Technology

Those in the know, know I've build myself a new machine. Actually, nobody's in the know except the one person who saw me build it.

So it's a fairly new system. I didn't go bleeding edge, I had a lot of parts to get and I wanted to keep a meager budget since I hadn't finished paying off my laptop yet. I really had to, too many BSOD happening on my machine... very related to cooling issues AND unstable motherboard.

I'm running a new AMD Athlon64, 3000+ (ah, running 1.8GHz). The Venice core: 90 nm, CPU integrated dual-channel northbridge. I'm not running Windows XP 64, yet, since it's missing a lot of things I happen to need right now (ODBC, MS-DOS support, etc), and the fact that a lot of applications with 32-bit installers won't run scares me a bit. I may dual-boot it later.

But anyway, just having an internal FSB makes this sucker smooth as butter, even though this is the lowest speed Venice. I've hit 100% CPU usage already, but only as a bug with some software I was installing. Well worth the $150 for a CPU (including the pretty dull HSF, but it does the trick as these no longer suck (although, could have been a lot better than 100% aluminum. It's ok, though, as Venice is supposed to run MUCH cooler than an equally rated Pentium 4)), but, to upgrade to this, I needed to get a motherboard to support the socket of 939 pins.

Sitting on top of an nForce3 chipset (Epox, again, since I always say try everything twice). I'm hooked up with 1GB of matched DDR ram from Corsair, bar none one of the best manufacturers. I went pure SATA on this thing, too. Got a new HD and that DVD-DL burner I'd been eyeing for a while. I figured it'd be better this way so I don't have to deal with that 137 GB limit thing. (actually, yes, I had to anyway, but that's just ignorance on my part on how SATA works).

And since the motherboard's got a bunch of headers on it for front ports and things, and frustration over my case and how noisy and clumbsy it is to work in lead me to get a new case. My old case was starting to stress me out. I knew a cable had disconnected itself on the inside and I didn't want to open it up and wade though all the crap to fix it. At least this new case has easily removed side panels and I can even rotate the computer from where it is without having to unplug anything from the back. Follow the link to check it out. It's got a clear plastic duct to tunnel air across the CPU. I havn't hit tempuratures even near 40 C... that's a good thing.

Grabbed a new power supply, too, interesting design with lots of air holes and one big fan. This whole machine is SO QUIET it's hard to tell it's on. After I threw in the rest of my hard drives so I can back up my old data and just have a badass 1TB of storage, the hard drives were actually LOUDER than the rest of the system. My oldest one from Blue was really irritating. I quickly dumped the contents of that one into a newer hard drive and got rid of it. The next annoying thing was a crappy 40mm fan on my removable hard drive enclosure. I had to slice those wires to turn it off. So far, right now, my keystrokes are louder than the system. I no longer have a sweet spot on my TV background noise. One notch lower and I can't hear it. One notch above that and it's too loud.

I was tempted by water cooling, but, I can live with this air cooling. I didn't get the optional CPU heatsink without a fan, but already it's pretty k-rad. The whole thing, including extention cables, set me back about $860. I estimate the cost of this system, minus all the "unnecessary" extra hard drives, plus the video card (an old GeForce 3) is a total of $1100, if all were purchased at new pricing. With that $250 for a vid card today I'd probably put it in a 6800 or something.

I could make a pretty snappy machine for about $500, I estimate. It wouldn't be a fucking pimp, but it would do well.

Now taking orders.

 > Link <