The Official Budget-Conscious Dream Machine!

You get a rash when you get in contact with poison ivy. I'm guessing that's what happened.

 

Ah, he meant literally. I'm aware it's nasty stuff, I wasn't sure if it was metaphorical poison ivy or real...

 

Eh, the doctor gave me steroids. I'm ok for now... kinda itchy and swollen. It's on both arms, my left hand, left leg, stomach, and other... areas >.>

Anyhoo, I'm looking at the case now. I think I might remove the vga bar, but that interferes with the look of the case. Should I just keep the exhaust fan there for the sake of airflow?

 

Really? I thought the VGA bar made the case look cooler. You could see inside, but not enough. The perfect balance.

I don't think airflow will be affected much.

 

I also think the vga bar makes the case look cool. I might leave it there and remove the fan. Oh well. We'll see what happens when I start transferring parts. It's gonna be a while though. Poison ivy is a very messy rash to have >.<

 

Yeah, that sucks man. Let us know when you get better.

 

Yes, you have my well wishes Estuansis...

 

Well, I finally have all my parts in the case. The side panel has a kind of fiber-optic effect going on with my cold cathode. Looks very cool

I wish I had a camera to show you guys my wire management. I actually took some time with it now that I'm in a smaller case. I routed most of my extra cables and the hooks ups for my lighting behind the mobo tray. It looks really clean inside. I'm happy with it

The OCZ StealthXstream is working just fine right now. It's almost dead silent with all the other fans in my case turned off, so very near the Corsair 550VX in noise level. Powering these components:

2 x 120mm fans
2 x 80mm fans
2 x 320GB SATA HDDs
Lite-On DVD-RW
8800GTS G92 512MB
E6750 @ 3.4GHz
AC Freezer 7 Pro
GA-P35-DS3L
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music
12" Blue Cold Cathode.

I'm using the fan on the VGA bar as intake to create airflow for my PCI slots. Seems to be doing okay right now. I don't want to get rid of the bar but the fan doesn't seem to serve much purpose for me. I'm taking out the fan and the blue clip thing. I'm thinking some sort of LED display for the empty spot.

 

Did you get a sound activated cathode? I want to do a hardware mod in my Xbox 360 and one of those in there.

 

No. It apparently has the capability to be sound sensitive, but mine isn't. It's just a cheap Logisys CC light. Cost $7 so I'm not worried. It works fine and is very bright.

I also picked up a copy of Rainbow Six Vegas. The console-to-pc port seems to be fine. The controls are smooth and intuitive. My only complaint is the performance. ~40 FPS at 1920 x 1200. Plays very smoothly, so a minor annoyance at best.

 

Think about what graphics card you have, now how old the game is, and how it looks. I am disgusted with how the original Vegas runs, and so should you be.

 

Yeah, it really doesn't run the best. I get about the same performance in Crysis or DiRT. I don't really care much, though. I can run it maxed at native resolution

EDIT:

I also like the single player campaign a lot. Not much on story, but enough action and arcadey-ness to make it enjoyable just the same.
Performance-wise, it's a terrible port. I'm lucky I have a PC that can handle it. Framerates stay silky about 90% of the time. But it's still a great game. I personally think the graphics look awesome. Easily a 4 out of 5 IMO.

 

For modern games I'd give the graphics 7/10 and performance 2/10 - for Crysis I'd give the graphics 8/10 and the performance 3/10. Contrastingly I would give Half Life 2 Episode two and Call of Duty 4 both 10/10 for graphics and 9/10 and 8/10 respectively for performance. More games like those please.

 

I suppose this is the only place to discuss Graphics cards. In other threads people seem to be choosing 8600GT OVER 8800GS!

Anyway, you guys seen the reviews for the 4870?

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1481/sapphire_radeon_hd_4870_in_crossfire/index.html

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=581&type=expert&pid=8

 

disappointing really, 50% more expensive and only 20% faster. Suppose you're paying extra for a cooler that actually works...
It's nice to see the performance of 4870s in crossfire, but the reason why the 4850s are so good is that in CF they're still cheaper than the GTX280, even similarly priced to the 280 - the 4870s are nowhere near as good value. When the performance needed really matters, where two 4850s won't do, two 4870s won't do either, and it's almost the same for a single card. Going with 4870s, especially in crossfire, is more for 3dmark bragging rights than for useful gains, especially in Crysis, which is doubly disappointing but not unexpected.
Still, a pair of either 4800 series cards liquidises a GTX280 in several cases - I know what I'm going to buy!

 

Yeah but think of it this way, it will be quite easy to overclock the 4850 to 4870 speeds especially when versions with better coolers and GDDR5 come about.

You know I think I may build myself a computer again lol. Maybe when I get out of this road trip and the GDDR5 cards come out.

 

It's just such a shame the idle power consumption of the 4850 is so dreadfully poor, it uses as much power at idle as most cards do under full load - I would have thought AMD would have sorted out their energy efficiency by now.

 

Still way batter than the new Nvidia cards. I think if you wait a bit they might maybe release a fix for it? Or is the idle power consumption always going to be the same?

 

well no, the GTX280 uses over ten watts less than the HD4850 at idle. As for a fix, I don't know, because I hate powerplay, so technically I suppose I don't want them to make it any better.

 

i dunno, im sure the extra memory bandwidth of the 4870 will flourish in very high res, esp with 1GB.

and now the memory in the 4870x2 will be shared, a FULL 1GB can be used for that aswell, where as 512 4870s crossfired only use 512 mb memory