[XFxGeforced]

Quote:

Originally Posted by afireinside Hard modded vdd @ 2.3v vgpu @ 1.6v. It over heats pretty bad on this zalman, need water cooling.

i went went from 1.4v to 1.5v with the softmod and my watercooling takes care of the heat. i had a zalman fatal1ty cooler before this setup and it got hot

 

[CousCous]

In terms of support, I can recommend both DFI and OCZ. I have a DFI Lanparty SLI-DR motherboard, and OCZ powerstream psu, OCZ El Platinum Ram.

The DFI forums are a fantastic resource. Super active forums with great people.
The OCZ forums are good too, and you'll find 3 or so OCZ reps answering people's questions, taking RMA's, etc.

 

[afireinside]

Quote:

Originally Posted by XFxGeforced i went went from 1.4v to 1.5v with the softmod and my watercooling takes care of the heat. i had a zalman fatal1ty cooler before this setup and it got hot

Yeah I have the fatality now with a 120mm panaflow over it.

Stay away from dfi-street. Their idiocy baffles me over there. Check out xtremesystems.org. It's the head-fi of the overclocking world. Full of experts, but theres tons of annoying noobs like I am here as well

 

[XFxGeforced]

Quote:

Originally Posted by afireinside Yeah I have the fatality now with a 120mm panaflow over it. Stay away from dfi-street. Their idiocy baffles me over there. Check out xtremesystems.org. It's the head-fi of the overclocking world. Full of experts, but theres tons of annoying noobs like I am here as well

ill stick to my home @ extremeoverclocking, but i sometimes goto xs

 

[JaGWiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by XFxGeforced there you go

That all is similiar to what I'de say, but dump that power supply. Get a seasonic or pc power and cooling, they are among the best. Also, maxtor hard drives have 1 year and I detest them myself with many others. Get a 7200.9 seagate, hitachi, or samsung, or wait for the 7200.10 series from seagate.

I wouldn't recommend alfireinsides hard drive recommendation though. Raid 0 means you lose both drives in a failure, and overall isn't worth it. The new 146 gigabyte raptor may be good at speed, but a regular sata drive is just fine.

 

[afireinside]

If data lose is concern then get other drives for music, movies, pictures, whatever you need. I do it to avoid losing everything when I reformat. 2x raptors in RAID 0 is unrivaled in speed at least on the desktop market. I can go from popping my windows XP disk in, to having a fully set up windows install (minus games) in about half an hour. That includes formating, installing windows, and all my daily apps. The drives also have a 5 year warrenty with western digital. They have an AWESOME RMA service.

 

[ReDVsion]

My recommendations:

~$1000: Link

~$1500: Link

I think that for a PC that will also be used for music listening it ought to be reasonably quiet while still being a good performer. Of course there are lots more options for quieting graphics cards outside of the cards I listed in these two wishlists; I just listed examples I found at newegg. While I personally would rather take a framerate hit for better sound, I figured the X-fi would be the preferred card in a gaming system.

 

[Rockofeller]

Is this a budget rig? CAS Latency is unimportant to anyone but an overclocker, and 1GB of RAM is enough (money better spent elsewhere) unless youre doing hardcore graphics work or have money to burn.
Western Digital Caviar SE 400GB for the harddrive is the best choice for a 7200 RPM Drive.

 

[JaGWiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by afireinside If data lose is concern then get other drives for music, movies, pictures, whatever you need. I do it to avoid losing everything when I reformat. 2x raptors in RAID 0 is unrivaled in speed at least on the desktop market. I can go from popping my windows XP disk in, to having a fully set up windows install (minus games) in about half an hour. That includes formating, installing windows, and all my daily apps. The drives also have a 5 year warrenty with western digital. They have an AWESOME RMA service.

And it's also pretty whiney in noise. Bleh, not going to argue much, but the 146 gigabyte is the only one truley worth the time now I think, but even that isn't worth the money IMHO. For the price of a $300 raptor, you may as well just get a scsi controller and get some real scsi drives (seagate cheetah anyone?) Most stuff relies on ram anyway, if you want a fast XP install, image your drive right after a clean install, not too difficult. Trust me, when you have raid 0, and one drive fails, you won't have fun waiting for an RMA on both. I would just dump the idea because of the price. Hell, I'de personally suggest 2x 80 gigabyte seagate drives in raid 0.

 

[JaGWiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rockofeller Is this a budget rig? CAS Latency is unimportant to anyone but an overclocker, and 1GB of RAM is enough (money better spent elsewhere) unless youre doing hardcore graphics work or have money to burn. Western Digital Caviar SE 400GB for the harddrive is the best choice for a 7200 RPM Drive.

Well, he has the dfi board, so he might as well get some ram that compliments it. That DFI board is damn picky with ram, you'll probably end up with overclocking ram regardless of if your interested or not. Good timings should help anyway, and hopefully he will clock it in the future (even if he has no plans to do so now.)
Afireinside, I think I remember you from xtremesystems. I'm not sure, but did you happen to be active in the phase change, dry ice or ln2 community?

 

[afireinside]

Woops double post

 

[afireinside]

Yes I'm active in the dry ice world. I have the 7800GT records and you probably remember me pushing the opteron 146 to 3.6ghz before most people got them

You're right it would suck if one died. It's really all based on personal preference. The chance of a drive dying isn't that large anyway. If you have 300 dollars to put two of them in RAID and you want the fastest load times you can get, it's worth it 110%. Although they can get loud in a low noise system. But the performance difference over a 7200 rpm drive is night and day.

A DFI board is a VERY bad idea if you don't know much about ram and overclocking or you don't like the thought of having to figure out what chips your ram uses, hunting down the right settings for them, then playing around to get them all to work.

 

[li0n]

Mousepad?
mouse?
keyboard?
headphones?
crt monitor?
i think they'd be much more important

 

[JaGWiRE]

Quote:

Originally Posted by afireinside Yes I'm active in the dry ice world. I have the 7800GT records and you probably remember me pushing the opteron 146 to 3.6ghz before most people got them You're right it would suck if one died. It's really all based on personal preference. The chance of a drive dying isn't that large anyway. If you have 300 dollars to put two of them in RAID and you want the fastest load times you can get, it's worth it 110%. Although they can get loud in a low noise system. But the performance difference over a 7200 rpm drive is night and day. A DFI board is a VERY bad idea if you don't know much about ram and overclocking or you don't like the thought of having to figure out what chips your ram uses, hunting down the right settings for them, then playing around to get them all to work.

Hm, you bring up a good point. With stock settings, my board wasn't even stable. My friend (noob who is scared to touch his pc) just built his rig with a DFI (after I advised an asus), and he has no idea what to do with his extreme.

 

[jesusfr3ak4evr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by li0n Mousepad? mouse? keyboard? headphones? crt monitor? i think they'd be much more important

Get a Logitech G7 mouse and a fUnc mousepad, or similar. If you're going to be gaming, I suggest Sennheiser HD 595s (what I use, and I'm 3rd on a CS: Source server). I also hear Audio-Technica ATH-A900s are good for gaming.