I don't build myself a computer very often, but when I do, I like to build something special and this new machine named HAL will be no exception.
This machine will replace my main workhorse machine called Backslash, this is an Intel LGA775 2.83GHz which at one point was overclocked to 4.2GHz. this machine has an EVGA nVidia 8800GTX video card and 8GB of system RAM. Both the CPU and Video card in this PC are water cooled with a totally custom system.
I mainly use this PC for customer work, video editing, VMWare, and gaming so a high performance machine is essential. As well as plenty of RAM good disk IO is required so virtual machines don't get bottle-necked at the storage layer.
The specification I have planned so far is...
Intel Core i7 4770K 3.5GHz CPU with 4 physical cores and 4 hyper-threaded cores.
Gigabyte Z87MX-D3H
16GB of Kingston HyperX Beast 2400MHz DDR3 RAM
The storage will be covered by 2x 240GB Corsair Force LS SSD's, a single 60GB Force LS SSD and 2x 2TB hard disks. An explanation of the storage configuration will be covered in another article.
I'd like to keep the size of the machine down as much as possible hence the motherboard is a mATX board. The Z87MX-D3H has all the slots and interfaces needed as well as 6x SATA3 ports with Intel RAID the gigabit LAN is also Intel and not Realtek.
The chosen video card will be an EVGA nVidia powered GTX 750Ti FTW ACX, chosen because of it mid level performance that wont break the budget and reviews indicating that its a quiet card.
CPU Cooling will be provided by an Envermax 240mm ELC240 water-cooling system.