Finally built my box

[n8bachelor]

With everything that has been going on lately I have been putting off my build for quire a while now. After taking much grief from coworkers and helping others through their builds I ordered my parts the other day. Nothing quite as impressive as Geno's build but hey it is a big upgrade on what I was running. As any builder will tell you this is a work in progress.... I'm still saving up for a large monitor.

Parts:
Case - Cooler Master CM 690
Power - Cooler Master Real Power 550W
Got them together a few months ago.
Mainboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E7400
Memory - G.Skill F2-6400CL5-4GBPQ
Video - MSI Radeon 4830
Hard Disk - Seagate 500gb 7200.11 *** still a little angry over this one.

And of course I'm still rocking the Windows 7000 Beta. so far so good....

That's it for now. I have to run.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Let us know how far you OC that E7400. And may God strike you down if you don't

 

[ONEBADMK8]

Nice stuff. You will Love the Cuda. I have the 1.5tb version and it is FAST!!! It was only $135.00 shipped from Dell.

 

[n8bachelor]

I will admit I have a love / hate relationship with my Seagate. I first powered it up about 4 months ago. As you said it is FAST. Then out of the blue it stopped working completely. It was no longer seen by the BIOS of any machine I put it in.... turns out after some googling there was a known issue with the firmware of the 7200.11 series with certain build dates. Nothing I could do. It was a brick. I RMA'd it back to Seagate and got a refirbished replacement... Lost 4mo worth of torrent downloads and random stuff. Had backups for my personal data but not my torrents... working on renewing that collection now.

I will definately be clocking my e7400.... just not on the stock cooler. That thing is a piece of S**t. I hope to get into the 3.2-3.5ghz range.
As I mentioned this is definately a work in progress.... Not going for anything too extreme, just as the pocketbook will allow for new parts to feed my need.
Still on the list: Monitor (22" at least), keyboard & mouse upgrade, SATA DVD burner, and a better CPU cooler. When it is all said and done I will have a great platform to transition this to my home server and get something better (i7 when the price comes down).

Like I said I'm still loving Windows 7! When they finally release it for retail I will buy it too. Many cool features but a few bugs too (punkbuster does not function correctly). One cool thing to mention is native support for ISO files. Just a click away from burning to DVD (no software required). Also Windows Live can be integrated into the Libraries of Win7, and integrated into IE8 for a pretty cool interface. Still lots to learn though....