I haz made puter

Mike

New member
Jun 27, 2006
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On the firing line
Anybody else into building their own machine? I've always wanted to, so when my 3 (4?) year old Gateway started getting twitchy, I figured it was a good time. Here's my beast:

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... and parts of my messy desk.

The specs:

NZXT Phantom case
AMD Phenom II 1100T Black cpu
Asus Crosshair IV Formula mobo
Sapphire Radeon 6850 video card
12 gig Kinston HyperX RAM
Corsair H70 liquid cooling
Corsair AX 850 modular power supply
(2) Western Digital 1 TB hard drives
Some nifty cool looking NZXT cables

Overall, it was a pretty easy build. I was actually surprised at how simple it was to put this machine together. Had a problem with the first motherboard, but it's getting warranteed, so no biggie. I actually bought this one because I couldn't (didn't want to) wait for the warranty board.

Also, I started with Corsair TX 850 psu. Replaced some fans with led fans (shiny). So, I'm about halfway to another machine already in the spare pieces I have.

Performance: Yes, I know somebody will ask. It fucking screams. Play Black Ops at full throttle, barely heats up the CPU, no video lag, smoooooooth, and I can pwn n00bs even more so than before. Sick.

I had the Asus AI Suite on the right monitor while playing on the left monitor. Normally it runs about 33 - 34 degrees, after 10 minutes of grenades and gunfire, it showed 37 - 38 degrees.

Ran Prime 95 for 18 hours (maybe 20, can't remember) no issues. Although to be fair, there shouldn't have been since I haven't overclocked it yet. Honestly though, I'm not sure why I would want to. It's goddam fast as it is.

Okay, so that's my story. Wanted to share with some fellow geeks that would appreciate it.
 


It's been years (almost 10) since I built one myself. However for years that PC was faster than anything I bought. And it has never crashed - not once. I still use it in my basement as a media server. - A lot of fun. I wish I had time to do it again.
 
All that and no SSD?!

And no RAID??

What kind of speakers do you have? Definitely important for a proper gaming experience.
 
I've been wanting to try out a solid state drive. Can you see a big difference when you use one?
 
I remember when I built my first computer when I was 12 or 13. At the time it was such a great computer, I should dig it out to see whats on it.

Didn't know gateway was still around. Crazy gateway cows.
 
If I remember right, it was just a hair over $1200.

Paper towels were because I just finished wiping the 3 inches of dust off of my desk (hence the Endust cap laying next to them).

SSD and RAID.... I didn't spend the time reading up on those, so I wussed out. I'm thinking I may save everything to an external 2 TB drive I have and trying it later though.

What kind of speakers do you have? Definitely important for a proper gaming experience.

No speakers, I like headsets. Logitech G35 here.

Nice job on the cable management :thumbsup:

Thanks, the modular psu helped tremendously, and the NZXT cables just look cool. :D
 
IMO, ssd is something you only do if you have nothing better to do with the money. If you *do* end up getting an SSD drive, make sure it's a top of the line intel drive. They are shown to have the least decrease in speed over time.

I'd like to have two ssd's in a raid1 config, and do daily backups to a remote location.
 
Performance: Yes, I know somebody will ask. It fucking screams. Play Black Ops at full throttle, barely heats up the CPU, no video lag, smoooooooth, and I can pwn n00bs even more so than before. Sick.

Sweet, I play black ops too every other night online via PC.. What's your steam username?

Your new machine will get a great test when BF3 releases in Sept..
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zw8SmsovJc&feature=channel_video_title]YouTube - Battlefield 3 - Full Length "Fault Line" Gameplay Trailer[/ame]
 
Built every desktop I've owned since 1991. It's easy now - all cables can only be plugged where they're supposed to go, there's no IRQ's to setup and everything is auto-detect/PnP.
 
The calender on the wall shows April 2011, surprising! My calender still shows Feb 2008.
 
Big mistake not getting an SSD, it was THE best investment I ever made for my PC. I got a 60gb OCZ vortex 2 and I run windows and all my applications from it. I use a regular big ol' hdd for storing videos and shit. CPU\RAM barely makes a difference when it comes to opening applications or anything that isn't playing games, and for that nothing beats the SSD.

It's a shame so many old PC's get thrown out because they take forever to boot up and load shit, when the culprit is obviously the shitty old hard drive. It could easily be solved with a relatively cheap SSD, most of the time the CPU and RAM is perfectly fine.