EggXpert

Capt. Insane:

Kardon:

Capt. Insane:

Man, I wish I had the money some of you guys to build rigs like that. I thought mine was pretty boss, only to learn my mobo only has PCIe 1.0 so I can't use any of the 2.0 gfx cards. And since I don't want Vista, I'll probably have to wait until 2010 until the price of Windows 7 comes down enough for my price range. Damn new software being so expensive

PCI express 2.0 cards are backwards compatible.

Are they really? Will it make much of a difference?

YES PCIe 2.0 and 1.1(16x) ARE Compatible!

Capt. Insane:

Kardon:

Capt. Insane:

Man, I wish I had the money some of you guys to build rigs like that. I thought mine was pretty boss, only to learn my mobo only has PCIe 1.0 so I can't use any of the 2.0 gfx cards. And since I don't want Vista, I'll probably have to wait until 2010 until the price of Windows 7 comes down enough for my price range. Damn new software being so expensive

PCI express 2.0 cards are backwards compatible.

Are they really? Will it make much of a difference?

Nope there is virtually no performance difference between the 2 as of now

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2-0,1915.html

Kardon:

Capt. Insane:

Kardon:

Capt. Insane:

Man, I wish I had the money some of you guys to build rigs like that. I thought mine was pretty boss, only to learn my mobo only has PCIe 1.0 so I can't use any of the 2.0 gfx cards. And since I don't want Vista, I'll probably have to wait until 2010 until the price of Windows 7 comes down enough for my price range. Damn new software being so expensive

PCI express 2.0 cards are backwards compatible.

Are they really? Will it make much of a difference?

Nope there is virtually no performance difference between the 2 as of now

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2-0,1915.html

Sweet. Thanks both of you (kardon/tracer)

Capt. Insane:

Kardon:

Capt. Insane:

Kardon:

Capt. Insane:

Man, I wish I had the money some of you guys to build rigs like that. I thought mine was pretty boss, only to learn my mobo only has PCIe 1.0 so I can't use any of the 2.0 gfx cards. And since I don't want Vista, I'll probably have to wait until 2010 until the price of Windows 7 comes down enough for my price range. Damn new software being so expensive

PCI express 2.0 cards are backwards compatible.

Are they really? Will it make much of a difference?

Nope there is virtually no performance difference between the 2 as of now

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2-0,1915.html

Sweet. Thanks both of you (kardon/tracer)

Not a problem

Alright, you guys are going to love this one.

 

Processor: Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.33 GHz lapped like hell

Memory: 3.5GB DDR2-800 (3 sticks of 1GB and one stick of 512MB)

Hard Drive 1: 18.4GB 15,000 RPM SCSI Ultra-320

Hard Drive 2: 74GB 15,000 RPM SCSI Ultra-320

Hard Drive 3: 150GB 10,000 RPM SCSI Ultra-320

Hard Drive 4: 150GB 10,000 RPM SCSI Ultra-320 (paired with the one above in RAID 1)

Hard Drive 5: Maxtor 500GB SATA

Video Card: ATI Radeon HD4850

Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E Wifi/AP Edition

Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Platinum

Power Supply: Enermax 650W

Speakers: Yamaha HTR-5940, Klipsch Sub10, 5x PolkAudio Monitor 40, Polk Audio CS1, all on copper oxy-free 12AWG and connected to X-Fi platinum via optical.

Operating System: Windows XP Pro

Fans: 2 Silverstone FM-121 (front and back), 1 Silverstone FM-81 (top), Silverstone Nitrogon NT06 Lapped like hell w/ AS5

Case: Lian Li PC-7B

Keyboard: Enermax Aurora Premium (brushed aluminum keyboard) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823102003

Mouse: Logitech G5

Monitor: Envision EN2028 20" 1600x1200 Professional LCD

Misc: LSI MegaRAID 320-2 SCSI RAID w/ Backup Battery & 128MB Cache

Misc: Entire case lined with sound dampening

 

And time for some pictures...

 

 

 

You don't know SPEED till you've used a 15,000 RPM SCSI drive with Cached I/O, NCQ, and a $700 SCSI Controller.

Phenom 9850 x4 oced to 2.9ghz

Asus MVP Deluxe 790FX (Zalman 9700)

3870x2 (soon to be 4870x2 maybe two!)

