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Post by Nostra1 on Sept 7, 2006 4:31:55 GMT 1
I don't know. I guess I'd better figure out how to turn the counter on. I just cranked up the settings and INI tweaks, enabled pixel shader 3.0 and other stuff you can't do from the normal options, It looks beautiful but did slow it quite a bit. Thanks for the info Wildman! Its always nice to hear how well certain vid boards work with Oblivion. It seems the 7300 is a nice board to get to run OB without mortgaging your house to do so.
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Post by Nostra1 on Dec 22, 2006 8:35:26 GMT 1
Well finally got my wife's rig to some sort of point that I can post it here. Took the CoolerMaster Centurion 5 case and modded it a bit. Stripped all of the paint off and painted it with the colors of her choice (Bahama Blue and Avignon Blue and a bit of Black accents). Cut out the back perforations and put in a Bahama Sun fan grill. Cut out a window for her in her requested X pattern and put in an acrylic window. Put another Bahama Sun fan grill on the window spinning a 120mm CoolerMaster Silent LED fan (volt modded for 7V). Put on a Diving Golden Dolphin crystal and two 28ab Starflower crystals on the door and shined a spotlight on the Starflower crystals. Anyway, here is the rig as it stands now. Before: Now: ;D ;D ;D Her desktop: (Note: The white LED spotlight of the lower crystal burnt out so you can see in the last picture the difference of the top crystal when it is lit up and the bottom crystal which is not. They really sparkle pink and look really cool in real life. Will replace the bottom LED soon). System Specifications: CPU: AMD Opteron 165 Dual Core 1.8GHz (CCBBE 0616 XPMW) presently at 2.45GHz overclock Mobo: ASUS A8N5X NForce4 Socket 939 motherboard RAM: 1x1Gb Corsair Value Select (w Samsung UCCC chips) DDR 400 presently at DDR446 overclock PSU: Hiper TypeR 580w dual rail, modular PSU (love the color ) HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7800.9 250Gb SATA 3.0 jumpered to run SATA 150 Optical: BenQ 1650 x16 +/- DVD Burner Video: Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT with Silent Pipe II passive cooling Floppy: Mitsumi 3.5" Floppy with universal multi card reader (USB 2.0) Case: CoolerMaster Centurion 5 ATX case CPU cooler: Noctua NH U9 with Tek Chain 92mm LED fan spinning at 1600rpm Chipset Cooler: Microcool Northpole Whisper XE Crystals: Diving Golden Dolphin Crystals and 28ab Starflower Crystals. Sisoft Sandra benchmarked at faster than Athlon 64 X2 4800. It should presently be about a Athlon 64 X2 5000. Targetting to get to 2.7Ghz which will make it slightly faster than a FX-60. System temps 30-32C idle, 48C full load (Orthos blend for 2 hours core 0 48C, core 1 51C) and even with the overclock the processor is running at a lower voltage than stock (1.29V) so it is less stressed than a stock X2 CPU. These CCBBE Opterons are insane! Not really finished but for the moment, I will put this on hold. I have to build my son's rig with him on Christmas eve.
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Post by osiris on Dec 22, 2006 17:44:20 GMT 1
Wow, your work on your wife's case looks really really good! My congratulations. I paint, draw and whatever, then i own a bit of creativity... i suppose; but i would never touch a case, probably because frightened about to damage something, so... My deepest congratulations to who is really able to do such interesting things.
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Post by Nostra1 on Dec 22, 2006 20:29:16 GMT 1
Thanks Osiris!! ;D ;D ;D Coming from a pro like you, I am honored. It was a bit stressful at times but it was a lot of fun. The biggest stress was trying to get all the painting done before it got cold. It went ok though I cut corners at the end which cost me a bit. Still I am very happy with how it turned out. Still have things to do to this rig over the next few months. I want to get her one more DVD burner so that she can rip and burn DVD's at will. Need to get her a temp monitor/fan controller panel for convenience. Got to do some more to enhance the appearance (minor tweaks here and there). Have to add a sound card. Then have to go upgrade what Neko calls the hardware/meatware interface (monitor, keyboard, speakers etc). It will be more fun. I also have to build my son's rig (thank god he chose a pre-modded case) which I will post after Christmas once it is built. Then later this summer or so, I get to build up my system again! Mine will be the last socket 939 rig for us. And probably in a year or so, I need to upgrade my daughter's system. Her's should be a lot of fun to upgrade as she already picked out a theme and I have chosen the case I want to use for that build. I will decide later if I want to go AMD with AM2 or Intel with C2D. I hope you are doing well this holiday season and may you have a wonderful winter holiday. Thanks for creating such a wonderful and friendly forum.
