Ed Brill is not the only one who’s been out buying new toys this week. I’ve been doing a little online shopping of my own and I purchased a lovely new home computer to add to my ever growing collection.
Rather then buy a complete PC from any of the major manufacturers I decided to buy all the components and build it myself. A number of reasons for this, the main one being that all the main retailers here in Ireland insist that you purchase a monitor as part of the overall kit and seeing as I already have a nice 21inch monitor sitting on my desk I don’t really need another. Also, by buying components I can make sure I get exactly what I want and also have the fun of putting it all together.
So what did I want? Well I purchased my first AMD based PC with a Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, an AMD Athlon XP3200+ processor, 2Gb Ram and a Nvidia GeForce FX5950 Ultra 256Mb Graphics card. All of this ( along with the case and other components etc ) should assemble into a pretty fast machine that will won’t be out of date till at least next week.
All this just so I can enjoy HalfLife 2 when it’s eventually released.
Dec's Dom Blog 
Nice PC spec Declan.
Personally, I would invest in a couple of extra fans for the inside of the case (if you haven’t done so already). My experience with the Athlon XP+ range of CPUs (2400+ upwards) is that they tend to kick out a hell of a lot more heat than the sub-2000+ range of AMD CPUs. Couple this with the heat from your GeForce card, and you start to get into temp ranges that are just plain bad for your mobo, hard disk and RAM.
I’m running a Athlon XP 2700+ with 4 fans inside the case. 1 on top of the HUGE copper CPU heatsink/cooler, 1 on the side of the case and 2 at the rear. Admittedly, it’s a wee bit noisy, but it does keep things nice and chilly (!) when playing Call of Duty and Wolfenstein ET!
Have fun putting your new toy together.
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The case I bought ( Chieftec Matrix Blue ) supports up to 5 fans. It comes with one preinstalled and I bought another 4. I also bought a fan for the CPU. Last thing I want is for the whole thing to melt some night in the middle of a battle
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Hey, I have Linux boxes that run on half your video ram. As main memory, of course. Ah, and they need less reboots …
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Volker Weber,
And how does Call of Duty runs in that linux machines? smoothly ?
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Declan im currently building my own pc at the moment aswell
Ive just purchased a asus a7n8x-vm/400 motherboard. On receiving the motherboard I notice there is only 1 cpu fan socket and 1 chasis socket does this mean i
can only run 1 case fan. If not could you please tell me how i can run more fans ive tryed looking for a cable to do this and been unsuccessful. Hope you could help me out cheers Adam
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