i thought yall would appreciate some good spending and massive power of my new computer!
heres the specs

AMD anthlon 64 X2 4200

eVGA 256-P2-N528-AX Geforce 7800GTX 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 VIVO PCI Express x16 Video Card

OCZ Peroformance 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory

Red Logysis Phantom ATX case

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

OCZ OCZ520ADJ ATX 520W Power Supply 100-120V AC/200-240V AC TUV, UL, CSA, CE, CB, FCC (chrome with green LED exhaust fan it looks nice )

3 red LED antec fans

1 vantec fan controller

2 red vantec cold cathode lights

western digital 160gig HD

creative audigy sound card (from my old computer)


its kick ass
i love it
as soon as i get the fan controller in and the cathode lights working ill take some pics to show the final product (later this week)

big thanks to Petschska for helping me put it together
damn i love my new computer
PICS TO COME

total cost $1800

[Edited on September 25, 2005 at 11:45 PM. Reason : ]

9/25/2005 11:40:53 PM

Quote :

"MSI"

Im sorry

9/26/2005 12:04:53 AM

that's a puny harddrive

9/26/2005 12:06:38 AM

that motherboard has worked very well
only fault ive found with it is that it dosent have enough 3 pin connectors for all the fans and lights im stuffing in the case

9/26/2005 12:11:35 AM

Quote :

"anthlon"

9/26/2005 12:28:41 AM

nice system for damn sure, i'd like to use something like that before i upgrade again just to see how ridiculously fast it is...

9/26/2005 12:40:28 AM

why in the fuck are you putting lights in it?

And fan lights are just as retarded.

It's a damn computer, not a laser light show in disney world.

I thought you had better taste than this Ryan, I am quite disappointed

The case is retarded too

9/26/2005 1:03:44 AM

i bet i coulda shaved atleast 300 off of that

9/26/2005 1:22:21 AM

Whata POS computer. You fucked up real good. Maybe next time you'll consult Noen since its obvious he knows whats best. You probably hate your computer now, as you should.

9/26/2005 1:55:29 AM

^eat my ass fuckhead.

I made no comment on the quality or performance, because he made good choices. I'm commenting on the complete garbage aesthetic.

Case "Modding" was fun 5-7 years ago to do things yourself, but now every damn case has preinstalled retardo windows, a bajillion fans (more fans does NOT mean better cooling) and lights everywhere. It's just so damn overboard.

9/26/2005 1:59:41 AM

I would have gone for dual 300GB HD's if u were gonna drop that much

9/26/2005 2:08:15 AM

Going for all "performance" components and then shitting out on the hard drive is just silly. I wonder where the bottleneck in this system will be . . . .

9/26/2005 2:18:25 AM

fregac, can you return my calls/IMs/voicemails/PMs/etc.? I want my LCD back.

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 2:29 AM. Reason : .]

9/26/2005 2:29:02 AM

Eh? Its ready, what number are you calling?

9/26/2005 2:48:33 AM

I would have gone for Pentium D

9/26/2005 3:12:27 AM

one of the reasons i wanted a new comp was to have something pretty to look at because my old comp is boring
its not like im taking it to some lan party to show it off or something.
i like the case actually its really quiet compared to my old comp and it keeps things really cool
all it has is 2 120mm fans and a side 80mm
the harddrive is quite fast actually
i wasent gonna drop $300 for a 10,000rpm HD but its a 7,200 rpm and works just fine
i havent gotten battlefield 2 yet to really test it
but HL2 plays maxxed out with out any sign of any lag.
as far as ppl who are opposed to lights
thats your preference
and this is my preference
i want something that i can enjoy and i dont enjoy staring at a black case all day
so to each his own

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 8:15 AM. Reason : ]

9/26/2005 8:10:04 AM

Quote :

"why in the fuck are you putting lights in it? And fan lights are just as retarded. It's a damn computer, not a laser light show in disney world. I thought you had better taste than this Ryan, I am quite disappointed The case is retarded too"

YanTheManV there u have it, better go kill urself now.

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 9:10 AM. Reason : .]

9/26/2005 9:09:43 AM

I built this system for $550 in January and it runs HL2 and BF2 at pretty high resolutions

Asus A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard
AMD Barton 2800+
1.5GB PC2700 RAM
2x160GB hard drive (320 GB total)
ATI 9600XT 256MB
DVD+/-RW drive (dual format)
DVD-ROM drive
Yellow Cooler Master Case
Dual 19" CRT Flat Screens
Soundblaster MP3+ USB Audio

9/26/2005 9:28:13 AM

For real, it's your computer and, unlike a car, no one is going to see it except for you and people you invite into your home. If you wanna put lights in it do it.

