Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[Amit]

Where's the incentive for him? lol

[Zeph]

550 is evga too if you can get stuff off it as well.

[Cortexian]

I'll just post my affiliate code here, if anyone gets an EVGA product in the future, I'd love for you guys to use my code!

5U6XPP77ZN

Click the above to register an EVGA product with my affiliation code. You need to upload a copy of the invoice within 30 days to your account for affiliations to go through successfully I think. You'll need to do this for a Step-Up program or RMA anyway, so you might as well do it while you have everything on hand!

[Zeph]

Got the thing put together this evening. Took five hours because cable management was a bitch. Still not sure what the fuck Thermaltake is doing with their fan wiring. The single bit of documentation on it is stupidly vague and doesn't even describe what's going on. Win7 installed onto the Raptor in like ten minutes. Was pretty crazy. Kinda worried about how well the HSF is covering the processor with paste. Was completely off the mark on the first seating and had to give it another go after repasting. There was very little sliding to secure the bracket, but I'm gonna have to keep an eye on temps tomorrow when I start loading drivers, software, and stress it a bit. Got plenty of pictures I'll put in the other thread as well.

[Cortexian]

I always go with the "grain-of-rice" style pasting. Seems to always work pretty well. Even if you need to twist the cooler around a bit you should be fine.

Also, grats on your nice rig man. I'm trying to figure out what I want to replace my 500GB mediocre Seagate drives with. And SSD under 200GB or a couple 300GB Raptors in RAID-0.

[Zeph]

I would have a pair of 300gb raptors right now, but when the guy packaging one of them put on the bumpers for shipping, he mashed down on the SATA power header causing it to break. Got one of them running right now and it's loud as fuck. Sounds like my hard drive from 1995 at some times. Gonna be a bit interesting when the other gets back from RMA and I pair it into RAID-0. This is definitely incentive for a SSD though. I'll probably go for a 100ish GB SSD for the OS and commonly used productivity and dump everything else on platters. Will have to wait till mid January though .

The only two fans working in the case right now are the CPU and rear exhaust. Can't quite figure out why the other three aren't being detected. It's probably some shitty wire job from TT >_<. Even so, my CPU is idling between 17c and 30c depending on what's going on in the background right now.

Drivers and such are pretty much installed. Can't do much graphical stuff with the 550, but I can push the CPU a little to see how it does.

edit: Running a super huge render on max. All 8 threads are running full 100% and my CPU temp has seemingly stabilzed at 75-76c and vcores at 60c. I've left it at stock, but it's current clock is at 4.4GHz. This is the boosting the chip does, right? From the couple of bits I've read, these temps are inline with other air cooling solutions. Guess the HSF turned out okay. Looking forward to seeing how it cures.

[Cortexian]

Those temps look normal and the 4.4GHz is the Turbo-Boost that Intel includes.

[Narida]

Hi...
I need a new PC and i was considering building my own...
Otherwise its pretty much this
Basically it's:
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 6 x 2.8 GHz (automatic overclocking to 3.3 GHz)
Mainboard: ASUS M4A79T
Graphics: 1024 MB ATI Radeon HD 6870 GDDR5 (overclocked)
8 GB RAM
1 TB HDD

for 580€/$770

I was wondering if I can get an equivalent rig cheaper / something more powerful for the same amount if I build it myself. Also it seems kinda stupid to get something without usb 3.0 (although I might be mistaken)

Anyone who knows more about this stuff than I do have any suggestions? ;-)

Thanks in advance

[Cortexian]

There aren't many devices out there that use USB 3.0 right now, so no big loss on that front yet. They will be starting to flourish though, all new devices should be designed for USB 3.0 so keep that in mind.

The price looks decent, but even with the same components you could probably build it yourself a little cheaper.

[TeeKup]

You could probably safely shave off AT LEAST $150 (maybe 200) off that. But it is a decent price.