Halfway Finished Building New Computer

Off-Topic
1

I will be buying the EMU soundcard and KRK Studio monitors soon and thought it would be nice to change my computer as well.

Have wanted to get back into gaming again and my aging ATI Radeon 9700, while best in its day when I purchased it, struggles if you try to turn eye candy on in the latest games. Also started showing artifacts the past couple of months so I haven’t been gaming.

I bought the procesor, mb, and memory from newegg.com. Case and PSU were purchased locally. Still need to get a SATA hd. Just have my old drives in it for the time being.

AMD Athlon 64 AM2 3800+
Epox - MF4ULTRA NFORCE4
2 Gigs of OCZ DDR-2 PC2 5400 - Gold Series
EVGA GForce 7900GT KO
Antec SmartPower 500 Watt PSU
Antec Super Lanboy Case

Also, nforce4 is a pain in the ass. I had a feeling I would run into problems after reading posts here and elsewhere. I was so excited about the nvidia integrated hardware firewall until I realized it was currupting every download. That was exciting. Also takes like 1 minute to boot windows. My xp2200 based system took approx 10 seconds. Something about a possible USB issue & Nforce4. I think that’s the last issue for me to work out.

Onboard audio is tons better. Still want the emu, but this Realtek ALC850 is a major improvement over the older realtek on my last MSI mb.

Also, I don’t know if my motherboard processor temperature monitor is accurate.

The ac right now is set to about 73 degrees. My processor temp is reading 73 degrees/23 celsius.

Damn idle is so cool, without cool & quiet enabled as well.

Am running PRIME 95 right now. Torture test for the past 5 minutes and the temperature is @ 95 degrees / 35 celsius.

I had no idea these processors ran so cool. Funny thing is I didn’t use any artic silver like I have in the past, but the stock thermal compound on the AMD Retail heatsink/fan combo that comes with the processor.

Read somewhere that the compound they use is excellent.

2

NICE!!! Your going to love that rig dude! But yeah, like you mentioned, stay the f**** away from nforce firewall drivers. All you need is the chipset drivers and the essential stuff. I’m kinda scared of epox shit though- my boy had gotten an epox mobo and it gave him problem after problem, so he just went with an asus… hopefully you don’t have those problems with it though. Good luck and let us know how it runs when you get it all hooked up.

PS- I would hate on your bragging, but my computer whoops your computers ass with his mouse tied behind his back. (well I guess not really- we have the same proc, but mine is an opty with twice the cache and I got four 250gb sata2 HD’s- but your mobo is higher spec than mine i think yours may support sli… but I use matrox cards, our memory is about the same (I have crucial xms dual channel kit- other than that, we are pretty much running the same rig.) :P

3

do yourself the favour and do not buy AMD now - you will regret it.
push one or two houndred bucks more into that system and get an intel core 2 duo e6600 (conroe core, 4mb cache, 2x2.4ghz) with an intel bad axe or asus p5w dh deluxe mobo.
anything else will be something you would regret if you would know what was possible to get for just a slight amount of more money.

the whole system would be a hell lot of faster than what you consider to buy.
google around for some e6600 reviews (or even e6700 (extreme) ones) and youll know what i mean.

e6600 (~320 EUR) is even faster than the AMD FX-62, which costs around 900 EUR