 3 wd raptors in raid 0

1 640 gb wd sats 3.0

Lite on DL dvd Burner

8 gigabytes of OCZ ddr2 1066

Creative XFI Elite sound card.

Antec 1000w  psu (<80% eff with 4 rails)

Barricuda Razer 5.1 headset, Sienhierser 595 Hds, Logitech Z-5500 5.1 (Speakers w/ 10 inch sub conneced using Fiber Optical to XFI Elite)

Coolermaster Stacker 830 Evolution (7 x140mm fans)

Logitech G5, and G9 :p

Logitech G15 Keyboard

Dell Ultrasharp 22inch (1680x1050), Viewsonic 22inch (1680x1050)

Dont have pics right now but will soon havent taken any in a while!

 

I have a 3 week old rig built on a $1200 budget over a span of 2 years.  Core components were bought 3 weeks ago, everything else was bought in pairs or so over the last 2 years.

• ASUS P5Q
  
• Core 2 Duo E8400 (3 Ghz on stock cooling)
  
• 2 x 2 GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800 RAM
  
• eVGA 8800GT SC (512 MB, PCI-E 2.0)
  
• 320 GB Seagate SATAII HDD
  
• 2 x Lite-On Optical Drives (DVD and DVD Lightscribe)
  
• Corsair HX520 PSU
  
• Zalman MFC-1 Plus Fan Controller (Black)
  
• Antec P180B Case
  
• 4 x 120 mm Masscool Case Fans
  
• Logitech G7 (to be replaced with a Ideazon Razer Edge)
  
• Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 (to be replaced with a Microsoft Media Keyboard 3000)

Total cost after shipping such on all parts minus peripherals is approximately $1120.

ExtremeRev, that Silverstone Nitro is absolutely HUGE!!! LOL.

Here's a pict of the new Xfire setup.  

Please disregard the cabling, the pict was took right after initial install. You know the quick and dirty, make sure everything works,  2 get  them rebates out. LOL. I've since cleaned it up a bit. I'm debating either going with a Xigmatek 92mm, or a diff HSF, because the 120mm blocks out the side fan on my 900 (Open to opinions and suggestions on that one.) I really hate to though, the 120 Xig is giving me great temps, 24-6c idle mid 30s load.

Penewah!

 

Nice crossfire setup there Pene!  What MSI board is that?  P45 based?  How's the temps on those HD4850s looking?

Penewab2007:

ExtremeRev, that Silverstone Nitro is absolutely HUGE!!! LOL.

 

lol yeah. It actually got some pretty bad reviews on tomshardware when they ran their cooler benchmarks, but that's because the heatsink was cut horribly from factory. If you lap it like it should be, it provides absolutely excellent cooling (given its massively thick fan and huge hetasink).

At the price of $50-$60 though, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they were planning on lapping it. I dropped 8 degrees C idle and 12 degrees C under load after I lapped the CPU and heatsink, just to give you an idea of how bad it is from factory.

Mine is always a work in progress.  Components are changing all the time. Right now it is the following:

Processor - Core 2 Duo E6700 OC'ed to 3.42 ghz (using a $10 MassCool HS & Fan with Arctic Silver 5)

Memory - 4 gig (4 x 1 gig) of OCZ PC6400 OC'ed to 912 mhz (one gig is unused with 32 bit XP but I plan to go to Vista x64 soon)

Hard Drive - 3 older IDE HD's (ATA133) Total storage = 460 gigabytes

Video Card - ATI 1650X Pro

Motherboard - Biostar TForce TP43D2A7

Sound Card - On-board sound

Power Supply - Antec Earthwatts 380

Speakers - Older Logictech Dolby Digital setup

Operating System - Windows XP Pro

Fans - One 120mm and one 80mm

Case - Antec NSK4480B

Keyboard - VERY OLD (circa 1993) keyboard that fits me like a pair of old jeans

Mouse - Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse 2.0

Monitor - Older Hitachi 21" CRT

Misc - Also, Liteon 20X DVD burner, PCI LPT card, PCI IDE card

Pictures of it would put you to sleep.  Nothing flashy or fancy.

EXRev: Thats surprising, Silverstone is usually good about QC, and I've always loved their designs, fire'm a email saying "what up!" ! LOL.

