Just curious, I see we have some gamers among us. Anyone got a PC they built (or bought) that is high performance? I just spent the last 3 weeks building my new one. It replaced one I built 2 1/2 years ago. Anyone doing anything over the top with their PCs? My new one is liquid cooled

 

6781234430 ebay, thats my case for my main pc. its got a 3 gig processor, asus mother board, 120 gigs, 1028 of ram, dvd burner, dvd rom, exteranal cd burner, media reader, cold cathode tube lights, blue led fans, floresent round ide cables. im going for a modular power supply next, 580 watts. im running dual os's, xp pro, and mandrake linux10.1

 

Nice, that case is almost identical to mine. Mine is a Thermaltake Tsunami, all aluminum with the blue lighting and clear side panel. Although for me th eclearside has only one purpose, so I can see if it starts leaking coolant!

 

lol, yea that could be a bad thing, hey wats that smell? smell like anitfreeze. yea thats the only reason i havent tried that, to much can go wrong, till they got all the kinks worked out.

 

Actually you can make coolant that does not conduct electricity. I'm not using car antifreeze, it's a mixture of distilled water and ethanol. People forget that water by itself is not an electrical conducter, it's the imputities IN the water that conduct electricity. So pure distilled water will not allow current to flow, which means IF I got a leak the worst that would happen is a few days of component drying. Also the cooling system is not under pressure so any leaks would be slow. I think my system flows at 40 gallons an hour.

 

huh, wow thats cool. im gonna look into that

 

Nothing really performance for gaming. (I don't 'game'.)
I do graphics and design layout for work.


1 machine (laptop) - P-IV 3.0 gig - 1 60 gig HDD, - 1 gig of DDR RAM - CD-RW, DVD burner, 15.1" monitor

1 machine (desktop) - AMD 1.8 gig - 450w power supply, 1 80 gig HDD, 1 gig DDR RAM, Nvidia 256 MB video card, 2 external 120 gig HDDs, 52x CD-RW, 8x DVD dual format burner, 8x DVD ROM drive, 17" .25dp monitor. (Next purchase is a 19" LCD.)

These are my machines. My wife's new pc will put this old AMD into the 'door-stop' category.

 

Actually mine was built for work first and gaming second. Primary use is to run Virtual Machines with VMWare. I designed it to run up to 6 hosts at once:

1. An XP system for applications, email, etc
2. A Linux Red Hat 9 system for web surfing, downloads, etc
3. A Red Hat Fedora system to play with (still very new)
4. XP box for software development
5. Windows Longhorn Beta with VS 2005 Beta
6. And a Windows 2003 server as a back end for any development

I used to have 4 seperate machines for all this, now EVERYTHING is in one PC, although a very expensive and HOT one.

 

what cooling system did you go with?-

 

home made here. 3.4e intel chip, asus p5ad2-e mb, 1gb ddr2 533 pc2 .300 g maxtor diamondmax10 sata hd, dvd, cdrw, 19 inch lcd monitor. plus some more go fast toys. no gaming just photo's a lot of them

 

I have a question for you PC builders. How do you make sure that your bare PC case is compatible with any given motherboard? I'd build one but it's so hit and miss... Also, the shipping on those cases are killer. Like 25 bucks a piece.

Ryan

 

I have a AMD athlon xp 2200 sitting on a ECS mobo, WIth 512 megs of SDRAM, 140 GIgs of memory, 500 watt power supply(true power) Nvidea GeForce FX5200 with 128 megs of RAM, Liteon DVD/CD player, Sony DVD/CD burner(the good ole "real" Sony 4X), a 8.5x11 clear acrylic window with 2 variable color LED lights inside, ATX case with single LED blue and red 80mm fan. oh, and dual LCD temperature displays on between the sony and liteon drives.

MRKnight, look for the motherboard and case sizes. You will find something like ATX, mini ATX etc.

a mini ATX is very small, its what you would find in one of those little bitty liquid cooled cases. This cases usually only have one or two CD drives and one floopy drive in the front, with maybe 2, 3 or maybe 4 ports in the back.

Most normal cases are called "mid-tower", that is what a regular ATX will fit in. This will have probally 3 or 4 CD drive bays in the front, with probally 1 or 2 Floopy drives, then they may have 5 or so ports in the back for video cards, sound cards etc.

Then you have what are called "Server" cases which are quite large and sport many, many drive bays and lots of cooling ports.

I hpe i have made it simple enough, it sounds very condusing, but you will pick it up very quickly, and be on your way to building and modding your cases before you know it. Also, if i let something out, or misdescribed something, lemme know guys because even perfect people make mistakes.

 

try www.compuplus.com a very good company to deal with a resonable shipping rates

 

OK, here is my newest monster and I'm proud that it still runs stable after 3 weeks. And from my previous post please do remember what I actually built this for.

• ASUS P5Wd2 - Premium Motherboard (Has Dual PCIe video slots)
• Intel Prescott 660 (3.6GHz w/ 2MB cache - runs freakin hot!)
• 6GB of 533MHz RAM
• ATI x850 Video card with dual monitor output (just 1)
• Soundblaster Audigy z2 Sound card w/ 5.1 surround speakers
• 2 300GB SATA hard drives, each with cooling shroud
• 1 400GB USB2 external drive (backups)
• DVD-RW +/-
• ATI USB2 TV Tuner (For vid capture)
• Thermaltake Tsunami all aluminum case w 2 120mm fans & 1 90mm fan
• Windows XP 64bit

By itself this system generates about 104 degrees F inside the case and 140 degrees from the CPU. Then I felt 3.6GHz wasn't enough so I overclocked it. The CPU now runs at like 4.2GHz and the RAM at 800MHz. As soon as I did theat though the temps went up, 122 degrees in the case and almost 170 degrees on the CPU. This was in a room that is regulated at 68 - 72 degrees

So the last thing I bought was a Zalman Reserator 1 water cooling system. It is a 2.5 foot tall round (all aluminum) radiator that has a small pump at the bottom. A hose goes from the pump to the CPU cooler mounted inside the computer. The cooler is usually copper, this kit comes with a gold plated one (to prevent galvanic corrosion). Then the exit hose goes back to the radiator where the water is lifted all 2.5 feet throught he fins, then brought back down the 2.5 feet again, trading it's heat to the air around it to do it all again. With this setup I never see higher than 90 degrees in the case and 110 on the CPU.

And everything I had to go through is why you will not likely see 4GHz and higher CPUs in home PCs anytime soon. I have pics and a write-up at the link below.

http://home.comcast.net/~knight75/Hydra/Hydra.htm

 

i dont know knight, but i cant get that link to work