Wouldn't that be right side up from where he is standing though?

It sounds like you are well on you way to getting it all set up.Sweet machine,Jafo,and just like mine.(Well at least the 17" CRT part is.)   Have fun with all that power and speed.

It's fast....but I'm just as impressed with Win7....RC ver or not it's just 'better' than XP ....and I didn't have much time with....or think much of....Vista.

The vid card came packaged with Far Cry 2 .....which looks quite spiffy .....even whilst still on that 17".

I need to experiment a bit more with the methodology of drive imaging and swapping with SATAs ..... seems I'm always back in the BIOS convincing it to find and boot the right drive.

The old machine with PATAs was simpler to handle....

when I bought my computer I had asked in the forums about what components were best. I received a lot of good information and am happy with my choices. many suggessted that I build my own and save some money. I'm sure that Jafo's experience is more than typical when building one's own computer. What is your time worth, convert that time into money and add it on top of what you paid for the components to find the real cost of that computer.

me, I received my computer on a Friday. I opened the box and started to transfer files and install programs Saturday morning, by noon I was up and running.

I may not have the satisfaction of putting something together and see it work but I also didn't have much frustration in the process either.

17" CRT?????

Total loss of respect on that.

Does you saab have tires chiseled out of stone?

I got the bits on the thursday....it was assembled and fired up on the saturday....and had a functioning OS on Sunday.

When you have more than a TB of files/data/skins/assorted junk .....it takes a while to sort.... so a week later I'm still tweaking.

I run double redundancy backups to alternate physical drives....etc...et al..... so it's not your average computer config...

This is still a dev machine...using a spare monitor.

The primary machine [soon to be retired] has all the 'good' peripherals...

Sysmetrix still shows bugger-all ram and cpu activity/use.

CPU ticking along at 43c ...

Under which "room size" conditioning?

When summer suns are at Zenith and you happen to let the box pump in rays, that figure can tag along just fine until heat slowly raises to its recommended maximum. Shadows of a past or not, i unclugged fans before and it simply doesn't matter if a board is detected as cooled within a given temperature.

50c... think i should open mine?

I've seen people putting towers in desk cases so tight, they warmed up to failure in weeks.

They took a cold shower and returned to their brand new gears with a simple warning from me; these holes you see, they were punched in for a reason.

Fiberglass body takes weight off the overall structure on some Acura-NX but it needs traction of aluminium composites wrapped in rubber still. Gotta buy Death Magnetic album (too bad, LPs vinyl quality is rare) by Metallica though. Stuck in traffic is boring when one must think of important issues.

Yeah, mine is running at about that... 44c - 46c.  However, it's Winter here at present and I wouldn't expect those sorts of temps in 6 months time... especially not if we get more of those 45c plus heatwaves.  Fortunately, my landlord has agreed to put in roof insulation and install an extra air-con unit to hook up to the split system bizzo outside... arrives tomorrow morning. 

The existing unit is installed in the middle of the house and didn't cool my study area at all... and without roof insulation it was getting up into the 50c's on particularly hot days with no breeze to speak of, which is why I bought myself a portable air-con unit for the study.

Yup, I've seen that as well... folks putting rigs into spaces with barely half an inch to spare either side, then they wonder why they overheat and shut down/or worse.  Shoot, I even saw a bloke once who built his off-the-wall desk around his PC to give it that made-to-order, built-in look, leaving NO space either side, just a door on the inner side of the unit to access the cables, etc.  

Told him it wouldn't last in the 30c  -35c plus Summer temps we get here in Queensland.... less than 6 months later he was bringing to me to fix  Yeah, right, like I'm an expert!!  Obviously it was fried, but at that time I hadn't even taken off the side of a tower, much less fiddled around with the stuff inside... guess he mistook having some common sense for some kind of expertise.

My desk leaves for a clear 2 inches either side of my rig, and on very hot days (prior to the portable air-con) I had a fan running behind it sucking cooler air in from the open window, and another oscillating in front for me and the rig both... that was on top of the 3 case fans and the extra I added to have 2 blowing and 2 acting as exhaust fans.

I probably should have taken the time to sort but haven't yet. transferred "my documents" to a 400gig external and did a straight transfer over to the new directory. it's kind of ugly when you get right down to it. AND I haven't cleaned up the external drive yet either.

just for fyi: CPU 38C.

At idle...MoBo is 36 ....CPU is 36.

List of working games is growing.....I liked the warning from Doom3 saying 'extra high graphic detail may be an issue...with up to 500meg of texture rendering' [or something like that].....ran it in 'extra high' with no dramas at all....

At last.....GTR2....GP4....rFactor ....all at the max ..... no stutters [so far]....

Next trick is to see if I can convince Win7 to run GTR ....along with what is supposed to be an incompatible Starforce.... but expect that starfoce will likely strangle my CD drives as it did on the old system.

Love the game.... hate the protection.

ROOTKIT means....it roots your kit.

All the installed games run painlessly when setup with 'No CD' patches .... but GTR's starforce means you have to jump through hoops....even disconnecting your CD drives, loading virtual drives, etc.

Oh, and GL Legends too....it also has the rootkit.

By the time they [Simbin/10Tacle] released GTR2 they'd weathered the backlash and relented with such crap.

Well.....system is still going.....uptime is halfway decent too....2 days 8 hours plus....

Got a handy proggy called Speedfan [v4.38] ..... gives lots of useful info.... with temps. etc.  [MBM refuses to work with Win7/my MoBo].

Current temps are...

GPU .... 54c  [fan at default 40%]

CPU ... 32c

System ... 42c  [not sure which that one is - or rather from where]

Ambient here must be around 25c or so [I'm upstairs...not in my office area].

I have pretty-well everything working.....now I just need to be reticent re adding further unnecessary 'crap'....

Wanna buy a slighlty used 19" LCD to replace that CRT?  

You missed the bit where this is a temporary setup....and the ASUS MW221u is still on the old machine? ....