Naw, this is an AMD rig. I'm building an Intel rig right now too, but I think I'm gonna just hammer on that for a while and then sell it. I'm partial to AMD, after everything's said and done. I wanna start keepin a couple completed boxes around for quick sells.

Sorry about the size! LOL. I had the same high temps before the fan fix. have a couple profiles now, when 66% I'm getting the 41c, at 40% it goes up to 46-47c. I didn't save a 100% profile, b/c the things bascially sounded like they were gonna fly out of my case! lmao.

I'm more than comfortable with 41c CF'd, 50-55c load. Painkiller though will drive'm into the 60s, love to know why, PK never been known as a benchin game, but it does have some serius graphic events. Anyways. I like this MSI 790FX allot, just a flat out nice board. And not sure what people are squakin about the heatpipe in the way, my card over PCIE_1 popped right in and its not touching. ??

I got a 9950 comin, b/c I wanna see what this board can do with it, but the 6000+ x2 is doing just fine as well. My old faithful 6000+, thing's paid for it self, many times over. I think I'll have them bury it with me.

Penewah!

Old hardware

Old P4 Northwood. Doesn't look to good.

Done building.

 

Just built this rig.

 

ASUS P5N-D nForce 750i SLI ATX

EVGA GeForce 9600GT 512MB GDDR3 PCI-e 2.0 16x

Rosewill RX950 950W PSU

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz

OCZ Fatal1ty Edition 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800 RAM

2 WD Caviar SE16 250GB HDD

Artcic Silver 5 Thermal compound

3 MASSCOOL 80mm Case fans

2 IDE Optical. 48/32/48 CD-RW, 16x DVD

Custom "CTTower" Mid-Tower

Logitech Keyboard.

Microsoft Optical Mouse

17" CRT

vampyre:

As the subject says:

 What's in your computer. Share with everyone what components are working good for you. Upsides or Downsides. Be creative.

Everyting about this is fantastic!:

Processor

AMD 9950 BE

Memory

4g gskill 1066

Hard Drive

Seagate 250g 310AS

Video Card

Diamond 4870

Motherboard

Asus M3a78 790gx

Sound Card 

Pci creative x-fi fatality pro

Power Supply

Pc power and cooling silencer 750w Red

Speakers

Running HDMI from 4870 into onkyo HTIB

Operating System

Windows vista home premium 64

Fans

2 120mm fans that came with case

Case

Cooler master mystique with side air duct

Keyboard

Saitek eclipse II

Mouse

Razer 2000 dpi blue

Monitor

From onkyo receiver by HDMI into samsung lnt4071f 40" 1080p TV

Misc

Want to get a nice canon duplex printer

Let us see pictures!!

Will edit with a picture and all my OC/timing info soon .!

 

My gaming pc currently consists of:
Mobo: Asus P5n32-e sli plus
CPU: Core2Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz
Ram: 6GB DDR2 (should be 8, but one stick went bad)
GPU: 640mb GeForce 8800GTS
Sound: Sound Blaster Live 24-bit
PSU: 650 Watt
HDs: 3x 300gb sata
External HDs: 3x 500GB IDE in USB cases, 2x 750gb in removable drive trays
Monitors: dual standard Hanns-G 19" LCDs
Case: Lian-Li PC-V2100B
Drives: Asus 20x Sata DVD+/-RW
Fans: coolers on each HD, 3x Ultra Kraze 120mm 3krpm, kingston ram fan
Other: Bamboo Fun graphics tablet, Logitech G25 Racing Wheel, Optical Mouse, 5 in 1 card reader
OS: 64bit Vista Ultimate

Mobo: Gigabyte

CPU: AMD 5600+ 

Ram: 2GB Crucial Balistics

GPU: nvidia xfx 8600gt XXX

Case: Coolermaster 

OS: Vista 32-bit ultimate

 

Specs in sig.

Worklog in link below

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=198781 

That case is a beast.

Processor: Core 2 Quad Q6600 Oc'd to 3.2GHz

Memory: 8GB OCZ Sli-Ready DDR2-800

Hard Drive: WD 500GB 7200RPM

Video Card: EVGA 9800 GX2 KO

Motherboard: EVGA 780i

Sound Card: Onboard 

Power Supply: Rosewill Xtreme 850w

Speakers: Soundworks 4.1 surround.

Operating System: Vista Ultimate x64

Fans: 4 120mm Blue LED

Case: Cooler M