I gots new gear

**Gordon Moore** · 02 February 2003, 13:59 Sunday

One more thing...Man that heatsink is heavy and HUGE!!!!!

now I just need to find an hours to throw it all together

"A RONSTER!"

**Eduardo** · 02 February 2003, 22:47 Sunday

Gordon - sounds like a fun project. I've been wanting to build a new pc. Keep us updated and post pics.

Eduardo

http://home.nc.rr.com/ejimenez

**Lex** · 02 February 2003, 23:08 Sunday

Nice Gordon!

Lex

**JonMarsh** · 03 February 2003, 12:14 Monday

Sounds like fun, Gordon. I sympathize with the hours thing- I've got a new nforce based board and re-cycled AMD CPU and new video card to build into a from the chasis up upgrade of my main HTPC- haven't had time to touch it since XMAS. Maybe later this week.... the parts are pretty light, shouldn't present any problem.

It's pretty awesome how meaty the latest fan/heatsink combos are. The last couple I picked up also used a copper heatspreader. That's probably pretty standard these days on Athlons.

With my new build desktop (built from my old bedroom HTPC chasis), with an ASUS A7V8X MB, it would accept and work wtih PC2700, but only one DIMM can be used at that memory speed. It does provide a few ticks up in performance on some benchmarks, but the Athlon's don't seem to be nearly as dependent on external memory bandwidth as P4 except on a few apps like video MPEG encoding. Good question as to whether one would be better off using more DIMMS, or the fast memory. But a single 512MB PC2700 DIMM wasn't that bad, pricewise.

Let us know how you like your system after you've got it together- what are you planning for sound and video?

Best regards,

Jon

Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

**Gordon Moore** · 03 February 2003, 12:50 Monday

For sound and video I'm recycling my old parts.

Asus GeForce2 GTS Deluxe VIVO and Hercules Fortissimo III 7.1

When cash becomes available (later, like, after I pay the tax-man) I would probably upgrade the vid card but my game play is really limited these days except for the Need for Speed series (I'm a sucker for a good race game and the odd Unreal shoot-em up). The VIVO features of the card come in handy since I don't have a digital camcorder. I just pump my video into there and make the home stuff available for family and friends that way.

Eventually I'll get around to digitizing my home movies to VCD or DVD but the DVD-R/RW needs to come down a little more before I jump in. And by that time I'll have a digital camcorder so the 2 will work out well. I just wish the road map to that point wasn't so long

Ahhhh, such is life

**JonMarsh** · 03 February 2003, 23:29 Monday

The video card is such a tradeoff.

I don't have the time for much gaming, but the few I like are kind of graphics intensive (stuff like NeverWinter Nights, Jedi Knight, Unreal II)

Then there's the DVD issue. Unfortunately, nVidia doesn't make an "optimum" card for both. I got one GF4 Ti4200 (runs most games well at 1280X1024), which really seemed to be the sweet spot for bang for the buck for gaming; but the MX440 is the best platform for DVD, as it has much more hardware support for DVD.

Have you used the Fortissimo before, or is this a new purchase? I have an Game theater in my audio test/back up HTPC, which works OK, but so far I've been most impressed with the nForce solutions- good performance and sound, and very low CPU utilization on multiple voice games. Plus DD encoding of all audio is available.

Let us know how it turns out!

-Jon

Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

**Gordon Moore** · 03 February 2003, 23:56 Monday

Yup the Fortissimo comes from my old machine. Not bad for bang for the buck. Nforce was an interesting option with DD on the fly a-la-xbox but price-wise was out of my budget because I would have had to compromise other things. I just got this audio card and it seems to fit the bill so I'm not too ready to sell it. My pc's not used as a hometheater hub (one day...one day... I'll do it right Mu-waahahahaha :twisted: and it WILL be front projection all the way)

So the audio card wasn't mission critical otherwise I'd be looking more towards the REVO 7.1

The Fortissimo is bascially Gametheater lite. Love their driver set and I just wanted to break away from Creative, however, I'll give credit where credit is due... Audigy2 is the best offering from Creative to date IMHO.

I gots new gear

I gots new gear

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