OT: If You Were Going To Build A New PC

[Sivran]

Not bad Thermodyne. That Radeon 9250 though, they didn't have anything better? The 9250's rather old. Then again.. video cards are a helluva racket..

[Thermodyne]

Nothing better in that budget range, unless you catch a promo. IMHO, the vid card is easy to update, so is a place to cut cost on an initial build. Also, he could get a comparable NVIDIA card if he prefers that flavor. I put most of the money in the CPU and Main board, as they are the parts that tend to stay in service the longest. One of the biggest mistakes many people make is skimping on the main board. They save $50, but end up with an unstable system. If I was going to push it a little higher, then I’d add another SATA drive and set the pair up as a stripe set. That would give him a noticeable increase in performance. The Vid card only comes into play with a few high end games, and certainly is not needed for SE. If he has concerns about rendering, then we need to have a talk about Vid cards that would break his budget twice over all by themselves.

[NullAshton]

I'd like to put my computer inside a refrigerator. Think of how fast I can overclock it

[Thermodyne]

The fridge can’t deal with the amount of heat that an OC’s pc puts out. Outside in the dead of winter works, just keep the hard drive warm. Liquid polypropylene pre chilled to around 0c works, and is cheap. Fan and dryer duct to winter air works too. But NO2 is the Boss http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20031230/index.html Some real serious OCing going on with these guys. My personal best is 2.9GHz out of a 2GHz Northwood chip air cooled with a Swifty. Just couldn’t get it stable at 3.0 for the coveted 50% OC/air.

I havn’t done any Oc’ing since the Fall of 03, I’m still using the system I built then. But this old box put some serious numbers up for back then. It’s cooled with the stock cooler that AMD shipped with the sample CPU. Couldn’t get anything else back then. All I did was over volt the fan.

http://groups.msn.com/ThermodynesPlace/fx51244ghz.msnw

[Thermodyne]

Here’s a good demonstration of what a stripe set of Raptors will do for performance. Look at the storage performance number in the lower right.

http://groups.msn.com/ThermodynesPla...oto&PhotoID=28

Now that XP64 is final, I might have to move my stuff off of this box and see how it does on 64 bit. Perhaps even invest in some water cooling

[Caduceus]

Liquid cooling, hilarious (yet interesting) Thermodyne... I triple-dog dare you to lick the computer case. LOL

[Gandalf Parker]

(A)Remove the case

(B) bend a sheete of acrylic down over it, then out across the desk for a few inches, then back up to an inch higher than the case wo that its a large blocky W shape

(C) Seal front and back of both "wings" of the W

(D) provide water, fish, and air pump

You have just created a symbiotic environment in which the computer provides heat to the fish tank, the fish tank provides cooling to the computer, and you get to see the internal workings of the computer running "inside" a fish tank.

I would make suggestions on topic with the subject but I usually just trust my local Mom & Pop computer shop to give me good desktops. I only have opinions when Im building servers (which are much simpler)

Gandalf Parker
-- WANTED: A trustworthy "wish I had ideas" project finisher to partner
in a profit sharing relationship with an excellent "got too many ideas"
project starter.

[Sivran]

I have an Athlon XP and a Sempron running on ECS (ie cheapo) mobos. Gotta love them mobo/cpu combos at Fry's. Neither one is unstable, so either ECS is better than people think or I have insane luck--I'm the guy who gets month-plus uptimes out of Win98SE, after all.

Then again, I don't overclock.