9/26/2005 9:28:53 AM

^absolutely
only ppl who see it are my gf and roomie/guests very seldomly

yea older systems can play those games very easily
but my computer uses like 10% of the cpu to do it lol
i am thinking long term
build a nice enjoyable top system right now so that it can play games 5 years down the road without any problem
ill have plenty of $ when it comes time to make another comp

yea when i get more money
which will be in like a year or something
ill look at getting another monitor and a new sound card (if its nessicary)
as far as only having 160 gigs of memory:
i had my old comp for 4 years and it only had a 60 gig HD when i unplugged it this weekend i still had 30 gigs of free space
i dont use a lot of space so i dont need it
if i do need more memory i can always buy another HD
but i dont have 5billion songs on my comp
and any movies i acquire through perfectly legal means get burned and deleted
so yea........160 is good enough for me


ive got a shitload of interviews and tests and HW this week but as soon as i complete it pics will be up
its pretty IMO
it is not a top of the line case nothing like the antec sonata or anything but i think it works perfectly regardless
especially with a 120mm intake 120mm exhaust and 80mm exhaust it keeps it quite cool.

took my dvdrw drive out of my old computer
its a pioneer 109
cdrw 40x dvdrw 16x dvd DL rw 6x
one drive that does everything

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 11:27 AM. Reason : ]

9/26/2005 11:07:10 AM

I had a feeling regardless of what your components were going to be, someone would talk shit about it.

9/26/2005 11:34:51 AM

i was expecting that to happen man
you cant EVER please everyone
the only person im concerned about pleasing is myself
i just thought yall would like to see a nice system put together or at least it would be something for tech ppl to talk about

9/26/2005 11:36:33 AM

Quote :

"then shitting out on the hard drive"

not really. A 160gb 7200rpm SATA hd is nothing to put down. 10krpm HDD aren't worth the money at the moment. Theres not enough real world performance gain to justify paying out the ass

9/26/2005 12:11:37 PM

^thats almost verbatum to what me and my friends concluded when i was ordering these parts.
i was trying to get the most bang for 1800
and HD is low on the list of things to spend a lot of $ on

V my last comp had a MSI KT3 ultra MOBO and there were never any bugs
and i have seen absolutely no bugs with this mobo
petschska has the same mobo and vouched for its stability to me

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 12:29 PM. Reason : ]

9/26/2005 12:27:59 PM

Quote :

"I had a feeling regardless of what your components were going to be, someone would talk shit about it. "

Hey now, the last MSI A64 board i witnessed had more bugs than anything i had ever seen.

*but was pretty

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 12:28 PM. Reason : .]

9/26/2005 12:28:09 PM

i'm curious why anyone would want to dish out the extra for SATA (other than for appearance/fan clearance). i know it has ~26MB/s more bandwidth than EIDE, but do you really notice?

9/26/2005 12:48:08 PM

his computer is pretty

but its a damn nightlight at night

9/26/2005 12:53:25 PM

what is everyones beef with MSI? Their nF4 boards are some of the best around

9/26/2005 1:09:36 PM

seriously, wheres the SCSI hard drive. You just bought a 160 gig slow piece of shit

9/26/2005 1:10:13 PM

fast hard drive is good for gaming since it reads game data off your hd continually while you play it
so sata is very nice
i like it

9/26/2005 1:11:13 PM

Quote :

"since it reads game data off your hd continually while you play it"

I think a lot of things like skins and levels are loaded from the hdd to the memory during game play so it can be easily accessed by the cpu

9/26/2005 1:15:14 PM

yea
HL2 has lots of loading time
like single player is full of it
and multiplayer i know it does load a lot of stuff when you are connecting to the game as far as when your playing the game im not sure
prolly not that much but anyway
i could get a link to the exact one i bought
but stupid campus computers wont let me access my account on new egg to look up which one i bought

9/26/2005 1:18:20 PM

If you bought a WD 7200rpm sata hd, in my opinion you made a very good choice. SATA should be around for a while and the 10k rpm hd are a ways away from hitting a good price/performance ratio

9/26/2005 1:24:57 PM

im pretty sure it is
i dont remember
when i get home ill find out

9/26/2005 1:31:49 PM

the hard drive is the most significant bottleneck in any system, being several orders of magnitude slower in sustained transfers, and several more in latency, than main memory, which is already a few orders of magnitude slower than the processor..

