Bandwidth Place 2

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My LG DVD-ROM drive in my dad's PC can't read half the DVDs I give it. And that is a lot considering just how many discs my dad gets using blockbuster's mail-in and store-trading for the mail-ins. LG also seems to have this inherent hiss sound before and after spinning up and stopping. I don't know about LG... when the only big thing I know from them is their social disaster, the "Chocolate" phone, I have utter distaste for that company. Seriously, just go NEC.

Get Arctic Cooling MX-1 paste instead of AS5.

EDIT:
OH, be careful about the length of the power supply cables and the P182. The 4/8-pin plug on the top left of that motherboard is pretty damn far from the PSU. That was the only problem with the PC in my system. I had to cut the 4-pin cable from another power supply and use it as an extension to make it long enough. I don't remember the lengths of my cables but there pretty much weren't any possible alternative PSUs that had long enough cables. If you have to make such an extension, please, learn from my mistake and make sure the wires contact each other well. I melted my PSU's 4-pin plug because all those amps had to go through like one thread of the wire that was actually contacting.

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I no longer see any problems. :] Well, the 4/8pin cable length is still a problem but you are aware of that now. To me it feels unnatural to only have one disc drive but whatever, its not like you NEED two.

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do you really need the quad core?

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OC it, you pussy O_O or just use the stock cooler.

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My thoughts:

This list WILL change by August for a fact, thats right off the bat.

This rig will run but won't give you the performance your looking for in non multi-threaded applications. A E6400 clocked over by 1 GHZ will beat that quad core (stock) at many things and lose only in applications designed to fully take advantage of 4 cores. Dual core has been out how long now and have we really seen anything that makes good use of the extra core?

Really like the case, my P180 is amazing and when I rebuild this computer I'll more then likely be using it again. One way or another I'll be keeping this case. Just be carefull not to scratch it, tape up the vent holes for the GPU exhaust system and tear out the GPU ducts in side the system.. there of no use.

If you need to lengthen the wires, strip about and inch of wire on both ends of the wires and SOLDER then together. Then ELECTRICAL tape them together... this is why PB's cables melted... the scotch tape heated up and transfered heat. I had no problems with my PSU and the 4 pin cable reaching on my board.

The extra 320 MB isn't worth the $150 to get it on the 8800GTS... save the cash because you won't really see a difference in 90% of all games... same with my X1800XT 512MB vs the 256MB edition... like maybe a 1-3% increase in SOME titles. I'm thinking by the time you build this system you may want to use the X2900XT as it will have 1GB of GDDR4 ram and might be just as cheap as the 8800GTS.

I'm a little torn on the 60A single 12V rail... not so sure to buy into the fact that having dual 12V rails is a bad thing. But its got plenty of amps and more then enough wattage.

Add a 500GB WD SATA for $130 US or less for storage. Do all your converting/capturing/whatever on the 150GB and transfer the final results to the 500GB.

Unless you run windows, the program and have the output for the program all going to the 10K or 15K RPM drive then its pointless to have a faster HDD. Makeing the 500GB storage a need.

Are you re using the Audigy 2 ZS? If not go with a soundblaster X-Fi... its worth it.



Thats all for right at the moment, I'm sure I'll have more imput before this things built but my system was "in the works" for about as long as yours will be and the game plan changed several times. Initially I was using a 3700+ single core with 1GB of ram and a cheaper 6800 or something like that and ended up with a 939 opteron 165, 2GB of ram and a X1800XT 512 lol.

Consider learning to over clock, without it the cooler upgrade is un necessary and your missing out on the best part of the Core 2 series.

Please also understand that even your system will be outdated in around a year. I built this one middle of last april and its already showing its age.

It could use a GPU upgrade and it would probably make it about another 12-16 months before needing more money put into it but the lifespan of hardware, even expensive hardware, is painfully short.

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1.) Although even with my pro headphones I don't notice too much of an improvement from my Sound Blaster Live!, I was not listening to lossless or CD quality music like I am now so that is a big factor. I did not say it was not that good, its just that I have the INFAMOUS crackling problem when I had it in the PC in my sig which rendered the card useless. According to Creative, my PC isn't feeding it the data quickly enough... Well, the card is in my dad's PC now, an Athlon XP (vs Opteron dual core) system with a VIA chipset (vs nForce 4) and it is working flawlessly. I don't know if you will have the crackling problem or not, its just risky. So when we were talking about it I recommended you another card based off of one of C-Media's audio chip, I haven't heard of such crackling problems with theirs and they are as close to the X-Fi as you can get.

2.) Q6600 = E6600 with two more cores, which is $223.90 on newegg. 223.90 < 1000. You will, for the most part, experience the same performance as the E6600. The only programs I can imagine you using that can use the extra cores are Photoshop and some sort of video encoder. Photoshop doesn't even count since most of its functions work instantly on even my Athlon XPs. I only mentioned these two because most programs that say they support quad core do not show adequate performance increases for it. Photoshop and video encoders are programs that can actually show something close to four times the performance compared to a single core. Most programs claiming support, and especially for games, will simply thread out some useless part, like audio, to another core, but doesn't actually split up the thread that needs the extra power. Simply put, most programs that say they can use quad cores, in reality, can't.

3.) Yes get the 640MB 8800GTS. The 2900XT is an option, but its drivers currently suck balls and I don't see that improving for quite a while. I mean the 8 series has had 6 months to mature its drivers and its still having problems in Vista.

EDIT:
2005, it was NOT that I didn't use electrical tape the first time. The second time I used electrical and it still burned it out. The problem was that there was barely any contact between the wires because I did not strip (or remove the plug for that matter) the wire from the PSU. The reason that I did not remove the plug in the beginning was that if I happened to for whatever reason need to send it back to Tagan, a removed 4 pin plug probably won't look very good. My solution was that I went to Fry's and got REAL contact pins that fit into the holes of the 4 pin plug and plugged the pins in. What was done before this was taking the stripped wire, with all its threads, and stuffing it into the four holes hoping it touches the metal in each hole. That was stupid.

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