Just finished. Love it!

[TonyJ]

Built my son an E8400 based gaming machine last week with some help from folks here. It got me jazzed, so I built one for me too. I'm a pro photographer and do lots of photoshop work, so my needs were a little different. Heres what I ended up with:

Antec Three Hundred Case
Corsair ATX-650 PS
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz
ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler
G.SKILL PI Black 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
SAPPHIRE 100245L Radeon HD 4850 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 (I'll add another in Crossfire if I need to...)
WD 500 GB SATA w/16 MB buffer
WD 1 TB SATA w/32 MB buffer
Samsung 22x DVDRW SATA
Koutech 3-Port FireWire/1394b
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

Everything went together well and it came up fine. I had to make a few changes in the setup for boot sequence and had to turn off the floppy drive.

HELP... The only issue I had was the Koutech Firewire card. I waited until the system was up and stable before installing it and when I did, the system wouldn't shut down anymore. It would try to, then reset and boot back up. The only way to shut down was via the power switch on the power supply. The card uses native windows drivers and there wasn't anything at their site, so I've pulled the card until I figure out what's going on. The on-board 1394 works fine.

Overall, I'm very pleased with how well Vista 64 is doing. My scanner and two color printers (all Canons...) are working fine and no issue with my lan or network laser printer (Brother) So far all my software has installed and works fine. I'm loving the speed of the processor and the 8 GBs of RAM. Wow...

 

[huron]

Congrats. Good to hear you've been successful twice in such a short period.

Enjoy your machine.

 

[roadrunner197069]

Looks good. you might want to get faster hard drives soon. I know that 500 is real slow. I had one and scrapped it.

Run a test on it with hd tune and change the settings to accurate.

You might as well start overclocking up to 3.4-3.6.

 

[TonyJ]

...

Run a test on it with hd tune and change the settings to accurate...

Mine seem to be doing pretty well, compared to the other drives they had tested on their web site. There were some with faster access, but not by much. I'll try again in a week or so after they become a tad more fragged. Thanks, Tony

 

[lunyone]

Just think you could've bought a pre-configured one for $100-300 more for similar parts!! LOL! Now you've been turned into a computer builder and will probably not buy another pre-built computer for the rest of your life!!!

 

[TonyJ]

Just think you could've bought a pre-configured one for $100-300 more for similar parts!! LOL! Now you've been turned into a computer builder and will probably not buy another pre-built computer for the rest of your life!!!

I was just telling a friend that! The nice thing is a true clean install without any crap programs bogging things down.

 

[lunyone]

I was just telling a friend that! The nice thing is a true clean install without any crap programs bogging things down.

That is about 40% of why I started researching and building my own PC's!! The other 60% was due to the proprietary mobo's and BIOS's that the pre-built PC's have. My second (and last) pre-built didn't have an AGP slot for GPU upgrades, so I was stuck with a Voodoo 3 2000 16mb PCI GPU. I would've bought the nVidia or ATI 32 mb versions (forgot what they were called). Boy was I furious to find that out, so from then on I swore to never buy a pre-built PC again (except for laptops, which I'm working on that now).

 

[Huttfuzz]

ATI Rage Fury MAXX 32 MB ??? My ears love the sound of that card when i pronounce it!!!

 

[lunyone]

Yeah I think that was 1 of them, except I don't think it was a MAXX one, just the vanilla 32mb one