uATX System Buildup: Choosing Components

With the major component decisions out of the way, it was time to make a decision on what peripherals I wanted and then those that I could actually afford. It turns out in my original budgeting process that I made some assumptions on cooling and audio that were wrong - at least wrong in the fact that I thought the retail kit extras or "hand me down" components would suffice. Of course, the thought of having a shiny new trinket was too much to resist also. Therefore, besides the John Travolta autographed Saturday Night Fever wardrobe and Bee Gees album, it appears my Brad Delp autographed Boston paraphernalia will see action on eBay now.

Cooling

The SG03 case comes with a very good 120mm fan and has an option for a second 120mm fan in the case. Considering the setup being installed, I decided another fan would be wise. I have always liked the Noctua NF-S12-800, but since the inclusion of additional case fans was outside the original budget I could not afford two of them. Silverstone offers a nice series of fans including the FN121 already installed in the case. At $9.99, it was a relative bargain but another fan that Wesley has recommended to me a hundred times showed up in the same price range. I have used Scythe fans in the past and always liked them. I decided to remove the Silverstone fan in my case, install it in my daughter's, and purchase a couple of fans for my system that provide very good airflow with excellent acoustics. The price of $12.99, down from $29.99, sealed the deal for me and I ordered two of them.

I had planned to use the retail Phenom X3 heatsink, but even though it fit fine, the clearances in this case were just a little too close for comfort as I wanted some additional maneuvering room. I had an extra Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP cooler that would have worked, but my OCD kicked in again so I went on the prowl for something different. Silverstone offers the passive NT06-Lite cooler designed with the SG series of cases in mind - provided you have the right power supply. Besides having a power supply with a different layout, the unit was just too large for my tastes.

I figured my best opportunity would be a 1U or 2U type cooler. Thermaltake offered a unit that looked perfect but it was socket F/1207 only. After several product searches, I ended up back at Silverstone with the NT07-AM2 low-profile cooler. However, this unit is for 65W or lower TDP processors and our Phenom 8650 X3 is a 95W TDP design. I decided to take a chance after finding one on clearance for $12.99 and $3 shipping. It worked fine at idle and under light loads, but for gaming or heavy encoding activities it just could not keep the X3 in the 50C~54C range that I needed.

I was back to square one; a couple of low-profile coolers from Cooljag/Dynatron would have worked except the noise levels were going to be significantly higher than the retail cooler at load. I had a friend suggest the Scythe Shuriken cooler and Cooler Master Vortex 752 that were working well in his HTPC configurations. I decided not to take the risk of spending more money or having my friend tear down his system. Anyway, cost reared its ugly head again with these options.

At this point, I pulled a Zalman CNPS-8700 out of my HT system just to see how well it would fit as I started to rethink my obsession with creating as much free area as possible around the CPU socket. The Zalman would work; the problem was a $54 price tag that I could not afford. It appeared I was going to have to settle for the retail cooler after all... until I went closet diving.

I remembered I had bought a couple of coolers from Rosewill when the Phenoms first arrived, but I never had a chance to use them after I realized the Phenoms were not going into normal system builds anytime soon. After digging through what I can only describe as a historical treasure trove of computer related items (Ed: stuff he is too lazy to dump), I found the box containing two Rosewill RCX-Z1 units. At first glance, they really did not seem to be an improvement over the retail unit and I started wondering why I purchased them.

It then occurred to me that this particular model comes with a fan controller that allows the user to tailor their fan speeds and is the reason I purchased them. I will say in testing that these units operate quieter than the retail units do, especially when you run the fan on low speed. Temperatures are about 3C~4C lower than the retail unit when the fan speed is above 85%. Whether it is worth $20 over the retail unit is debatable for a stock system. However, since they were technically "free" at this point, I was going to use them and deal with my phobia about the space requirements.