BlackBeast
Named for its large, black, gaming case, BlackBeast Mark I was a Novatech bare-bones PC that I assembled at the end of 2010. Given that I rarely saw its AMD six-core 64-bit CPU exceed about 5% utilisation I remained vulnerable to the suggestion that I might have over-specified the system. A little bit. Possibly.1 On the other hand, it didn't tend to exceed 25C either. Given the propensity of the Windows operating "system" to sprawl over everything I fitted 8GB of DDR3 RAM for it to play with. About 1.2GB of this seemed to get soaked up effortlessly before I loaded and ran a single useful application.2
It was still available as of September 2011:
I've also stuffed three 1TB SATA data drives, and a 150GB Velociraptor boot drive into it. Plus a Sapphire Radeon HD5670 passively-cooled graphics card, which purports to be about the most powerful available without a cooling fan. And a very decent Creative X-fi audio card (for its optical digital I/O).
BlackBeast Mark II
Owing to that delicious combination of my stupidity and clumsiness, in early December 2011 I managed to turn the AMD six-core CPU chip into a worthless piece of dead sand. How did that happen? Well, I had just begun experimenting with transcoding some of my DVDs into MP4 files. Such files are eminently suitable for playback on my Asus Tablet PC and equally suitable for storing on my Buffalo NAS and playing back via my Netgear Media player.
Of course, it turns out that video transcoding is quite processor-intensive. I was using the jolly nice HandBrake application and I couldn't help noticing that not only did CPU cycles batter themselves against the 99% usage level but the processor chip temperature shot up as high as 77C during the process. Even with both case fans turned up to Harrier-take-off-noise-level maximum speed.
Opinions among my technically savvy chums vary as to safe thermal limits, though all do agree that cooler is better. AMD tech support reckons 62C is the wise maximum to keep in mind. So I thought I'd investigate more efficient CPU cooling. I treated myself to a nice, big, quiet, Zalman. Expensive mistake...
It turns out size does matter, after all. Basically, having sliced into the patient to assess the lie of the land, the surgeon (me) had to close him up again3 and send him back into battle (as it were) with his original cooler. The Zalman was too large, in truth, for me to manoeuvre it into position without removing at least one — and probably two — of my four sticks of DRAM (permanently) and, even then, it was doubtful that the power cable cluster to the furthest corner of the motherboard would have enough "give" in it to get out of the way. (And the cable bundle was too fat to let me re-route it underneath the motherboard, too.)
I thus found myself back in Novatech's nicely-refurbished premises taking their advice on either a new processor or a new processor and motherboard combo and (in either case) a better, quieter, CPU cooler. AMD now has an eight-core "Bulldozer" chip that tempted me (briefly), but I was advised to go for a quad core Intel i7 2600K with hyperthreading4 (whatever that means)...
... and we closed the deal when they agreed to fit this and a shiny new motherboard into my existing case, also fit (a different) Zalman — I didn't bother to bring along the one you can see above as I figured it was just too big — and also completely re-install a fresh copy of Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate SP1 leaving it up to me to configure and re-activate that using my own licence key when I'd got the system back home and after I'd re-fitted my data drives and graphics card. So I cooled my heels for about two hours while they re-opened the patient and performed the surgery. The two 4GB DRAM sticks are 20% faster than the four 2GB sticks I'd been using, too, and also leave two further memory slots free.
So now I have a slightly faster, even quieter, PC that barely gets up to 50C while video transcoding, and rips through CDs at about 30x real-time speed, too.
Anyone want a spare Zalman CPU cooler? It's quite big...