Here it is, It took me a lot of savings to save up enough to buy this all in one fell swoop, I just started assembling/modding it all together yesteray:
Full size Ultra tower with a 750 watt PS, modular connections.
BFG nForce 680i SLI mobo
Q6600 quad core with Zerotherm CF900 silent cooler (looks sweet)
8GB DDRII-800mhz OCZ Reaper X HPC 2GBx4 @4-4-3-15
2x BFG Geforce 8800GT OC 512 MB graphics cards
1x 10000 RPM 150GB WD Raptor SATA150 HDD (for the OSs - I\'m gonna have 4) - with window!
4x 320 SATA300 WD Caviar HDDs, that\'s 7200/16/SATA300
1x Lite on DVD writer (SATA), with lightscribe
Happy with onboard sound/lan for now... (has a 8 channel with optical out sound onboard and dual gigabit lan), and of course, the usual simple mods I go for, nice case, some lights, fan controller, mediacard reader. For peripherals I\'m keeping my Logitech Z5500 speaker setup, but upgrading to a logitech G15 gaming keyboard and G7 lazer cordless mouse. To protect the whole shebang I also bought a new conditioning power center. Finally, at least this month, my monitor will be way under spec, because I have just my old Samsung 19" 1280x1024 monitor... but I will be getting a 27" or 30" sometime in the next couple months (I\'ll have to test to see if my setup will be able to push the 2560x1600 or if I should be happy with the smaller 1920x1200).
I\'ve currently got the mobo installed with CPU and some of the fans and casemods done. Waiting on ram to arrive in mail, as soon as it arrives I\'ll be set to go. I\'m looking at about another 2 days of hardware building/testing, then about a week of installing (2x 32 bit editions of XP pro, 1x 64 bit edition of the same, and 1x 64 bit vista - although I might put linux on there and sub out one). Finally about another week of moving and sorting stuff from the old comp (the old comp has about 800 GB of stuff to go through, on 3 external and 2 internal HDDs).
Just cause I know I\'ll get some flack for my OS choices:
32 XP (1) - My day to day use OS... full of crap. Generally formatted every 6 months to clean cause it gets so crappy (all that junk I download and try once).
32 XP (2) - Ultra-clean gaming system. Will likely be playing legacy games on it, which wouldn\'t work under a 64 bit OS.
64 XP - This is the one that might switch to linux. Generally for video/graphics processing, and has to be 64 bit to take advantage of the ram.
Vista 64 - I hate to have it, but you want directX 10... for now this is the way to do it, again 64 bit to use the ram. Hell, maybe it won\'t be as bad as I fear...
I was really on the fence with this upgrade, I was SO tempted by all the new liquid cooling integrated tower systems available... it was very close... but I didn\'t want to spend 2 grand on two BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition GPUs... even if the overclocking would have been lots of fun
. Integrated water cooling tower systems have really made liquid cooling an easy and much less risky option.
