Computers and such

[Rosuav]

That's pretty good going, Kerrida.

What'd you pay for the HD? WD's a good brand, and 250GB is a decent size.

Fans of course are the biggest noise in any computer. (They are now, anyhow... in our little old Epson XT-clone, the hard disk was pretty noisy; and of course floppy drives grind a bit. But CD drives are moderately quiet, and hard drives are almost inaudible.) If you want it quieter, try one of the large low-speed fans - or if you have lots of dollars and want total silence, a huge hunk of copper sticking out the back does an excellent job of cooling.

I reckon the key to putting together ultra cheap, ultra powerful systems is to be a pack rat. Collect components when they're being chucked out cheap - or even better, when they're being chucked out! Foster the reputation of being a geek, and people start offering you their computers rather than throwing them out... ooh, this one has a great case, this one has a working optical drive, hey, here's a pretty good hard drive!

[Kerrida]

I paid about $80 for the HD.

And, yeah, the way I got out of having to spend a lot is I reuse parts, like FD & HD, DVD burner.. basically anything that is still useful and is still good.

I think the floppy drive has been with me for like 7 years or more. I kept my old HD (now I have a total of 500GB space.. just one is pata and one is sata), and dvd burner.. no sense in letting them go to waste.

Plus, it also helps that I will upgrade individual parts every so often. This was just a big upgrade round because I was upgrading my CPU, as it was an old AMD Athlon XP 1800+.

[Grantref]

Originally posted by Kerrida

I think the floppy drive has been with me for like 7 years or more.

Have you used it? Because the dust that accumulates on the read head after that amount of time will typically destroy the first floppy disk you put in there, unless you give it a good shot with canned air first.

[Kerrida]

Lol of course I use it.

It houses my LILO boot config for when I want to boot my home box into Linux. I'd have it in linux permanently if my SO didn't need it.

[Savaric]

After much data mining I have finally settled on my components. All of it is ordered except the psu and video card (out of stock).

* e6750 Intel duocore, 2.6 Ghz 1333
* Asus motherboard, P5K intel P35 1333/1033
* Western Digital Caviar (?) 160 GB SATA II, 7200 rpm
* Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4DHX 800 DDR II (2x1GB)
(40 rebate)
* Cooler Master Centurion 5 ATX Mid Tower
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811119077

*eVGA 8800 GTS 320 mb 500 Mhz (out of stock)

I'm still mulling the psu. I think 500 watts is fine but I need to figure out the amperage deal. That card seems to want 26 amps, the psu I've selected (antec earthwatts 500w) has 32 amps split up on two rails. What's the dealio? Do I need 26 amps on a single rail? I'm not overclocking.

The total tally on this is about 950 for hardware. I'll give a final cost comparison once I got it together (to Dell's 1250).

[Sier]

Looks great, that system should give you a good 3 years of gaming and for the time being you will be able to play every game you get ahold of on high graphics (including crysis). I do hope you aren't using it for just word processing!

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Savaric
I'm still mulling the psu. I think 500 watts is fine but I need to figure out the amperage deal. That card seems to want 26 amps, the psu I've selected (antec earthwatts 500w) has 32 amps split up on two rails. What's the dealio? Do I need 26 amps on a single rail? I'm not overclocking.

A bit of googling turned up the following, which seems to be a fairly comprehensive reference.

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.co...d.php?t=136602

I'm not an overclocker, nor a high-end-graphics person, so I don't really know much in terms of what you need. But yes, you would need 26A on one rail, I believe.

[Savaric]

Excellent, thanks Ros. This is good info since most of these power units are multiple rails. Now I can complete my journey to the dark side.

[Kerrida]

A lot of the top end graphics cards have to have their own power source. The rails generally (as far as I know) go to the mobo.

I know my mobo had a single 24pin ATX connector, but also required a smaller 4pin connector for addition power to the cpu.

The video card will also likely require a 4pin connector to be connected to it so that it is pulling power directly from the psu as well. That I believe is what it is needing. My video card is a couple steps down (I have the 8500 with 512MB ram), and works great on a very cheap generic psu.

[Savaric]

Originally posted by Rosuav
A bit of googling turned up the following, which seems to be a fairly comprehensive reference.

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.co...d.php?t=136602

I found another article which seems to contradict the above.
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Ca...?articleId=199

"However, the maximum power figure alone is not enough to determine whether a PSU is able to drive your computer. Each voltage rail requires attention, but the most attention needs to go to the +12V rail(s), since the processor and PCIe video cards receive their power from them. The power supply must output at least 18A (amps) on the +12V rail(s) for a mainstream up-to-date computer; more than 24A for a system with a single enthusiast-class graphics card; and no less than 34A when it comes to a high end SLI/CrossFire system. The output amperage figure we're talking about here is the combined figure for PSUs offering more than one +12V rail."

Actually this makes more sense since most of the psus have multiple rails and very few of them actually break the 18 amp marker.