The (new) Official PC building thread!

are you planning to go SLI. if not, intel boards, (either the x38 or p35) offer a much better value for more OCablitiy.

you couild go for the p35 P5K Premium Wifi board form ASUS, or the P5E for the x38 chipset.

also wait a bit, as the Q6600 is mroe thana year old tech, and the new yorkfeild quads are coming.

 

tbh they said 3/5 ultras they have revied have been award winners.

 

Speaking of sammyboy!! I found the perfect case for him. lol. I didn't check he UK sites but I'm sure you guys can help him find it!! LINK to case for sammyboy

Been slow today so I thought I'd spice it up.

Waiting on some parts to play with. HDD enclosure, new gfx card, and a couple of other nick-nacks!!

....gm

 

Have decided to get the arctic freezer 7 to go with my build simply because ebay emailed me today saying "you havent shopped with us for a while" (its been less than a month since I bought Halo 3 from there lol) "so have a tenner to spend on anything".

The 7 pro was £18 quid delivered - so cost me only 8 quid after the ebay coupon

edit - Nice case apart from the door

 

Looks like i may have a good business idea.

How does the best quality sata cables made from the best quality raw materials that utilise 100% customer satisfaction and are bendy, retractable and are available in many different colours/varieties and are so good every manufacture of motherboards(or whatever) will stock them with their product?

 

@greensman

if sam dont like that one there is this one here to. i think this one will be alot quieter than the other one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811156187

was over at wally world looking around. they got a 320gb sata 16mb cache for $98 not usre if thats a deal or not. but i can get 10% off

 

Much better no door lol

These drives would probably be better for the money:-
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145215
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073

I got the second one for Christmas - cant fault it really - runs in my crap rig at only 32C and was filled within a month forcing me to get another external drive lol.

However if you only want 320g try this one:-
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136074

 

Shaffaaf: THey have indeed, however, suspicions in the past showed that some Ultra units are the same as Rosewills. With a company with such ludicrously varying build quality, would you trust them>?
Greensman: Gross man, just gross.
Rob: <frowns> honestly guys, what did I do to deserve this?

Pepp: A lot of people here frown on Deskstars, don't know why. I've had great success with the WD5000AAKS (in both 00TM and 65TM variants) so I can heartily recommend them.

 

sammorris,

Nice 400 Watt PS! LOL!! Cheap, but Expensive! ROFL!! Wonder how many months TigerDirect will take to remove the "SLI Ready" in their ads for them? Then again, they'll just blame Ultra, who will then blame Wintech! LOL!!

I have a question for you Sam. When your P5N-E was going bad, what sort of error messages were you getting when it would BSOD? Gina's is getting BSODs with alarming regularity. She says it can sit for days running with no problems, and she'll sit down and go to open a program, and as soon as she clicks the mouse, Instant Blue Screen. No temperature or voltage issues. It will run Orthos for hours with seemingly no problem. No errors with Memtest, and it never fails in the middle of her doing work. Most of her work is Court Testimony Transcriptions, so there's no real load on anything. All the components are good quality. The Error message she gets a lot is IRQ not equal to or less than something. I can't remember exactly what she said, but she looked up the two error messages she gets and they seem to be memory related. She put her old 1GB memory back in it, which she never had any problems with and it does the same thing. Any input you might have, would be appreciated.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Thats why I only linked to one as it was a similar price and the one at Wallys wasnt named. The two WD drives are fantastic quality though and well worth the money. Probably best bang for buck at the moment.

 

I'll be honest with you Russ, it never Bluescreened in its stage of going bad. What it would do is not post for several occasions, having to press the reset button up to half a dozen times to get it to boot. This pretty much exclusively happened on reboots, it was usually fine when it cold booted.
However, what made me realise it was actually on the way out was the Serial inputs would go funny. The USB sound card would work fine but you'd go to type something and often it would only write one character per second for up to 10 seconds and then suddenly the rest of what you wrote would be remembered - as if keyboard input would get stuck in the buffer - needless to say this made gaming impossible. It happened with increasing regularity, as did the reboot problem until I just had enough and got the Gigabyte!
Never ran the P5N-E with four sticks of RAM though, glad I didn't!

