ATV Florida Forum

Anybody on here build your own machines?  I just finished building a nice gaming rig for my boy (maybe me too). 

I d what did you build ;) specs plz ;)

I went fairly high end because I wanted strong 3D capability and to eventually integrate into my home entertainment system.  My project is built on an ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard.  This board offers USB 3.0 and has two 6.0GB/s SATA ports and seven 3.0 GB/s additional SATA ports.  For a processor, I was tempted to go with the new i7 980 but couldn't stomach the price so for the time being, I'm using an i7 950.  Went with 12 GB of Corsair 1600 DDR3 memory, which turned out to be too hot for the 950 so I had to turn the voltage down to 1.60 to keep from cooking the CPU (temps were over 100 C when I first fired it up)   :o .  I boot from an Intel 80 GB SSD and use a Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive for storage.  My graphics card is an EVGA GeForce GTX480.  All of this is powered by a Corsair 1200 W power supply because I plan to add a second 480 at some point.  I also installed an HP Lightscribe Blue Ray burner and a multi-format card reader/control console.  For a video display, I purchased an ASUS VG236H monitor bundled with two pair of NVIDIA 3D glasses.  I think I future-proofed myself pretty well for the time being with this set-up.   ;)

I still build PCs, but not for hardcore gaming. I built one HTPC for Media Center to run as a DVR and grab off-the-air HD broadcasts. It works great so I dropped cable all together. Then I built a couple to play MAME (emulator of old arcade games from the 80's) and not a lot of horse power is needed. I even have Windows 2000 on one of them.

I remember MAME.  I had a MAME emulator and a bunch of old games but lost it all with a hard drive crash (before backing up a hard drive was as easy as sticking in a DVD-R or plugging in an external drive).  That was a long time ago!  As far as horsepower goes, I'll probably never test the limits of this machine but it seems everytime I build a rig, three years later the state of the art leaves it slogging through the mud.  Trying to future-proof myself for at least a few extra years. 

Whats the clock speed on the i7 950? I run a an old Q6600 quad core at 2.4 GH.  The only thing that would improve your performance (marginally) would be to run an SLi configuraton. but its not necessary with your card.


nice set up BTW