Finally did a system upgrade and only took my GPU,the Sapphire 4850 with Vortexx neo my hard disks and DVD burner.
Went for The Asus P7P55D 1156 Motherboard,
The Core i3 530 Processor,
after reading lots of reviews decided to go for this as the 540 was not available
and chose to avoid the i5 range altogether as it only makes overclocking easier
but does not increase the level of overclocking by a noticeable level unfortunately,
Got The Gskill RipJaws 2x2Gb 1600
which goes nicely with my rig which I'll talk about in a moment
,
To power all of this got The Corsair 550VX
which although is the best available in this price range and is a real beauty with its sleeved cables,
was a second preference because cable management was high on the list and wanted to go for the 520HX
which was unfortunately unavailable,
my disappointment was short lived,however,thanks to my bloody cabbyhyeah: ,
Was always worried about the state of my 1Tb Caviar Green which I had connected externally using a cheap sata to usb converter,
I was looking for a nice external casing which had a fan and had eSata.
The SunbeamTech eSata+Usb case fit the bill perfectly.
I can now stop worrying about forgetting to plug out the case after use and going to sleep
because there's a quite little fan working hard to keep my hard disk nice and cool.eSata transfers have been 2-3 times faster than USB :hap2:
Finally,coming to the star of the show :cool1:,my cabinet,
The LanCool PC K-62R1 Red Edition.
I was actually planning on going for a 10k rpm HDD or save a bit more and go for an 80Gb SSD
however is cabinet ne mera plan ko poora mitti me mila diya :ashamed:
This cabinet is a total beauty,
Completely tool less design,rotatable HDD cage and vibration damping where needed,
water cooling capable (sorry about the bad lighting),
anodized thumbscrews for the motherboard,cable management clamps and vibration damping for the hard disks,
A closer look at the damping material,
Removable hdd trays,
And this clamp which part of the tool less design holds the PSU,
It makes more sense when you see it in action.
4 fans,two fans without Leds on the top
two of which have Red Leds,the ones on the front and the rear,all fans are upgradeable although I don't feel the need for it.
Front and top "panels" are removable as you might have noticed already and the dust filters are easily removable and washable.
My rig with the motherboard,PSU and hdd in place,
Oh btw,rubberized stands and air inlet with dust filter for the PSU,almost forgot to mention
Smartly placed openings and a removable back panel makes cable management a pleasure and for all those extra cables lying around they provided these clamps to clamp them with.
My rig,finally assembled,have a few cables hanging around when they shouldn't be,my bad,
Whew! What can I say,assembling a rig is fun again.
I like to nitpick but I find it hard to do so in this case.Two things come to my mind though,
back panel is removable however the motherboard tray itself isn't removable,
overall mostly steel frame instead of aluminum which cuts down weight by half.
I found no problems in installing my board however and don't plan on moving my cabby anytime soon,
something which only makes sense for LAN party animals.
The overall feel of the cabinet though is very upmarkety,
the insides have been given a nice crimson reddish paint job
and I totally forgot to mention,
they threw in a fan controller,worth 500 bucks at least,that simultaneously controls 4 fans,
just like that :hap2:
What more could I ask for a cool Rs.7000 :cool2: .
For somebody who was using a Bijli till now,
this has been a totally awesome upgrade and a huge level jump,
something which I had experienced only once previously
when moving to a better Headphone and Sound Card...
Talking about Sound Cards,
I just remembered I did a Sound Card upgrade a couple of months ago,
Meet the HT Omega Claro Halo,
Not much in terms of packaging,very simple,
Some Cables and fancy gold plated interconnects,or so they claim,
won't be using them anytime soon anyways,
Now the reason why I didn't show this off earlier or post a review and something that still holds is because I haven't been able to fully use this beast.
It has these beautiful speaker inputs just lying there because I use headphones,
It has a dedicated chips for providing Dolby Headphone,Dolby Prologic IIx and DTS Neo 7 and another chip for 7.1 channel Virtual Surround,
again things which I don't use.
However the reason why I mention it now is because I have used these for over 3 months now
and let me tell you the onboard DAC and opamps alone are worth the ~12k or so I spend on this.
I was using a Audigy Value card previously and was expecting a decent quality increase
but not something along the lines of going from onboard to Audigy+AD700 but boy was I wrong.
The biggest difference I found was in the level of bass detail and the ability to distinguish between even the smallest differences totally blew me.
It brought out the best of my Ad 700 also felt that the sound stage had opened up a bit more but this is could probably just in my mind
but honestly,at times I feel my headphone is now the bottleneck!
It even has an onboard Headphone amp(upto 200ohm) so I don't have to worry about one if I were to upgrade my cans
Another thing that adds value to this is that they are very mod friendly and the opamps are completely swappable.Can't talk much here as I haven't tried it but can't wait to get me hands on some which have been mentioned on Head-fi!
