My new gaming rig

[Matt34]

Finally was able to order it last Thursday and it arrived today. I must say, not as bad putting it together as I thought and had a successful 1st boot!! Only thing I had to go back and change was the power/standy LED got switched up.

I was all ready to go but for the life of me can't find my windows 7 disc!! Oh well, I'll find it tomorrow.

Here are the specs and some pics:

Asus motherboard
AMD Phenom II 3.2gig Quad core
Geforce GT250 GPU
8 gigs DDR3 1333 ram
150gig WD Velociraptor 10,000rpm boot drive
1terabyte WD 7200rpm storage drive
OCZ Stealth Stream 700w power supply
Thermaltake Armor VH6000 case
Logitech G9 mouse
Logitech G15 keyboard

Pull out motherboard tray!

More of the cable mess, I'll get a pic tomorrow of it all cleaned up and zip tied.

First boot

 

[Matt34]

All buttoned up

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Gongrats!
I always liked Thermaltake case, but Lol - the mobo really dwarf in it

 

[Matt34]

Gongrats!
I always liked Thermaltake case, but Lol - the mobo really dwarf in it

Hey, I have really good airflow!!

 

[GlocksRock]

That looks really good... I've never built a PC, but have wanted to for a while. It's just easier to buy one, but I guess for a gaming rig it's better to have all the specific components that you really want.

 

[Matt34]

That looks really good... I've never built a PC, but have wanted to for a while.

Same here but I got to watching videos online that gave step by step instructions on how to put one together so I gave it a shot. Very happy with the way it turned out and I'm glad I didn't fry anything. I got so wrapped up into it I didn't even open up my Emotiva UPA-2 that arrived yesterday.

 

[krzywica]

Why not ATI and why not an SSD for your boot drive?

Good looking build BTW.

 

[Matt34]

Why not ATI and why not an SSD for your boot drive?

Good looking build BTW.

I wanted to go with a SSD but it would have put me over my budget. ATI, don't know really, was recommended the Geforce GT cards for what I'm going to use it for.

 

[adk highlander]

Way to go Matt. Looks good. I built a few machines last year for some friends. It is really not that hard you just need to not be intimidated and stay away from wool socks and carpets.

A UPA-2 as well! Man I need a new toy. You, J and Warp are making me jealous.

 

[Matt34]

I'm really disliking Microsoft right now. Using the past OS I figure I could use Windows 7 on more than one computer, well apparently not. Punch me for not reading the 10 page User agreement.

 

[scotsman8]

8 gigs of ram? Geez! Can windows even use all that?

 

[GlocksRock]

8 gigs of ram? Geez! Can windows even use all that?

Yes, my workstation motherboard will support up to 24 gigs of ram, a 4 gig stick in each of the 6 slots. I only have 9 gigs right now, which is plenty, but for some people who do a lot in photoshop, or who run virtual machines, they need lots of ram.

Both of my HTPC's only have 4 gigs of ram, and are running Win. 7 64 bit pro, and one is home premium 64 bit, but my workstation desktop has a Core i7 920 with 9 gigs of ram and is running Win. 7 Home Premium and I love it, it's so fast and snappy, plus it's a video encoding beast.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

my work pc desktop is maxed out at 8gb ram,Win7 x64 Ultimate and I can't live without it, running tons of apps at the same time, never single slowdown.

 

[Nemo128]

Couple things worth noting for people planning on running 64-bit Windows:

1. Applications that are written in a 32-bit code base that are 64-bit compatible will not use more than 4GB of memory for their OS-scheduled process. A lot of the apps we use are like this. Photoshop in particular wasn't natively 64-bit until CS4. Prior versions will not use more than 4GB of physical RAM, and that is only if a user knows the registry key to modify that will allow a process to use that much. For the most part, gobs of RAM only helps with multitasking and not with the individual processes past a certain limit. For most apps, that limit is 4GB. For the 64-bit native apps out there, the OS limit is the limit.

2. I'm not a PC gamer anymore, but the only PC games I know of that support 64-bit natively are Crysis and Valve's Orange Box. Simply put, your games will benefit more from a beefier CPU or GPU than from >4GB physical RAM. From the OS perspective, sure more memory is better. From the application perspective, it doesn't know the difference between your 8GB and your 192GB. Virtual memory usage after that point is a whole other issue and best handled by the fastest HDD in one's budget. That will certainly change in the future as devs produce 64-bit native games. For now, 64-bit is not the standard so they can't make that move just yet.

3. Windows 7's max RAM support is different for each 64-bit version. Home Basic is 8GB while Home Premium is 16GB. Versions above that are 192GB, which is plenty. Same story with Vista. Interestingly, none of the versions support the true 64-bit address space maximum. Just useless fact to affirm your geekitude.

4. Virtual machines are the perfect case for more RAM. On a Windows 7 64-bit machine running the appropriate version, the only real limit to the number of VMs a general user can run is the amount of memory their motherboard supports. Even giving the base OS and each VM 8GB of memory space would still allow 23 VMs on the Home Pro or better versions of Vista and 7. Of course for organizations that use VMs, that number might be too low but that's what the Windows Server OSs and server motherboard are for.

Yes, my rant is done...

 

[Serj22]

I just finished my HTPC gaming rig, and only went to 6gigs, but it's not as impressive. I play MW2 and Crysis and other hyper-graphic games, they stand up well.

