sure! Much wider than a normal case, and quite a lot taller too. I think the old servers my dad has are smaller than this monster. That was the first thing. The styling is reasonably understated. It looks nice, without screaming for attention (or being a dust trap). And it seems to be quite nicely made; all the bits fit together properly (you’d think every case would be like this — and you would be sadly mistaken!), there are no sharp edges, no stuff that gets in the way of other stuff, etc.

The next time you notice is that the entire thing looks like Swiss cheese. There is a dust filter where the PSU sits. There is a dust filter on the front panel. But right next to that filter is an open hole. There’s a gigantic fan on the top with no filtration at all. The back of the case is an open grill. And there’s more holes in both side panels where you can mount additional fans.

In short, one wonders why they even bothered with the dust filters. They cover such a tiny fraction of the multitude of holes and openings. There is literally no way that this case isn’t going to fill with dust in five minutes flat. So that’s a fairly big disappointment.

They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course. And one thing that quickly impressed me is just how few screws I need. The case comes with a huge bag of screws, but most of those are for mounting the 25 extra fans that you can optionally purchase. There are four thumb screws holding the sides on (so, no screwdriver). You need 6 screws to hold the motherboard down, and 4 screws to hold the PSU in. The rear expansion bay blanking plates are real, grown-up things which you can remove and remove again, and they all come with thumbscrews (so again, no screwdriver).

I managed to install a DVD drive and two harddrives without ever needing to touch a single screw. The front panel plates unclip (and can be clipped back in again). The blanking plates behind that unfortunately have to be broken off, but you can’t normally see those. You then simply slide the drive into the case, until it magically clicks into plate. To remove it, you press a pair of release levers inside the case. Very slick.

Installing the harddrives is similarly a matter of snapping two plastic arms onto the sides of the drive, and then just sliding it into a bay until it snaps into place. Squeeze the clips to move it again. As it turns, out, I ended up needing to move the drives around several times to make the cables reach. Not having to laboriously undo and redo 4 screws per drive made things drastically easier. Oh, and the drives sit transversely too, which is interesting. Makes it easier to fit cables and so forth.

Also, cable management. Basically, there are various holes with nice rubber flaps on them. When you connect up, say, a harddrive, you take the wires round the back of the motherboard, and then poke then out through the hole nearest to where they plug in on the board. In particular, most of the tangle of wires from the PSU vanishes through a hole. Behind the motherboard it’s a total mess. But the glass window shows you the front of the board, and from there everything looks neat and tidy.

Sadly, nowhere in the instructions does it mention that you’re supposed to plug one power cord into the small connector at the top to power all the case fans. (They did at least wire all of them up to one connection point — the point furthest from the PSU!) I ended up in a situation where I couldn’t quite connect up all of my devices, because the cables were just fractionally too short. Fortunately, my dad was able to give me a Molex extension, and then it reaches easily.

The build had other problems too — mainly the ridiculous Intel CPU cooler, which wouldn’t lock into place. The instructions are vague as hell. I’m pretty certain that mine isn’t installed correctly. Still, it seems to kind of work, so…

I also found that some of the power cables only just reached the necessary points on the motherboard. Heh, I remember when there was one power connection. Then they added that optional extra 4 pins. Then they added an additional 4-pin block on a different part of the motherboard. Well, my new motherboard apparently requires an 8-pin connector. Plugging in only 4 of those pins seems to work just fine though. (For now!)

It’s a bit scary plugging anything into the far edge of the motherboard, since there are no mounting holes there, so nothing supports that part of the board, and the whole thing flexes if you press on it too hard. Yikes! But hey, it’s only a £100 piece of equipment.

I used the PSU from my old PC. It took quite a whole to dust it. I also used the nVidia GeForce GTX 260 from my old PC. The fan (which is on the underside) was utterly caked in dust, and it wasn’t at all easy to remove it. I was almost tempted to try taking the thing apart… but that’s probably a bad idea. Oh, and I reused the DVD drive, and one of the HDs. (I left the OS drive in there. If I put the old PSU and old GPU back in, the PC should still work.)

So what is the final spec of this monster?

Not forgetting £70 for a copy of Windows 7.

Firing the monster up, I discover that the usual VGA text BIOS screen is gone, replaced with something graphical, which actually uses a mouse! Imagine that… I see my CPU cruising at about 45°C (which seems a little warm for a system that’s just been switched on…)

So next I install Windows 7. It’s not an OS I have more than a few minutes’ experience with. But I guess that will change soon. Other than the artwork, it looks pretty much like Windows Vista, which I have on my laptop. Installing it is a surprisingly trivial process. It gives you two options: “upgrade existing Windows to Windows 7″ or “install new copy of Windows 7 (advanced)”. It asks which drive to install on. And then it just does it. (It still takes a while to do, mind you. This version of Windows arrives on a DVD, not a CD.)

Several reboots later, it asks for a time zone, user name, and a license key. I miskeyed it the first time, but it did eventually accept it. And then Windows is up and running. There’s almost nothing to configure. (It did initially fail to mount both of my data partitions though, which scared me for a minute.) I went to go download the latest drivers from the Internet… but without the drivers the NIC doesn’t work. So it’s the motherboard CD after all.

Firing up your PC and seeing the OS report 8 CPU cores and a warm fuzzy feeling. Of course, I actually have 4 physical cores; the OS is seeing 8 due to hyperthreading. But all the same, it’s sweet.

I ran the “Windows experience index” thing. Everything comes back as 7.7 or 7.2; except my harddrive speed, which is 5.2, so the overall rating is 5.2. (I wonder what the **** you have to do to improve that? It’s not like harddrives come in different speeds or anything…) After fetching and installing Firefox 9.0 (Seriously? 9.0? What happened to 3.5??) I could begin downloading things in earnest.

I had a quick play with Apophysis. It seems, subjectively, to run very much faster. I can’t tell how many CPU cores it’s using. I’ll have to install Process Monitor in a while. (After I finish Crysis, since it detects Process Explorer as a “cheat program”, despite the fact that it isn’t.)

I installed the Steam client, and spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t log it. Turns out that your username is a name, not a full email address like how every other system on Earth now does it. Once I straightened that out, I had my library back. I told it to install Crysis. The entire 7GB download look about 15 minutes on our new super-fast broadband. Now that’s ****ing fast!

I’ve played Crysis before, of course. With most things on medium detail, it was sluggish but playable. Well, I fired it up (and immediately heard my CPU fan kick up a gear), and told it to select the best settings for my system.

It immediately set everything to maximum detail.

Nothing says your system is hyped quite like Crysis offering to run at maximum detail. And when I fired up the actual game, it did in fact flow like silk. Really, really smooth. I could be playing Quake 2 or something… except that it’s freaking Crysis! Oh man, I’m happy.

Hmm, I wonder if it’s man enough to handle Batman?

(If you don’t see anything wrong with the above, you should.)