- Joined
- 28 Dec 2001
- Messages
- 1,087
I'm just finishing building a new system to replace the one I put together in 2003 (yes it lasted that long!).
I'm basing it on the ASUS Striker Extreme MOBO and have the following components:
Thermaltake Toughpower 850 watt PSU
Intel Q6600 2.4 GHZ CPU (overclockable)
2 x NVidia 8600 GT Super 512 (for SLI)
Arctic 7 CPU fan (a tight fit)
4 GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2 RAM
2 x WD Caviar 500 GB drives in RAID 1 (I chickened out of RAID 0 after an accident on my last PC!!)
Samsung SH023B DVDRW
I've put it all in a rather nice looking Thermaltake Tsunami Dream mirror black Aluminium case.
I thought quite some time about the OS and wanted really to go for 64bit Vista. In the end though I'm putting boring XPSP2 on just now and will wait a few more months before thinking about Vista due to the compatability issues at the moment. When I switch to 64bit I'll upgrade the memory to 8GB.
Mostly (so far) installation was pretty straight forwards (although I had to cut the corners off the Artic 7 fan to get it to fit past the MOBOs heat sinks.
A couple of things stood out so far as being a bit dull:
1. I had to rip the floppy disk out of my old PC and scrape about for some (very old) 3.5" disks so I could load the SATA/RAID drivers during XP installation. I thought the FDD was obsolete?
2. After I'd configured the BIOS I shut the system down to disable the case tamper switch (this got very boring!) it then wouldn't power up <gulp>. Only after some frantic searching of the ASUS website did I learn that the MOBO LED light switch has to be OFF in order to allow re-boot.
HUMBUG! They could have put this in the manual - I nearly died of heart failure :suprised:
I'm basing it on the ASUS Striker Extreme MOBO and have the following components:
Thermaltake Toughpower 850 watt PSU
Intel Q6600 2.4 GHZ CPU (overclockable)
2 x NVidia 8600 GT Super 512 (for SLI)
Arctic 7 CPU fan (a tight fit)
4 GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2 RAM
2 x WD Caviar 500 GB drives in RAID 1 (I chickened out of RAID 0 after an accident on my last PC!!)
Samsung SH023B DVDRW
I've put it all in a rather nice looking Thermaltake Tsunami Dream mirror black Aluminium case.
I thought quite some time about the OS and wanted really to go for 64bit Vista. In the end though I'm putting boring XPSP2 on just now and will wait a few more months before thinking about Vista due to the compatability issues at the moment. When I switch to 64bit I'll upgrade the memory to 8GB.
Mostly (so far) installation was pretty straight forwards (although I had to cut the corners off the Artic 7 fan to get it to fit past the MOBOs heat sinks.
A couple of things stood out so far as being a bit dull:
1. I had to rip the floppy disk out of my old PC and scrape about for some (very old) 3.5" disks so I could load the SATA/RAID drivers during XP installation. I thought the FDD was obsolete?
2. After I'd configured the BIOS I shut the system down to disable the case tamper switch (this got very boring!) it then wouldn't power up <gulp>. Only after some frantic searching of the ASUS website did I learn that the MOBO LED light switch has to be OFF in order to allow re-boot.
HUMBUG! They could have put this in the manual - I nearly died of heart failure :suprised: