I just built my baby and just not booted it up and started using it. Building it from scratch cost me about 2500 bucks and I'm using it for gaming along with intense video encoding. If you want further specs I'll give them but for now I'll list the core specs.
It starts with an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Manchester core socket 939 CPU. The motherboard is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI board. I also have 4 512MB sticks of PC3200 400Mhz DC memory. The memory brand is Corsair XMS High Performance memory. They also came with heat spreaders. I've also got two Western Digital 400 GB drivers in a striped Raid Array configuration. I also have 2 Nvidia Geforce 6800 GT 256MB PCI Express 16x cards via SLI.
I also got an Asetek WaterChill Antarctica cooling system. I must say this cooling system does the job but it surely was a pain to install and get setup. I'm very good at building computers but this was harder than it could be.
The bottom line is this thing flies using Windows XP Professional x64 edition. I've installed both Windows XP Professional and I must say x64 edition runs everything much faster and smoother than I thought. You would be amazed how much Windows Media Player 10 speeds up in x64 edition with a large music collection. Everything loaded up (including Napster) almost 2 seconds quicker than the non x64 version and lets just say it only takes a tad over 3 seconds to load. My old Pentium 4 2.4Ghz system takes almost 8 seconds to load WMP 10 to a working state.
Also the games play great but not as great as what I was expecting considering the CPU and SLI graphics but great none the less. It seems that playing a game at 1920x1080 is now doable but the sweet spot still is 1600x1200 for now but when a came is written to take advantage of both SLI and the dualcore CPU it know I'll be playing at 1920x1080 in no time.
For the first time in a while this computer ended up being worth 2500 bucks because it had such a huge improvement with more great things to come. This system I feel for once will have 5 or more years of great things. Now I'm eager to find out what Windows Vista will bring to the table.
It starts with an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Manchester core socket 939 CPU. The motherboard is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI board. I also have 4 512MB sticks of PC3200 400Mhz DC memory. The memory brand is Corsair XMS High Performance memory. They also came with heat spreaders. I've also got two Western Digital 400 GB drivers in a striped Raid Array configuration. I also have 2 Nvidia Geforce 6800 GT 256MB PCI Express 16x cards via SLI.
I also got an Asetek WaterChill Antarctica cooling system. I must say this cooling system does the job but it surely was a pain to install and get setup. I'm very good at building computers but this was harder than it could be.
The bottom line is this thing flies using Windows XP Professional x64 edition. I've installed both Windows XP Professional and I must say x64 edition runs everything much faster and smoother than I thought. You would be amazed how much Windows Media Player 10 speeds up in x64 edition with a large music collection. Everything loaded up (including Napster) almost 2 seconds quicker than the non x64 version and lets just say it only takes a tad over 3 seconds to load. My old Pentium 4 2.4Ghz system takes almost 8 seconds to load WMP 10 to a working state.
Also the games play great but not as great as what I was expecting considering the CPU and SLI graphics but great none the less. It seems that playing a game at 1920x1080 is now doable but the sweet spot still is 1600x1200 for now but when a came is written to take advantage of both SLI and the dualcore CPU it know I'll be playing at 1920x1080 in no time.
For the first time in a while this computer ended up being worth 2500 bucks because it had such a huge improvement with more great things to come. This system I feel for once will have 5 or more years of great things. Now I'm eager to find out what Windows Vista will bring to the table.
