Reverant

iTrader: (10)

I still miss the sounds of old PCs. 5.25" drives on POST and modems connecting are sounds you don't forget.

Trip down the memory lane: anyone remember Ping Pong, Cascade, Michaelangelo...?

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

I don't miss the sound of dial-up at all. It was frustrating as hell to get sites to download.

I still get by with an old ATX with a CRT back at the house that I built for myself many moons ago. I guess I am uncool...
I do need a faster video card to keep up with the higher resolution stuff that is coming out (not worried about going HD on my current budget, but video is choppy).

Ben

iTrader: (33)

Fail. Didn't dial *70 first. When call waiting beeps in, you're going to get disconnected from your head to head 2 player command and conquer match.


Got the rest of the stuff in. Going to assemble it tonight (with 1 hard drive only).

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

Us 1337 kids had a dedicated modem line and would dial into BBSes with multiple nodes.

Ben

iTrader: (33)

And I'm done.
Whole thing took me about 3 hours from the time I started opening boxes to the time that I ran windows update, restarted and unlocked the 4th core.
Considering it was my first time, I thought I did pretty well. The only part that held me up was installing the aftermarket CPU cooler. I spent a solid 20 minutes trying to follow the instructions before getting frustrated and started winging it. Once I threw away the instructions, I had it installed in 5 minutes.

The case looks baller, it's quiet, and it's super fast. So far everything looks like it works correctly with exception to the cooling fans on top of the case. There are 2, wired parallel to each other, and neither spin. They're hooked to a line from the power supply that also feeds the optical drive, so I know the line has power. But the adapter that split the 4 pin connector from the power supply felt very cheap so I suspect that one of the pins isn't seated correctly. I'll mess with it over the weekend. I might just snip the bs cheap connectors and weatherpack it.

Windows rating below. So far I've only spent $300 (after $100 worth of rebates)!

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

oh **** I rate 5.7! only cause my GPU pwns yours. where you CPU pwns mine.

NA6C-Guy

iTrader: (1)

5.9 bitches, eat it! And that's only because of my old school HDD setup, all else is 7.4-7.6 out of 7.9. I think my computer cost me about $900 over a year ago.

No pictures!?

Ben

iTrader: (33)

I've read that windows assigns 5.9 as the maximum for 4GB ram.
After setting up the raid and installing a cheap video card, I think I'll be in all 7's except the RAM. Installing more RAM would mean removing the CPU cooler, which I'm not going to do. Also from what I read, I don't think I'd notice any benefits from installing more RAM anyway.

I looked over my invoices quickly and it looks like I've got $350 including shipping and the $10 I splurged on the fancy heat sink compound (of which I barely used). If I get a wild hair, I'll snap a pic when I fix the cooling fan. I'll probably put up a build list too in case someone else wants to try their hand at a first time build. You'd have to spend a lot more money (like double) to get a comparable PC in the store, and it wasn't that hard to do.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

It's funny how that works out. There have been times when I've looked at a finished machine and thought "I'd have been better off just buying the $299 bargain-bin special at Frys", and then others where, like you, something has managed to assemble itself on the cheap & good despite my worst intentions.



I still chuckle when I'm in any sort of retail store and I hear that sound in the background. Usually some third-party ATM or credit card machine. Last time I heard it was on Monday at the Ft. Myers airport in one of those bookstore / light retail shops. Can't imagine how at an airport terminal that they just constructed a few years ago everything isn't just straight IP.

ScottFW

iTrader: (4)

Last time I heard modem dial-up it turned out to be a ringtone on a nerd's cell phone.

Bryce

iTrader: (24)

/me changes his ringtone.

Ben

iTrader: (33)

The fan problem was indeed an unsecured pin in the cheap included fan harness. I popped it back in and all the fans are now functional. The case went from silent to barely audible.

The case included 3 fans. I mounted one in the front bottom, blowing into the hard drive rack. I put the other two on top, blowing up and out of the case. The CPU cooler fan pulls air through the CPU heat exchanger and pushes it up towards the top of the case and top of case fans.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

A few months ago I was up at Clear Channel's place in Chicago.

I'm standing in the rack room along with the station's CE. Suddenly, I hear an EAS alert tone. You know, that horrible, grating squeal you hear once a week on every radio station in the US as they test the Emergency Alert System. Except that I didn't also hear one of the EAS boxes (which were all in a rack in the next row from where I was standing) start chugging out a log on that tiny little printer built into the front. There are certain groups of sounds that you learn to recognize as all belonging together, and an EAS header is supposed to be followed by the log printer clattering.

Instead, the CE picked up his phone and said "hello."

I LOLed.

NA6C-Guy

iTrader: (1)

I went with 8GB just because my upgraded CPU cooler, which was rated so high on Newegg did zero for my temps, even after a 2 or 3 week break in to maybe let the thermal compound "set". If anything I saw a degree or two higher. Did you try out the stock heatsink and fan first? The one on my Phenom II 940 is pretty damn awesome and gets the job done. It freed up the other two slots to allow extra ram, which in my current case is not needed, since I'm not doing a lot of video and image editing at the same time, while playing games and browsing the internet. Even then, 8GB wouldn't be bothered.

Ben

iTrader: (33)

My CPU didn't come with a cooler. I got this one:



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103065

The mobo's software shows my CPU at 30-31° idle and 31-32 while surfing the internet. I let the mobo software run a stability test for the automatic overclock that ran all 4 cores at 100% for 25 minutes, and it only went up a few degrees (I stopped the auto overclcok at 3.4GHz. It was still going, I just throught it was fast enough). I put a decent amount of thought and effort into cooling when putting the case together. I actually blocked off case vents around the top to make sure that the fans were pulling in cold air from the bottom of the case and up through it. Otherwise the fans would have been pulling in cold air from near the top of the case instead of actually moving air through the case. I'd imagine that's usually overlooked by most. There are 2 cold air inlets on the actual bottom panel of the case. Each has a screen and mounts for fans, though I do not have fans there. The front panel bottom also has an intake fan that blows towards the drives and also has a screen. There is a fan there.

After running the overclock wizard I reset the clock frequency back to default by restarting without reapplying the settings, but the tuning software that came with the mobo says I can get at least 3.45GHz out of it if I wanted. Not bad for a $68 chip. It's an AMD Phenom II 740 BE unlocked to quad core. Used the coolermaster cooler as above and did the super thin layer of evenly spread arctic silver compound.

Bryce

iTrader: (24)

That's the exact CPU cooler I have. It's a great bang for the buck!

My WIE is GPU limited at 5.9. Otherwise it would be 7.4 due to the CPU.

4gb is plenty. I ended up with 12gb of ram so that I can load entire games onto a volatile virtual ramdisk to have faster-than-ssd loading times and performance. Games like ARMA 2 benefited heavily from this.


Check out that 0ms access time. SWEET!

My WD Black series Raid 0 array:


Compared to my 4 year old HD:

NA6C-Guy

iTrader: (1)

How does one go about doing this? ARMA II kicks my machines ***.

Those temps are excellent. My 940 oc at 3.5ghz sees around 40 at idle, which is high, despite my best attempts to improve flow through the case. 2 decently high speed fans up front pulling through the perforated front cover and foam filters, being blown out the back by both the PSU, GPU and another high speed case fan. I should be making slight positive pressure in the case, which I prefer to keep dust from getting sucked in through openings.

Ben

iTrader: (33)

Set the CPU fan as a pusher instead of a puller. Idle went down 2-3° C. Seems to hang out around 28° C with ocassional flickers to 29°. That's with the fan set to auto, which dropped down from 500 to 460 RPM automatically.

The Gigabyte Easy Tune software is pretty nice.

magnamx-5

iTrader: (7)

and my old rig still lives yeah man i need a new processor. Still for 350 bucks you did a hell of a job. props ben

Ben

iTrader: (33)

Added an inexpensive gpu ($80, MSI 240GT). Went with this one because it seemed to fit very well with performance vs energy usage vs price. Remember I went with a smaller but efficient power supply (Antec 430w continuous).

So far it's pretty dope. Only thing I don't like is it doesn't pwm its cooling fan. Boo for the fan that runs at 100% all of the time in an otherwise virtually silent system. I pulled off its stock cooler, carefully removed the applied thermal tape, applied arctic silver, and put it back together before installing it in the computer.

This is at the stock clock. The auto clock utility will overclock from stock 3.0 to 3.6 GHz if I ask it to--I just didn't see any benefit to offset the increased power consumption and heat.