Just finished building my first computer!

[Unit 5302]

Originally Posted by bmxmon

And I gotta say im pretty happy. Its a pretty sweet rig, intel core 2 duo E4300 1.8ghz processor, though I will be overclocking it tomorrow to about 3.0-3.2 hopefully. MSI P35 platnium board, 2gb of ram, 160 gb HD, PNY 7900GS GeForce graphics card, and a honkin Cooler Master Gemini II cpu cooler (looks really sweet btw, like it has a header coming out of it, haha). All that shoved into a cheap, plain looking case, since all of the expensive ones are quite ugly IMHO, plus I cant stand doors on computer cases. That, plus some of the other less cool stuff I didnt mention cost me about $800, all from newegg. (though I have about $130 in Mail in Rebates...) I also got a tv turner card, hopefully i'll be recording the cool car shows and then post them on the net The reason for the new computer build was that my laptop died on me, so it was a good reason to learn how to build a desktop. Still gotta go update and DL all my old programs, right now im on an old version of IE and its kinda driving me nuts....

(Ignore the mess, lol)

You definately can't go wrong with the Core2 Duo setup right now. Especially after Intel recently dropped prices on them. My next machine will probably get the E6600 Conroe processor. In a benchmark test at work, an LGA775 Pentium 4 2.8GHz ran a case in 38min while the 2.4GHz Core2 Duo managed the same case in 19min. The application wasn't even multi-threaded so the performance gap between the two processors is even more significant.

My current desktop has become quite unstable, but I'm not sure what's causing the issues. I suspect the 9800 Pro in there is part of the issue, but it doesn't matter to me anymore. Upgrading the system doesn't make any sense. I'll just build a new one. I'm working on my Pentium M 2.13GHz laptop with an x700 graphics card and a 7200rpm HDD for now. With a 17" widescreen and a 10 key built in, it's a pretty good little desktop replacement.