 

sam you didn't do anything!!! I was having some fun but didn't expect you to take it the wrong way. SMILE!! And call us, "you silly Americans or something". HAVE SOME FUN me boy!!!!! hehehe.

Tis true.... I have an OLD IBM Deskstar 40GB and she's still going strong...

Rob the WD for $79.99 is a deal. It's all personal preference but I figure cost per GB and go from there. As you know WD and SEagate are preferred by most.

....gm

 

sammorris,

Thanks for the quick reply. I appreciate that! Hers won't run with 4 sticks of memory in it, it won't even post! Both sets of memory are Corsair XMS2, cas4. I even checked with Corsair before she bought the new memory and they indicated that both the 512 sticks and the 1BG ones were compatible. She's tried changing the memory slots, but it does the same thing. Sounds an awful lot like problems between the Memory controller and the CPU, which was the problem with the last MB. That "Turkey" deserves the PPD/POS Award! LOL!!

I checked with Asus this morning, and they looked up the record on it and won't honor the Warranty! They've washed their hands of it! Claiming that 3 motherboards either bad or going bad, clearly indicates that something was done wrong during the build or some other component in the system is causing the problem! They claim that the two they sent were thoroughly tested both before they were sent to me! Funny, the first replacement lasted a couple of hours and died completely! So much for the value of their Warranty, especially since they acknowledged that there was a problem with the last one I sent back. I can't do much about the Warranty because it was bought third party from a reseller on E-Bay (not by me!)!

Time for a new MB methinks!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Greensman: The smile was so you knew I was joking. Guess I need to be less subtle next time! My old 15.5GB IBM Deskstar still works too, but I'm not sure that's really relevant in today's context!

Russ: Get this, the DFI board my mate has on the earlier revision BIOS will only boot at DDR333 rather than 400 with all four slots full, and if you don't fill all four slots, you can't use slot 1!
I'm guessing memory controllers are harder to program than I first thought, maybe Asus just got theirs wrong!
As for the motherboard, that's disgusting, time to sue perhaps?
Pull some poop and say "i've had a gigabyte motherboard in there running fine for quite a while now"... Wonder if that'll make them change their tone!

 

sammorris,

They are refusing on the grounds that She isn't the original purchaser! This was my parting shot, I said "It's funny I never had this problem with either of my Gigabyte motherboards"! They hung up on me! LOL!!

As the Bear pointed out, they probably won't spend the time and effort on a lower priced SLI motherboard! I still recommend the higher end or known good Asus motherboards, but I will discourage anyone from buying a P5N-E!

I wonder when I'm going to get my AD "Addict" Status? LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Sammyboy, it was meeee! lol

I liked MY ultra power supply. It was rock solid and had won a few recommendations from trusted sources. I still think it's an excellent PSU.

You can get a Ultra GRID case with a 700W Modular PSU for a 100 bucks. That's an excellent deal for something that works surprisingly well. I wont lie, the case wasn't exactly too attractive to me, but I can see how other people may like it. It was also prettu good as far as air flow went.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...33183 K&SRCCODE=GOOGLEBASE&CMP=OTC-GOOGLEBASE

EDIT: Russ I got my AD status when I was at around 2800 posts. It's because safety valve posts don't count and they don't update your status instantaneously.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMqd_O3Vf4U

Gears On System ^

 

Isn't it also at the moderators' discretion now?

Anyway, nonetheless I'm more wary of Ultra now than before...

@Greg: I think Gears of War needs to be retired as a benchmark, I can max it at 2560x1600.

 

Russ Status dont matter as much as the quality of your posts and belive me they STINK

TBh, i hae herd stories of LOADS of 680i chipset mobos hating on the 4 sticks of RAM.

herd gorror stories abotu EVGA and XFX. esp the RMA of XFX for the UK. (or lack there off)

and sam. IMO i would never buy there products, the HX series of corsair, or tagan, or P&CPC. NEVER anyother company

 

sammorris,

I have no idea. All I can say is I've well earned it! LOL!!

As far as the PS goes, The manufacturer can change along with the quality at any given time. That's what's wrong with the majority of manufacturers today. They don't build the components, someone else does, supposedly to Spec! LOL!! As far as False advertising, look at ProVantage! "The Industry's Lowest Prices"! I believe that's the definitive meaning of BS! ROFLMAO!!

Best Regards,
Russ