it's a nice system, don't get me wrong, but you are not going to be able to defend that... 60$ HD in a 1800$ system is, quite simply, indefensible. I'd put more and faster drives in a budget system RAID-0 Raptors for OS and applications, RAID-1 Maxlines for data, the one true PC storage configuration

9/26/2005 1:50:37 PM

^what I said but more technical

9/26/2005 1:52:01 PM

gigabyte i-ram

9/26/2005 2:01:22 PM

Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
wel its sata anyway
i dont really care
its a fine system

i dont know enough about computers to know how my HD can slow down any gaming i do on my PC

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 2:28 PM. Reason : ]

9/26/2005 2:27:38 PM

well let me spell it out for you

when you take 2 minutes longer than everyone else to load a map the first time (and probably every time if you play games like BF1942 that can find ways to waste 2GB of RAM )

and some punk already got the tank on the level

that punk has dual Raptors.

9/26/2005 2:33:31 PM

i see
well its good enough for me the loading times ive seen
always room for upgrades later
let me go kill myself now for not getting expensive HDs

9/26/2005 2:36:47 PM

I spent more money on a friggin' Dell earlier this year than you did on this disco lights thing.

9/26/2005 2:37:53 PM

^nothing against dell, but that isn't really something worth bragging about...

unless you got a whole lot more computer for your money, which is probably possible.

9/26/2005 2:43:34 PM

sorry gargamel im not rich like you yet
need to get a degree first

9/26/2005 2:44:35 PM

Quote :

"that punk has dual Raptors."

actually tests have been done showing that dual raptors have almost no effect on real world performance over say a single raptor

9/26/2005 3:54:01 PM

I am sadly going to have to justify that with a response

the ideal RAID implemention WILL double linear throughput (read and write), WILL reduce average seek time on account of the probabilty of concurrency, in ANY access pattern where two simultaneous seeks to different stripes can occur

now, yes, the full software RAID your typical gamer will try to run both of his Raptors off of is not an ideal implementation, does in fact suck ass, and probably will not show a performance increase in any test other than STR... HOWEVER, that does not mean that "dual raptors" or "RAID" "have no effect on real world performance". I'm not sure what controller would be best for an AMD system (most add-in controllers are either shitty full software implementations, or optimized for the high levels of concurrency found in servers), but the controllers Intel has integrated recently into their chipsets have been spot on for desktop/gaming RAID performance and benchmarks do illustrate that. Please, fewer generalizations in ignorance.

Edit:
After a little searching, I see a 20% decrease in load time for Doom 3 by going dual Raptors... from the fastest tested (faster than any of the dual SATA drives, even) in the benchmark, to even faster Other drives are realizing a nearly 100% decrease in load the same benchmarks... but basically, it's not that the performance isn't there, it's just that there's a point where the bottleneck won't be disk I/O, and obviously the Raptor is hitting it for certain games. Bringing dual core processors into it will also change the picture for games that bother to exploit the wealth of concurrency in decompression of game data... can't find any benchmarks regarding that, though.

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 4:55 PM. Reason : *]

9/26/2005 4:26:37 PM

um... that's a 50% rather than a 100% decrease, but you know what I mean

9/26/2005 4:57:51 PM

ok i take back what I said about NO performance increase, but in my opinion the amount of money you could save on not making a raid out of 2 raptors could be well spent in other places. In terms of large amounts of data access, raid may be the way to go, however, for an everyday browser/gamer I see no point in spending the extra cash. Unless you want to boot up XP 4seconds faster for another $180.

[Edited on September 26, 2005 at 5:06 PM. Reason : .]

9/26/2005 5:06:02 PM

wheres MiniMe_877 when you need him. He should know, he writes code for that type of shit

9/26/2005 5:07:23 PM

this is all hebrew to me

i just think it looks pretty, it was like a mini gift to me, to be able to look over and see coolness

although this buying process has helped me learn some good info about comps and what a fucking shitty computer i have right now, its seriously worth like 100 bucks, if that.

im happy for him he did do research on the stuff before he got it so he didnt just waste any of his money thinking he could do it on his own. he deserved this and im glad he got the chance to do it so stop all the hatin! opinions opinions...tsk tsk

9/26/2005 5:18:40 PM

I personally would have gone with a DFI board and x2 3800+ and just overclocked, but I like his setup. If he did his research and this is what he wanted thats cool.

9/26/2005 5:25:54 PM