Improbable Insights

So now the madness begins.

There's a New Kid in Town

This isn’t about Windows 7 itself. That’s for a later post. It’s about building a reference system to test Windows 7.

I’m working on various Windows 7-related projects. For that, I need a reference system.

What’s a reference system? Glad you asked.

A reference system is something that’s a baseline. Since I’m starting fresh, with a new OS, I wanted to build a system in which I could compare other systems and components. This would necessarily be a high end system, but it wouldn’t be an overclocker’s dream. It is, after all, a reference system. So everything needed to be bog-standard.

Some of the parts for the Windows 7 reference system.

I want to distinguish this from what I call a testbed. I have several here, all running in massive Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 cases. They’re constantly evolving, used to test new motherboard, CPUs, graphics and storage. My intent for the reference system that I just built will be constant going forward, for the next six months at a minimum.

That doesn’t mean it needed to be low performing. I’m working from the thesis that today’s high end is tomorrow’s midrange, which then becomes the low end in a few years. So we’ll start with a fairly high end system. Let’s run down the list of components.

• CPU:  Intel Core i7 975
• Motherboard:  Intel DX58SO
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright Ultra 120
• Graphics:  ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB stock
• Memory:  OCZ DDR3-1333 (@1066MHz) 6GB kit (3 x 2GB modules)
• Power Supply:  Corsair TX850W 850W 80-plus certified
• Hard Drive:  (Primary) Seagate 1TB 7200.12
• Hard Drive:  (Secondary) Western Digital 1TB RE2-GP GreenPower
• Optical Drive:  LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray / HD-DVD / DVD burner combo drive
• Case:  CM Storm Scout (Coolermaster)

So it’s a high end system, but it’s not an extreme high end system. That was the intent. The Scout, by Coolermaster’s CM Storm brand, is a useful mid-tower design. It’s not massive, it’s easy to move around and more important, it’s typical. It’s not huge, like many enthusiasts cases, it’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

For example, you can’t install a really large motherboard, like the Asus Rampage II Extreme. Physically, it would fit, but the back-facing SATA ports would be completely inaccessible. Airflow could be better. But it’s relatively compact and easy to move around. Since this reference build won’t see a lot of frequent hardware changes, the relatively small interior space isn’t a drawback.

Similarly, Intel’s DX58SO is pretty standard fare from Intel. It suffers from having only four memory sockets and unfortunate placement of several of the SATA ports. But it’s reliable, fits easily into standard ATX cases and works.

AMD’s Radeon HD 4890 is not a factory overclocked card, but does support DX10.1. At some point, we’ll have DX11 cards, but since Nvidia doesn’t support DirectX 10.1 features, in went the ATI card. It’s certainly speedy enough in modern games. The hard drives are pretty standard fare. Why a pair of one terabyte drives? The secondary drive is for storing various OS configuration image files. I typically have different image files backed up for gaming benchmarks, content creation testing and so on. And, of course, the LG drive will allow me to check out Blu-ray playback, as well as burn DVDs as needed.

All of these components should give me a pretty good baseline to judge component behavior under Windows 7. Later, I’ll benchmark this baby, but I only just got the Windows 7 RTM installed. I’ll post some results when I get them.

Of course, now that the shipping version of Win7 is up on Microsoft’s Technet, I’m downloading Windows 7 Pro, which is going on my production system. But that’s also a tale for another time.