Well its that time of year again, ticking over another digit on the grand counter of life. I used to think 24 was old...
Before we talk about birthdays shenanigans, some history: at the last LAN party we had at Jimmy's house the top 200mm exhaust fan on my PC tower chucked it i, I attempted a repair, with no luck, and unfortunately due to the design not just any old 200mm fan would do the job, a genuine is the only way to go, and they cost upward wards of $60, so, for my birthday this year I decided to buy myself a new chassis.
After loads of research (and I mean loads!) I settled on the Corsair Carbide Series Air 540, I love the divided chassis design, the cube shape, and its huge cooling capacity.
With the huge cooling capacity in mind I did some research on the best fans to use on my H100i cpu cooler, and matched chassis fans to that, working out the flow to keep positive pressure inside the case to help reduce dust. The result, my 2600k running at 4.8ghz never exceeds 60 degrees under full load.
On a side note these fans are quite impressive, with this build I was going for maximum performance so I skipped plugging fans into the motherboard and bought an 8 fan power splitter to power them all at full noise. When you power the machine on it shudders as the fans spin up, they have an insane amount of torque.
The build is basically the same as my previous chassis, one notable exception is I am putting two SSDs in that I have picked up over the past year or so, I put them in RAID 0, with some pretty impressive results, 1100mb/s read speed, 900mb/s write speed.
The finished build:
i7 2600k @ 4.8ghz
32GB DDR3 1866mhz RAM @ 1984mhz
Asus P8P67 Deluxe Board
Corsair H100i CPU Cooler with SP120 & AF120 fans in Push-Pull
2x EVGA GTX 780 Superclocked GPUs in SLI
2x 240GB SSDs in RAID 0
2x 1TB HDDs in RAID 0
OCZ 1250w PSU
A lot of the components in this build are getting old now, I first built this when Intel released Sandy Bridge and the 2600k was brand new! And now nearly 5 years on, and with a mild overclock this machine is still very powerful, I am very happy with this, and I am keen to put it to the test (a LAN, of course)!
For my birthday Amy wanted to buy me a fancy whisky, so we decided to go away for a weekend to explore some Tasmanian Whiskies, which meant a trip to Hobart! We invited Ek & Grant and planned a 3 day trip.
Day 1:
On the way down we stopped in at Nant, supposedly a highly regarded Tasmanian whisky, the distillery was pretty cool, built inside an old Flour Mill which has been restored. Personally I didnt really like the Nant that much, however tastings are always straight, and I am not a massive fan of drinking whiskey straight, so I bought 2x 40ml tasters to try at home.
Next stop, Redlands Distillery, this tour was different, but just as good as Nant, these guys had recently moved locations and so their distillery was not fully up and running yet, but our tour guide was the Master Distiller himself, he was an awesome bloke, and let us taste the whiskey at each step of the process. Again tho I didn't really like the final product, at this point I am starting to think I just don't really like 'Single Malt' Whiskies, which is what Tasmanian is known for.
After that we headed to our accomodation and checked in, then headed out to find some tea, ending up at a Burger Got Soul, they make a damn good burger! Including this one called 'The Mount Wellington' - which Grant just could not resist.
Day 2:
Less whisky today, it was more of a relaxing fun day, we went shopping in the CBD, I took Amy to Puddleduck Vineyard (she's always wanted to go there), after which we enjoyed a relaxing lunch in Richmond (where we got engaged) and then headed back to town to meet up with Grant & Ek. Tea tonight was at Hogs Breath.
Day 3:
Off to Bruny Island today to visit the Tasmanian House of Whisky, a place where every single bottle of Tasmanian made whisky can be found, it was very, very cool! We spent a good while looking around at all the whiskies, trying to decide which one we would taste (it was expensive). In the end we decided to try a whisky called The Exile:
This is a one of a kind whisky, only 344 bottles were made, and of those only 1 remains for sale, the definition of rare! And at $795 a bottle its not the most expensive in the world, but as far as Tasmanian whiskies go I believe it is only beaten out by one, the Sullivans Cove Single Malt which won best Single Malt in the world last year. The Exile was a very nice whisky, my favourite to have straight, unfortunately Ill never get the chance to try it with coke (some would say oh thank goodness, apparently mixing expensive whiskies is frowned upon). While we were at the House of Whisky I picked up a few empty bottles of rare whiskies to add to my collection (yes a collection of empty bottles). We didn't get too long on Bruny Island, we filled the remainder of our time visiting the Bruny Island Honey shop, I would have liked to see more of the island, next time! We stopped in at a few shops on the way home, including a small chocolate shop filled with all kinds of home made chocolate delights, made by an apparently world famous chocolatier who has been flown all around the world to make chocolate. After that it was off to find my birthday present, Amy is getting me an expensive whisky, I had planned on a fancy Tasmanian one but so far I didn't like them enough to spend that much on one, so we went around a few bottle shops and I settled on a bottle of Johhnie Walker Blue Label ($220/bottle).
On the way home we stopped at Campbell Town for a feed and that brings us to the end of a pretty epic weekend! Thanks to my beautiful wife for the Birthday present, and the idea for this epic trip!!