Some Call Me Krez

Just a small post about the custom gaming machine I’m building, which I’m modding as much as I can too increase air-flow while keeping noise and temperatures down. First off I decided to get a very powerful chip, one that will last me awhile and lead me into the “next-gen” of computing so I don’t have to buy anything new for quite some time. The chip of choice of course was an AMD over the Intel, both for price and other reasons that some, on both sides of the chip-wars, could debate over for hours (not me, AMD is hands down the winner, both on price and quality.) Anyhow I decided to go with the AMD 64 X2 3800+ The X2 represents what they call dual-core and a dual-core chip has two separate CPUs all on the single chip. Now without going into some major deep geekness, this dual feature provides some serious advantages over a single core setup, especially as more software is written to utilize dual core systems…Blah Blah Blah! ;oP

I went ahead and slapped in 2Gigs (2 x 1Gig sticks) of dual channel memory running on a FSBus of 2000Mhz (that’s right no more 800Mhz FSB) Next I moved on over to the Video card, while still AGP 8x, stock, is only a few FPS (5 to 10 frames per second) slower than the new NVida 7800-7900 PCIE (PCI-Express) video cards. Plus those cards cost several hundred dollars more than the one I have, which is the ATI-X850. As you can see from the pictures of the video card I removed the “stock” cooler and installed a solid copper cooler over the video CPU, and put heat sinks on each of the memory chips (something absent on stock cards.) Why do this? Because I plan to OC (Over-clock) the card and when you do this you must control the heat to keep things stable. This over-clocking should allow me to equal those Nvidia cards if not pass them in FPS for 1/3 of the price. ;o)

This cooling to stability balance is why I also added the custom heat sink (with those copper looking pipes) to the motherboard to cover the actual computer CPU. This will allow me to OC the computer itself if need be. The monster of a CPU cooler you see in the picture is capable of keeping the CPU very cool, almost as well as some water-cooled systems can (this is really due to the heat-pipe technology on the heat-sink.)

When you add all of the modifications up, and several I didn’t mention (small ones here and there, such as fan filters, etc,) you end up with a system that will surpass any gaming needs of those out today, and those in the distant future. Of course I don’t plan to use this system for just gaming, I also plan to use it for all my video/audio editing and encoding I like to do. Maybe dabble once again into computer aided art design and animation, which of course takes a vary beefy computer that can do numerous calculations every second.

Doing this all myself and have a few parts already, I was able to build this bad mofo for around $880.00. No way in hell you will find any gaming system out there that could match it for that price…Once I benchmark things I bet it will give some of those $3500-$4000 systems (most of the stuff they throw in is junk except for a few items – video card/CPU) a run for their FPS monies!
By the way if any of you out that have some questions about doing this yourself and would like some advice I would be more than happy to give it. I’ve been building and working on machines for more than fourteen years now, so ask away. =o)

…end of nerd rant. =oP


The X2 chip with two cores -- Mmmm Good!


Now that's a BIG heatsink - Got'a cool that chip down!


The Bad-Mofo with the memory


The Video card with the custom copper cooler I installed, gon'a OC this baby!


Those heatsinks I added to the memory chips on the VGA.


The all aluminum case with 550watt power supply. Notice the nice turbine fan intake - that's gon'a move some air!

Posted by Krez on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 at 3/21/2006 10:02:00 PM | Permalink