 

[krzywica]

Couple things worth noting for people planning on running 64-bit Windows:

1. Applications that are written in a 32-bit code base that are 64-bit compatible will not use more than 4GB of memory for their OS-scheduled process. A lot of the apps we use are like this. Photoshop in particular wasn't natively 64-bit until CS4. Prior versions will not use more than 4GB of physical RAM, and that is only if a user knows the registry key to modify that will allow a process to use that much. For the most part, gobs of RAM only helps with multitasking and not with the individual processes past a certain limit. For most apps, that limit is 4GB. For the 64-bit native apps out there, the OS limit is the limit.

2. I'm not a PC gamer anymore, but the only PC games I know of that support 64-bit natively are Crysis and Valve's Orange Box. Simply put, your games will benefit more from a beefier CPU or GPU than from >4GB physical RAM. From the OS perspective, sure more memory is better. From the application perspective, it doesn't know the difference between your 8GB and your 192GB. Virtual memory usage after that point is a whole other issue and best handled by the fastest HDD in one's budget. That will certainly change in the future as devs produce 64-bit native games. For now, 64-bit is not the standard so they can't make that move just yet.

3. Windows 7's max RAM support is different for each 64-bit version. Home Basic is 8GB while Home Premium is 16GB. Versions above that are 192GB, which is plenty. Same story with Vista. Interestingly, none of the versions support the true 64-bit address space maximum. Just useless fact to affirm your geekitude.

4. Virtual machines are the perfect case for more RAM. On a Windows 7 64-bit machine running the appropriate version, the only real limit to the number of VMs a general user can run is the amount of memory their motherboard supports. Even giving the base OS and each VM 8GB of memory space would still allow 23 VMs on the Home Pro or better versions of Vista and 7. Of course for organizations that use VMs, that number might be too low but that's what the Windows Server OSs and server motherboard are for.

Yes, my rant is done...

Another reason to have a lot more Ram than is needed is if you want to eliminate the swap/page file altogether. This can be beneficial depending on the OS and application you are running.

I just finished my HTPC gaming rig, and only went to 6gigs, but it's not as impressive. I play MW2 and Crysis and other hyper-graphic games, they stand up well.

They did very in depth testing of gaming and memory size on Toms or Anandtech a while back and they came to the conclusion that any more than 4GB of memory increases performance 0% for gaming.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Couple things worth noting for people planning on running 64-bit Windows:

1. Applications that are written in a 32-bit code base that are 64-bit compatible will not use more than 4GB of memory for their OS-scheduled process. A lot of the apps we use are like this. Photoshop in particular wasn't natively 64-bit until CS4. Prior versions will not use more than 4GB of physical RAM, and that is only if a user knows the registry key to modify that will allow a process to use that much. For the most part, gobs of RAM only helps with multitasking and not with the individual processes past a certain limit. For most apps, that limit is 4GB. For the 64-bit native apps out there, the OS limit is the limit.

So if I ran 32bit photoshop and 32bit Lightroom as same time [just an example],
photoshop will be limited to 4gb [or less], but will Lightroom will be sharing the same lower 4gb as PS or it could use the other 4gb [granted pc have 8gb or more?

2. I'm not a PC gamer anymore, but the only PC games I know of that support 64-bit natively are Crysis and Valve's Orange Box. Simply put, your games will benefit more from a beefier CPU or GPU than from >4GB physical RAM. From the OS perspective, sure more memory is better. From the application perspective, it doesn't know the difference between your 8GB and your 192GB. Virtual memory usage after that point is a whole other issue and best handled by the fastest HDD in one's budget. That will certainly change in the future as devs produce 64-bit native games. For now, 64-bit is not the standard so they can't make that move just yet.

3. Windows 7's max RAM support is different for each 64-bit version. Home Basic is 8GB while Home Premium is 16GB. Versions above that are 192GB, which is plenty. Same story with Vista. Interestingly, none of the versions support the true 64-bit address space maximum. Just useless fact to affirm your geekitude.

All above is 100% Truth.

4. Virtual machines are the perfect case for more RAM. On a Windows 7 64-bit machine running the appropriate version, the only real limit to the number of VMs a general user can run is the amount of memory their motherboard supports. Even giving the base OS and each VM 8GB of memory space would still allow 23 VMs on the Home Pro or better versions of Vista and 7. Of course for organizations that use VMs, that number might be too low but that's what the Windows Server OSs and server motherboard are for.

Sorry, but honestly [Sarcasm is off] how is it relevant ? Any company serious about their VMs will run it on real server hardware and bare-metal installed OS ESX or Hyper-V, not on top of Windows Desktop

 

[krzywica]

Sorry, but honestly [Sarcasm is off] how is it relevant ? Any company serious about their VMs will run it on real server hardware and bare-metal installed OS ESX or Hyper-V, not on top of Windows Desktop

Yeah right man, at work we run our entire SQL database on Windows Virtual PC installed on top of Windows ME. Its soooo stable and reliable!

 

[Serj22]

They did very in depth testing of gaming and memory size on Toms or Anandtech a while back and they came to the conclusion that any more than 4GB of memory increases performance 0% for gaming.

Works for me. I bought an HP Pavillion that came with 6gigs of ram, and the mobo w/quadcore, and just swapped cases, got a nice video card, another hard drive, wireless card, express 5.1 sound card, and swapped the power supply for a beefier one and got more fans, and upgraded the processor heat sink.

IT plays games just fine, and the ram handles nicely for all the processes. I often play Itunes music in the background while playing games, and it works nicely. All my other PC's, anytime you play music and a game, it slows down a lot.

 

[Shock]

Looks good, but for the price of that "Overpricaraptor" you could have gotten a nice SSD with much faster random read/writes.

Actually the new WD black series HDD's come pretty darn close to beating the Velo's for half the price and nearly 7x the storage.