PC Building!

23"s? dang. I have 3 17"s, two for my PC and one oooold CRT. Just thinking of the screen resolution makes me jealous lol.

naaaa, I have a dell here that I hardly use now. I can't live without my desktop. lol Alienware was ubercool at some point. Now its just custom rigs for gaming crammed with as many GPU's and RAM as you can fit in the case.

I used to love building computers, but you're right the cost savings aren't that good anymore. The last thing I built was a home theatre PC, but looking back I should have just used a laptop with a HDMI connection as it would have been cheaper and quieter.

I was caught out a few times with faulty components from the suppliers. Sometimes it was difficult to find out what was at fault if you didn't have the same parts to swap out to diagnose faults.

Some like gardening, some like to paint I build PC's. Its relaxing tbh. Never really had problems like that when troubleshooting I have a lab with enough spares to build a few (low end) rigs lol. I am in the process of building two for my girls. I'm going to have to splash out on the graphics cards though, they want to play high end games like Sacred and Dungeon siege 3.

Just about the most fun I have ever had, was taking two IBM Think Pads, and making one Was looked at weirdly, but from both, I could source the parts to build one, with a RAM upgrade included. When it worked I was the only one smiling.... wonder why lol.

guess it's ok when you've got the bits to swap about. It's interesting when you hit the on button for the first time on your latest creation to see if it all starts up! I got into building them when I fitted a math co-processor on my 286.

Especially when people think you'll never be able to do it. My lab desk was a mass of parts and "skeletons", and from that one think pad was born. Tis rewarding to know that you can bring a piece of technology to life and tis useful somehow. I still can't find any P3 processors though, and I guess by this time I never will. Plus, my windows 3.1 floppies have mysteriously disappeared lol.

I guess you could buy a PC, and have it as close to the specs you want it at, but building a pc to the exact specs you want, to me is better.

I used to like getting reviews of all the components, particularly the motherboard. Nowadays I just use a built laptop, just a shame it came with a load of pre-installed rubbish on it.

They must have set a brief to see how much junk they could install on one hard disk!

lol I love motherboard shopping tbh, which is why I asked about gigabyte boards. I have an ASRock Micro ATX at the moment. Only thing is that it usually leads to a CPU upgrade . My latest PC was finally upgraded to DDR 3 RAM, but, unfortunately with the price the setup cost, I had to make do with a single core CPU. I would love to go quad, but I would need to sort out the cooling system on my desktop methinks. I have about 4 strong fans running at the moment (with their luminous blue LED's lol), but you need something decent to run a quad core, and I will never really consider water cooling. My rig basically only needs 3 more things now. A dual core chip, 2 or more Gigs RAM, and a 2 Gig Graphics Card. I can get the card at about a thousand bucks, the CPU for around the same, and RAM for about 1/4 of that price (Hynix I think it is). Then I will be happy.

lol reviews are awesome, but makes for a lot of wishful thinking sometimes

I had a bit of trouble getting parts for the computer that lives under the TV as the backing plates are half height and not all cards come with them so you have to check first.

How much noise does your computer make with all those fans? Do you use software that can use all those cores? I remember in the early days of NT4 & 2000, there wasn't much stuff apart from SQL server that could truly make good use of additional CPUs.

With a set up like that it sounds that you'll be able to crack AES encryption! :-)

They're coolermasters. Whisper quiet to be honest. If I didn't see them spinning in their blue lights, I'd think they weren't working. I'm thinking of getting someone to make me a side cover out of perspex.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit, and a lot of my other software works best with dual cores etc. But I haven't decided on how many cores I want yet, so tis still single core for now. Still, in 64 bit, the PC is astonishingly fast.

NT.... Pretty much my mortal enemy, that OS lol. Everytime I find a PC using it, it gets a different windows OS. Usually XP. It's not one of my favorite OS's lol. 2000 was ok, but I literally jumped from 5 to 98 and to XP Pro, so Unless I was fixing someone else's rig, I hardly touched those OS's.

I know Microsoft have made some mistakes over the years, but backwards compatibility isn't one of them. WOW64 (windows on windows) allows the 64bit machine to run 32bit apps. In the server world we found 64bit really useful as it could natively address memory > 4GB without using stuff like AWE (address windowing extensions).

NT wasn't bad apart from DirectX and USB support, miles better than 95, 98 or ME. I think XP was one of the best to come out of Redmond (and DOS 3.3). Not tried Windows 8 yet as quite happy with Win 7 on the laptop.