First post from my new computer!

[TheJANG]

Just got my new setup online after staring at the boxes of parts on my floor all year! It was quite a pain (required installing a floppy drive thanks to WinXP + RAID, and a second optical drive because the SATA one wouldn't boot), but man am I happy to be up & running now. It's not an extreme gaming screamer, just an efficient, fairly low-power, quiet setup.

Athlon 64 X2 Black Edition dual-core "6400+" speed with Zalman radial partial liquid sink
Abit A-N78HD mobo with integrated GeForce 8200 video
2Gb Corsair DDR2 800mhz mem
Antec Phantom 500W PS -- love this thing to death, it's a huge heat sink and almost never uses its fans at all. Robbed it from the old system.
2x Maxtor SATA-II 160Gb HDDs in RAID config
Samsung SATA DVD RW
Iomega MiniView DVI KVM (easy remote pushbutton switching)
Mitsumi FDD, no-name CDR (temporary for 1st time installation)All wrapped up in a Lian-Li all-aluminum A05 mid-tower in satin black with 2 inline 120mm fans (one of which has a Vantec Stealth replacement waiting for it).

I had bought an SLI-ready pre-overclocked GeForce 8600GT, but will sell that on eBay shrinkwrapped because I don't game on the PC any longer.

The fans have been tuned down and it's almost as quiet as I wanted, which is REALLY quiet.

Time to finish loading up my 300gb secondary drive from the old clunker and transfer over all of my files! After that, I'll be able to reformat the oldie for the first time since I can remember. I think I've only done one full clean install from scratch since Windows 3.1 -- everything else has been an upgrade! The old case has been in use since I first touched the 1Ghz mark with the Athlon. It's seen some Dremelling and resurfacing, but has served me well and will continue to house the AMD 2800+ as a backup system or possibly a networked rendering slave for video :D

[Alexei235]

That's great Jang!:) ,it sounds like a very good and powerful computer.
btw I was first to see your first post on your computer!;)

[M3mph1s]

Pics or ban.

[Kemo]

Never really understood why people paid more for overclocked cards, many companies will warranty even if you overclock too far... on top of that, you also are paying more for the overclocking.

But good thing you are gettin rid of that card. the 8 series was notorious for problems... the 9 series was doomed from the start too, they use 2 8 series cores... sigh.

He has it all stuffed in this:

http://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggImage/productimage/11-112-129-01.jpg

[TheJANG]

Thanks Kemo, but I got the OC card for barely a couple bucks more than the regular ones, and I don't have the time to research all the right settings & such myself so it was a small price to pay.

[Kemo]

they include the overclocking software with most cards ;)

for that card, they are generally clocked to 620 MHz

[TheJANG]

I used to be quite hardcore into both hardware and software tweaking. My dad built systems from scratch (soldering individual components) in the 70s and early 80's, including my first PC which was an 8088. I modified the heck out of that 4mhz system, bringing it up to 1mb RAM with a 12" long EERAM card with a LIM 4.0 driver. Carefully optimized practically every byte of the running software profile through painful memory management. From the DOS prompt I could push two buttons and the system would reconfigure itself, restart, map a virtual drive into the RAM card's address space and then load & run Wordperfect 4.2 with no disk access. I wrote three sets of sophisticated ANSI prompts & macros that gave me a 16-color GUI-like menu-driven experience from DOS 4.2 & later 5.0. Kept the trend going when I finally stepped up to a 486DX50 (not DX2, but DX, the fastest internal clocked 486 ever made) that I ran a BBS off of, then a DX4-100, a Cyrix RISC system, two Intels and now four AMDs.

It's not a matter of ability, Kemo, it's choice. I choose to no longer spend my time fooling with this stuff at that level. I have far more things (in both number and level of importance) to do with my time. But thanks.

[ReDevil]

Is that why the site was "under routine maintience" last night?

[TheJANG]

Nay, completely unrelated. I did some database maintenance from work while waiting for a late teleconference.

[ReDevil]

Why al the "ye olde english" lately? Just wanted to be the first to ask!

[New_Era]

haha i noticed that too ReDevil

Jang, i like SATA better than the 4 pin IDE's do you? I here they load faster too. I don't know if that's true though.
So you are going to have 620 gigs? Man!! i thought i had a lot when i have a 300 gig IDE plus a 80 gig SATA.

[TheJANG]

Nope the two 160's are RAID-1, so it's 460Gb total. I should probably get another 300 to RAID that one too though. Either that or I'll get a 1Tb external backup.

[seth556]

LOW POWER?!?!?!?! I'm still running a Sempron 1.8ghz with a gig of ram. But sweet setup besides having to add the low power part.

[TheJANG]

Yes. LOW power versus an equivalent-speed system with 3 constant-rate case fans, normal CPU sink, big add-in card video (that can suck CPU-level wattage) with constant fan, PS with 2 fans running constantly. Note also that the K8 chip has "Cool'n'Quiet" which dramatically slashes the wattage when maximum speed isn't required (i.e. the vast majority of the time). Maximum possible CPU wattage is not the final word on total system power usage any more than EPA-rated hwy MPG is the final word on total real-world fuel economy for a car.

The system emits so little heat that exhaust air feels literally colder than ambient air due to the evaporation effect on skin.