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Post by Nostra1 on Dec 29, 2006 7:25:55 GMT 1
Well this time the project is a system for my son. This is our second father-son build project (the first was a skateboard that took all of 20 minutes to build (10 minutes looking for a screwdriver)). I am always surprised these projects do not end up with us throwing things at each other out of frustration. My son was getting frustrated over his old computer that he got handed down from his sister (one of those old emachines PC that looked like an iMac) that had a broken CD ROM. He could do most of his homework on it but it was too old for even some simple games (even those games that are in the bargain section). So as he will be entering 6th grade next year, we decided to get him a PC for his uh....future homework (yup thats it ;D ). However, instead of getting yet another emachines, we decided we would build a rig together. So getting some old stuff, cannibalizing some stuff from my rig and buying a few parts we set out on a build on Christmas eve. Parts: Case: Logisys X Blade (aka A-Top X Blade). His case of choice. Pretty nice case IMO (if you like the style). CPU: Athlon 64 3000+ Venice Socket 939 (my old CPU, nicely overclocks.) Mobo: Biostar TForce6100 NForce 410 Socket 939 mATX (I really like this mobo) PSU: Thermaltake TR2 W0070 430W PSU (my old PSU) RAM: OCZ Enchanced Latency 512Mb DDR 400 (seems like a nice RAM, will find out soon) HDD: Western Digital Caviar 80Gb SATA 3.0 DVD: NEC 3550 x16 +/- DVD Burner (my wife's old burner) Cooling: Stock Opteron cooler (with 4 Cu heatpipes, taken from my wife's rig when I put on the Noctua on hers) Misc: One 80mm Dragon fan grill (very important :smile: ), GE cheap optical mouse, some crappy no name speakers, old emachine CRT. ;D ;D Finished building by Christmas. My son was quite proud of his build. Helped him with wire management and putting on the HSF. Here is the finished rig. So here is his Dragon fan grill on the back. Though the back is 120mm, there were better choice 80mm dragon fan grills so we got an 80mm instead. The only good 120mm was one with a wing span bigger than 120mm that would not fit the case. I wonder about a silver grill on a silver case but its his choice and I guess doesn't look all that bad. Inside: Well with the mATX in this case and on board graphics, the computer looks almost empty. I was very impressed with this case. It is huge (bigger than either my Rosewill TU 155 or my wife's CoolerMaster C5). It is also the easiest system to wire manage of the three. It also has a detachable mobo tray so loading is easier. The motherboard also looks very nice. I may get a Biostar TForce mobo for my future set up as well. Put it on my wife's setup to test. Worked on first try. My son was quite happy. I was quite impressed with the on-board video. With the Opteron cooler, it runs really cool. I may get a small fan for the chipset heat sink later. The graphics were better than I expected. It may not play FEAR or Oblivion but my son has no interest in such games. The graphics is more than strong enough to play games such as Hot Wheels Stunt Racer and Star Wars Jedi Academy. So he seems very happy that he can finally play some of the games he bought like a year ago that his old rig would not play. I may get him the game he has wanted for awhile (LEGO Star Wars II) for his birthday. I will probably start clocking up the system slowly (since I have to find a time when he is not using it to clock the system up). With this rig, it may be bare bones but since all of our present builds are socket 939 and it has PCI express x16, it is ready for future upgrades from our hand me downs. Hopefully this rig will be with him for many years and he continues to tweak the system. :smile: :smile:
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Post by osiris on Dec 29, 2006 12:21:19 GMT 1
Looks simply amazing, even if i wouldn't add all those blue light inside, since i'm not much addicted of so much computer tuning; really a great machine for homeworks (Err...). Now you just have to change the monitor with a better and bigger LCD, i think. I own a CRT as well (i think that they still are the best, concerning the quality of the image), but i believe that a new screen would fit better with a so good machine.
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Post by Nostra1 on Dec 30, 2006 21:48:33 GMT 1
Thanks again. Yeah it lights up freakin blue (there is actually one more blue LED fan on the case door that is not on the photo) but it seems to be the trend these days. At least he turns the computer off before he goes to bed or else it would light up the entire room.
Yeah, LCD would be cool but I need one for myself first.
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Post by osiris on Jan 3, 2007 20:48:04 GMT 1
At least he turns the computer off before he goes to bed or else it would light up the entire room. ;D Yeah, LCD would be cool but I need one for myself first. You're right my friend! After all this work, a present for you would be nice.
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Gunther Rall
Retainer
no, im not a nazi, nor do i want to be one
Posts: 59
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Post by Gunther Rall on Jan 5, 2007 23:20:08 GMT 1
i have no pics atm, but its nothing special, just a generic tan case, and i leave the side panel off permanently(i just imagine i have some sweet glass case instead lol)
specs: p4 1.8GHz 640 MB RAM (hopefullt to be upgrade to 1.5GB in the near future) 512 MB ATI Radeon X1300 2 x 20 GB hard drives @ 7200 RPMs each(soon to be upgraded to a 80 GB @ 7200 RPMs) Windows XP Pro SP2 (soon to be upgraded to Vista!) generic Creative soundblaster card floppy drive CD-RW DVD player (only one of the 2 above optical drives can be used at a time though: 4 IDE devices max, but that will e remedied with my new hard drive) 17" lcd moniter with integrated speakers optical mouse glow in the dark keyboard not much else
oblvion's auto-detect systems specs program thingy defaulted my compy to high! but i had to turn it down to low (insufficient memory)
gunther
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Post by Nostra1 on Jan 9, 2007 23:11:42 GMT 1
RAM prices are finally starting to come down again so you may want to keep an eye out for a nice 1Gb stick. If you don't care about latency, there are now 1Gb sticks available for about $85 or so at the egg. You may want to wait and see if it come down further in price.
By the way, which lighted keyboard do you have?
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Gunther Rall
Retainer
no, im not a nazi, nor do i want to be one
Posts: 59
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Post by Gunther Rall on Jan 11, 2007 4:26:52 GMT 1
i have no idea what brand it is but it is black and the keys light up blue and it has a bunch of shortcut keys to like word, access, excel, etc
but i dont know who made it
sorry
gunther
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