Saturday, April 18, 2009
IT'S ALIVE!! Intel Core i7 920 With 12GB PC12800 DDR3 Monster System Done
One of my clients wanted me to build a pretty nice gaming PC for him and his kids, and my rep at TigerDirect.com was happy to help me pick out the components. When it was all in the shopping cart, the total was just under $1000 (after two rebates) for what should be a $1800 ~ $2000 system.
I slapped it together, yesterday, in less than an hour, and booted it up with a Slax Linux Live CD as a sanity test. Today, I installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 on it, which was a breeze - all the hardware was detected and drivers were installed automatically. With 12GB of RAM, and no pagefile, the disk activity was almost nil - even when running OpenOffice Suite, Gimp Image Manipulation, and playing music with GOM Media Player. They left me their HL2 CDs, so tonight I'll try it out and see how it plays. I've also gotta set up SyncBack so they can easily back up their files onto a big slow portable hard drive. After that, it's in their hands.
Luckily, this guy is a pretty sensible computer user. Compared to several other local clients, who can mysteriously reformat entire systems by accident despite my best efforts to safeguard the system, I've never had any major "WTF" calls from them. Even his kids are pretty good users, and know what not to click. He knows how to do basic hardware installation, so if he gets a duplicate SLI video card to run in parallel, or another hard drive, I'd have faith in him installing it on his own.
I've gotta say, this is a pretty sweet rig, but I'm still pretty happy with the new system I have at work, and my other PCs. None of my own systems are nearly as fast, especially since I'm underclocking the processor and RAM in my notebook (dynamic frequency scaling) and two desktops (manual), but they're all rock-friggin-solid - not a single freeze-up or crash, since I got 'em. Microsoft Vista gets a bum rap... IMO it's a great operating system, if you're willing to configure it to suit your needs. It's not even hard to configure Vista. Just Google around for Vista tweaks, and you'll find a number of guides that practically do all the work for you.
| • Asus P6T LGA 1366 Board • Core i7 920 / 2.66GHz • 12GB 1600MHz PC12800 DDR3 • 1GB PCIe2 GeForce 9500 GT SLI | • 7200RPM SATA-G3 1.5TB HDD • Sony DVD±RW / BluRay Drive • CoolerMaster ATX Case • 750 Watt Power Supply |
I slapped it together, yesterday, in less than an hour, and booted it up with a Slax Linux Live CD as a sanity test. Today, I installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 on it, which was a breeze - all the hardware was detected and drivers were installed automatically. With 12GB of RAM, and no pagefile, the disk activity was almost nil - even when running OpenOffice Suite, Gimp Image Manipulation, and playing music with GOM Media Player. They left me their HL2 CDs, so tonight I'll try it out and see how it plays. I've also gotta set up SyncBack so they can easily back up their files onto a big slow portable hard drive. After that, it's in their hands.Luckily, this guy is a pretty sensible computer user. Compared to several other local clients, who can mysteriously reformat entire systems by accident despite my best efforts to safeguard the system, I've never had any major "WTF" calls from them. Even his kids are pretty good users, and know what not to click. He knows how to do basic hardware installation, so if he gets a duplicate SLI video card to run in parallel, or another hard drive, I'd have faith in him installing it on his own.
I've gotta say, this is a pretty sweet rig, but I'm still pretty happy with the new system I have at work, and my other PCs. None of my own systems are nearly as fast, especially since I'm underclocking the processor and RAM in my notebook (dynamic frequency scaling) and two desktops (manual), but they're all rock-friggin-solid - not a single freeze-up or crash, since I got 'em. Microsoft Vista gets a bum rap... IMO it's a great operating system, if you're willing to configure it to suit your needs. It's not even hard to configure Vista. Just Google around for Vista tweaks, and you'll find a number of guides that practically do all the work for you.
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