All those High 3DMark scores at Warfactory...

[ronin4740]

...prompted me to buy a whole mess of new hardware. I spent a portion of Monday surfing through Newegg's inventory, saved everything to a wish list which I later decided was as good a use for what remains of my tax return as anything else... Of course the wish list dropped my selection of Powersupplies and I didn't realize it until this evening.

The list follows as will photos of the build process and benchmarks if there's interest. The Motherboard, CPU, HSF and Hard Drives have arrived and I expect the Case and Video card to arrive tomorrow or Thursday.


THERMALTAKE Armor VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case – Retail Item #: N82E16811133154

ABIT FATAL1TY AN8 Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard – Retail Item #: N82E16813127196

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3500DAA4BP – OEM Item #: N82E16819103532

CORSAIR XMS 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model TWINXP1024-3200C2 – Retail Item #: N82E16820145563

POWERCOLOR R48-TD3 Radeon X850XT 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express x16 Video Card – Retail Item #: N82E16814131301

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3200822AS 200GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive – OEM Item #: N82E16822148033

GIGABYTE GH-PCU21-VG 2 Ball Cooling Fan – Retail Item #: N82E16835128001

I'd appreciate your recommendations on PSU's that I can obtain locally as I am not going to wait through the weekend with no way to power the system. The PSU needs to have at least four SATA power connectors as the Seagates do not have Molex.

TIA!

Ronin

/edit by infinite -- did not see any real need for a poll, lets just talk hardware.

[infinitevalence]

first of i think your selling youself short with the 7200.7 as the 7200.8 is SATA2 with 300mb transfer and NQC. not that they will make a huge difference but why get last years hard drive.

you got some good hardware there, the ATI is going to be killer. As for PSU i would look at the Antec Truepower 2.0 series, im testing one now and its got excilent power regulation as well as two PCI-Express connectors, and 4 SATA connectors. If you look i know you can get the 550w for $100, a real deal.

[ronin4740]

infinitevalence -

Thanks for the advice on the PSU - I'll see if I can find one locally. Am in too much of a hurry to get the system built (and too broke after buying all the rest of the hardware) to buy it online and have it here by friday.

Ya, I realized after the order shipped and it was too late that I was buying last generation drives. The benchmarks I've seen which include both generations do show a difference in overall speed but it's not a huge difference.

If I could do it again I'd have done more research on the drives though. Oh well, that happens sometimes when one impulse shops

p.s. I only tosses in the poll to try and generate some replies to the post

[infinitevalence]

yeah it happens, i was going to wait for venice before i upgraded to a64 but after geting my DFI i could not hold back.

np on the poll but our forum is kinda small for polls right now, we are building all the time.

[-mogwai]

jeez, man... how much money do you have lying around to just throw out a huge wad like that for that kind of upgrade?

[infinitevalence]

tax returns my friend, i know thats what my $$ went to a new system

[-mogwai]

i hate bush...

i guess when you dont have a job, it's hard to get a tax return, huh? well, that's what being a medical research test subject is for!!!

[ronin4740]

ya... the tax man was kind to me this year but I already know he won't be next year.

Gotta spend it while I have it or I'll just piss it away on beer, women and other things which won't sing me to sleep with the sound of humming case fans ;)

I'll take some photos of the MB, CPU, HSF and Hard drives and post tomorrow.

[-mogwai]

how much did the upgrade run you?

[capper5016]

i hate bush...

?? He's the guy that puts more money back in your pockets to spend. Oh well, no more political jibe after last time for me.
Nice system you put together....but I would have passed on the ABIT, the whole Fatal!ty line is way overblown, and to be honest kind of disappointing, not to mention ABIT themselves are hanging by a thread. i personally would have gone with the DFI NF4- Ultra or the MSI Neo $ Ultra board, both much better, both based on NForce 4....other than that, great job.
As a little side note I just bought a Fatal!ty AA*-XE board and got so disgusted with the waste of $250 I took it back....picked up an ASUS P5AD2-E Premium instead....will be writing a review on it shortly, if anyone even cares about 925-XE any more.

