About 2 months ago, my staff got me a best buy gift card and I wondered in and picked up a copy of Oblivion. When I got home, I could only play it in a tiny 640x480 box with all the settings as low as possible. Unacceptable. This set me on a quest to buy my first real up to date system in years. Here's what I ended up with:
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
Core 2 Duo E6600
Tuniq Tower w\ Thermaltake Thunderblade (blue led)
Corsair Twin2X2048 6400C4 4-4-4-12 2GB
Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950XTX
Corsair HX620
2x Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA II
XClio CS-A 380 case (love it or hate it - 2 x 250mm fans!)
Thermaltake Thunderblade 120mm Blue LED rear fan
NEC ND-3550A
MITSUMI Black 1.44MB 3.5" USB 2.0 digital card reader with Floppy Drive
Acer AL2423Wdr 24" LCD
750 External USB Drive
Reactive Cable Wraps and Zip Ties
Cold white internal lights
Reactive Round Floppy, IDE and SCSI cable.
I had a really nice RAID card and two Ultra 320 36GB drives from a salvage at work, so I added those for some serious boot disk speed in RAID 0.
It took a while to get it all together (can I tell a reseller horror story somewhere?) but it's finally all together and theres only one small problem. With the Tuniq Tower and the huge 250mm side fan on the case, I can't quite get it closed without some serious pressure which cause the side fan blade to bang on the case. It pretty much closes, but not enough to get the screws in, so once I'm completely done, I'll zip tie it.
I did a pretty extensive job of wraping and tieing down the cables so it's really clean inside. The case is enormous and allows for some nice wire routing. With Blue LED fans and the cold white lights and huge side window, it's way over the top but that was what I was going for. I'll try to post some pictures soon.
Now I'm off to install XP and Oblivion and get some game on! After that, I'll work on overclocking. With the Tuniq and all the air flow, I'll shoot for 3GHz. I'm sure I could probably go higher, but I don't expect to push past that.
Final conclusion - my friggin staff cost me about $3000 with that damn gift card.
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
Core 2 Duo E6600
Tuniq Tower w\ Thermaltake Thunderblade (blue led)
Corsair Twin2X2048 6400C4 4-4-4-12 2GB
Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950XTX
Corsair HX620
2x Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA II
XClio CS-A 380 case (love it or hate it - 2 x 250mm fans!)
Thermaltake Thunderblade 120mm Blue LED rear fan
NEC ND-3550A
MITSUMI Black 1.44MB 3.5" USB 2.0 digital card reader with Floppy Drive
Acer AL2423Wdr 24" LCD
750 External USB Drive
Reactive Cable Wraps and Zip Ties
Cold white internal lights
Reactive Round Floppy, IDE and SCSI cable.
I had a really nice RAID card and two Ultra 320 36GB drives from a salvage at work, so I added those for some serious boot disk speed in RAID 0.
It took a while to get it all together (can I tell a reseller horror story somewhere?) but it's finally all together and theres only one small problem. With the Tuniq Tower and the huge 250mm side fan on the case, I can't quite get it closed without some serious pressure which cause the side fan blade to bang on the case. It pretty much closes, but not enough to get the screws in, so once I'm completely done, I'll zip tie it.
I did a pretty extensive job of wraping and tieing down the cables so it's really clean inside. The case is enormous and allows for some nice wire routing. With Blue LED fans and the cold white lights and huge side window, it's way over the top but that was what I was going for. I'll try to post some pictures soon.
Now I'm off to install XP and Oblivion and get some game on! After that, I'll work on overclocking. With the Tuniq and all the air flow, I'll shoot for 3GHz. I'm sure I could probably go higher, but I don't expect to push past that.
Final conclusion - my friggin staff cost me about $3000 with that damn gift card.
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