Finally if you have reached this far thanks for reading
Hit me up if had something to ask.
Went for The Asus P7P55D 1156 Motherboard,
The Core i3 530 Processor,
after reading lots of reviews decided to go for this as the 540 was not available
and chose to avoid the i5 range altogether as it only makes overclocking easier
but does not increase the level of overclocking by a noticeable level unfortunately,
Got The Gskill RipJaws 2x2Gb 1600
which goes nicely with my rig which I'll talk about in a moment
,
To power all of this got The Corsair 550VX
which although is the best available in this price range and is a real beauty with its sleeved cables,
was a second preference because cable management was high on the list and wanted to go for the 520HX
which was unfortunately unavailable,
my disappointment was short lived,however,thanks to my bloody cabby
hyeah: ,Was always worried about the state of my 1Tb Caviar Green which I had connected externally using a cheap sata to usb converter,
I was looking for a nice external casing which had a fan and had eSata.
The SunbeamTech eSata+Usb case fit the bill perfectly.
I can now stop worrying about forgetting to plug out the case after use and going to sleep
because there's a quite little fan working hard to keep my hard disk nice and cool.eSata transfers have been 2-3 times faster than USB :hap2:
Finally,coming to the star of the show :cool1:,my cabinet,
The LanCool PC K-62R1 Red Edition.
I was actually planning on going for a 10k rpm HDD or save a bit more and go for an 80Gb SSD
however is cabinet ne mera plan ko poora mitti me mila diya :ashamed:
This cabinet is a total beauty,
Completely tool less design,rotatable HDD cage and vibration damping where needed,
water cooling capable (sorry about the bad lighting),
anodized thumbscrews for the motherboard,cable management clamps and vibration damping for the hard disks,
A closer look at the damping material,
Removable hdd trays,
And this clamp which part of the tool less design holds the PSU,
It makes more sense when you see it in action.
4 fans,two fans without Leds on the top
two of which have Red Leds,the ones on the front and the rear,all fans are upgradeable although I don't feel the need for it.
Front and top "panels" are removable as you might have noticed already and the dust filters are easily removable and washable.
My rig with the motherboard,PSU and hdd in place,
Oh btw,rubberized stands and air inlet with dust filter for the PSU,almost forgot to mention
Smartly placed openings and a removable back panel makes cable management a pleasure and for all those extra cables lying around they provided these clamps to clamp them with.
My rig,finally assembled,have a few cables hanging around when they shouldn't be,my bad,
Whew! What can I say,assembling a rig is fun again
.I like to nitpick but I find it hard to do so in this case.Two things come to my mind though,
back panel is removable however the motherboard tray itself isn't removable,
overall mostly steel frame instead of aluminum which cuts down weight by half.
I found no problems in installing my board however and don't plan on moving my cabby anytime soon,
something which only makes sense for LAN party animals.
The overall feel of the cabinet though is very upmarkety,
the insides have been given a nice crimson reddish paint job
and I totally forgot to mention,
they threw in a fan controller,worth 500 bucks at least,that simultaneously controls 4 fans,
just like that :hap2:
What more could I ask for a cool Rs.7000 :cool2: .
For somebody who was using a Bijli till now,
this has been a totally awesome upgrade and a huge level jump,
something which I had experienced only once previously
when moving to a better Headphone and Sound Card...
Talking about Sound Cards,
I just remembered I did a Sound Card upgrade a couple of months ago,
Meet the HT Omega Claro Halo,
Not much in terms of packaging,very simple,
Some Cables and fancy gold plated interconnects,or so they claim,
won't be using them anytime soon anyways,
Now the reason why I didn't show this off earlier or post a review and something that still holds is because I haven't been able to fully use this beast.
It has these beautiful speaker inputs just lying there because I use headphones,
It has a dedicated chips for providing Dolby Headphone,Dolby Prologic IIx and DTS Neo 7 and another chip for 7.1 channel Virtual Surround,
again things which I don't use.
However the reason why I mention it now is because I have used these for over 3 months now
and let me tell you the onboard DAC and opamps alone are worth the ~12k or so I spend on this.
I was using a Audigy Value card previously and was expecting a decent quality increase
but not something along the lines of going from onboard to Audigy+AD700 but boy was I wrong.
The biggest difference I found was in the level of bass detail and the ability to distinguish between even the smallest differences totally blew me.
It brought out the best of my Ad 700 also felt that the sound stage had opened up a bit more but this is could probably just in my mind
but honestly,at times I feel my headphone is now the bottleneck!
It even has an onboard Headphone amp(upto 200ohm) so I don't have to worry about one if I were to upgrade my cans
Another thing that adds value to this is that they are very mod friendly and the opamps are completely swappable.Can't talk much here as I haven't tried it but can't wait to get me hands on some which have been mentioned on Head-fi!
Finally if you have reached this far thanks for reading
Hit me up if had something to ask.