[-mogwai]

about the bush comment, i think the tax "refund" and the returns have hurt us way more than help us, but whatever... i dont wanna get into it. if you'd like, i wrote an 8 paged paper about it (i was a poli-sci minor) that i could send you in pm. but, whatevs... sorry i mentioned anything. it's a computer forum, not politics.

have you guys done a review on the d925xcv by any chance?

[ronin4740]

audiophile - the upgrade set me back about 2k. More than I wanted to spend but I haven't done a full system update in a while and am thinking this will last me for a bit ;) I'll leave the Bush comment alone as suggested

capper - I agree that there are many good boards out there but I'm something of an Abit fan-boy and even though I'm aware of their financial difficulties didn't want to try a board from a manufacturer I'm not familair with. In the past I've tried Asus boards (liked it but it was kind of vanilla for my tastes) and Soyo (wasn't terribly pleased with the speed and stability). Still, if this board is flaky or bad I'll return it to newegg and get something else. Please do write the review on the Asus board - I care

[Bwall]

Not to get too far off topic but yeah my tax return has helped upgrade my PC a little also. I sold a lot of my old stuff so most of my return is still there. The remainder is heading toward a new $2800 Carbon Fiber road bike I'm picking up next week. :D

Good hardware you picked up there. If you overclock the CPU to 2.5GHz you should score in the 30,000 range with that killer video card.

[ronin4740]

The system is built. One small word on RAID arrays - you're going to need an actual floppy drive if you want to create the array and install the OS to it. I spent about 3 hours last night trying to get the system to boot from a CD and read the RAID drivers from a USB Floppy. Everytime the system would get past the POST it'd initialize the USB Floppy drive and kill the keyboard. I tried both USB and PS/2 keyboards but was never able to get the system to see the F6 key when XP was at that stage in the initial installation.

I'll post pics friday - I have school until 10:30 PM tonight and got like 3 hrs sleep last night. One Teaser pic now:





As a teaser the system goes from power off to login screen in about 17 seconds (about 12 seconds from Windows XP splash screen to login) and scored 22K in 3DMark 2001SE while copying several hundred Gigs of data from a networked computer. More detailed benchmarks will come Saturday.

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[-mogwai]

this is my post. it's green with envy ;)

[Apoptosis]

man, kick ass looking rig!

What is your 3dmark2001 SE score now?

[ronin4740]

3dMark 2001SE score was in the low 22K range when tested last night. Am sure with a bit of tweaking here and there (and not running it while moving several hundred Gigs of data from one PC to the other) I can get it a bit higher.

*chuckle* give me two days and I'll have all kinds of benchmark graphics

[infinitevalence]

22k in 3dmark01 SE is really decent. Its also more of a cpu score than anything, my guess is that your gfx card will really shine in 3dmark05. But damn thats a goodlooking systems so far, i cant wait for more results and pictures.

[ronin4740]

teaser pic @#2



Seems to be inline with most of the ATI Radeon benchmarks. Will try again
over the weekend with some tweaking and OC'ing

Ronin

[ronin4740]

*chuckle* okay, maybe you DFI fanboys are right - I've started having problems restarting the computer. The machine boots fine, loads windows fine, will hard reset fine but will NOT reboot or boot after a successful MS Windows shutdown without powercycling the PSU.

The POST code halts on #50. The next number in sequence is #52 which is initializing RAM. I've gone back to stock BIOS settings, reseated the RAM, swapped RAM slots around, done everything but tried different RAM (that will probably be tomorrow or weds) and can't cure the problem. Am starting to wonder if the AN8 is compatible with this variant of Corsair RAM...

I've emailed abit with their BlackBox utility and will see what they say. If they don't have an answer or if their answer is "reinstall windows" or "your using incompatible RAM" then NewEgg's getting the MB and possibly the RAM back.

Anyway, that's one of the reasons why there haven't been photos yet.

Ronin