My System & it's evolution

The system:

Lian Li PC-V1000 Silver Aluminum Case, modified with 120mm vent on the case side cover, foam tape inside the cover to seal the fan.

Lian Li Plus II 120mm Fan and Bracket BS-02 mounted inside the 120mm vent with a Thermaltake A2374 12cm Fan Filter.

Lian Li Aluminum Blower Set BS-01 mounted horizontally in the top front of the case for exhaust

Lian Li 5.25 inch Black Mesh cover plate on the top drive bay for the BS-01 discharge.

(The above fans & mod give me Zone 1, the HD area, with an intake fan that pushes air over the drives and mostly out the bottom of the case, Zone 2, where the PSU sits, pulling air in from the bottom and exhausting it out the back of the case, and Zone 3, which now pulls air in through the side of the case and exhausts it out of the top front and bottom rear of the case.)

Corsair TX750W 750W PSU

Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe Green nVIDIA Socket Am2 ATX Motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 6000+ 3.0 GHz Processor

Thermaltake XP90 heatsink with 90mm panaflow fan

4G OCZ OCZ2G8002GK DDR2-800 PC2-6400 Gold Gamer eXtreme XTC Edition Dual Channel Memory

EVGA 896-P3-1257-AR GeForce GTX260 Core 216 Superclocked 896MB video card

Mitsumi Floppy 8in1 Card Reader Black, Model FA404M

Four 500G hard drives: WD5000AACS-00ZUB0, ST3500630AS, ST3500630AS, ST3500641A

(2) Sony DRU-830A DVD RW

ViewSonic VX2255wmb 22" LCD Flat Panel Monitor /Web Cam

Logitech G15 keyboard

Logitech MX518 mouse

Nostromo N52te controller

The evolution

I have owned a number of computers. Some were new (Tandy, Gateway, Micron), some were used, some were built from scratch. At this point, they are all dead & gone.

My office is small and, in summer, quite hot, not a good operating environment. I have experienced about every computer failure possible - and that DOESN"T include the toll from spilled coffee!

So, a couple of years ago, I decided it would be cheaper to build a new machine that was a little higher quality.

First, the case. All those nice little holes in the Lian-Li case make for good ventilation, and the upside-down design of the V1000 is supposed to help in cooling flow. As far as I can tell, it does.

Mods: Pulled the MB fan from the system chip & installed a heatsink, then mounted a fan bracket & placed a fan over the videocards blowing down onto the heatsink. This pulls air into the case through the new side vent and cools the GPUs and the chip. Next I mounted a Lian-Li BS-01 fan in the top of the case to exhaust hot air out the front of the case with a black mesh drive cover in front of it..

The CPU. The first one was an AMD x64 3500+ Winchester, but since dual-core prices dropped so much after the Socket 939 MBs were phased out, I replaced it with the AMD ATHLON 64X2 Dual Core 3800+. Not a lot of difference when single tasking, but the dual-core lets me do stuff like defrag my hd while I type this w/o any slow-down effects. I think it was a worthwhile investment, and I have my old CPU as a backup if this one fails. Now I run the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+.

The HS & fan were a gift from my friend Gus Fraiha, since the old stock unit from the old cpu was not good enough. This one keeps the cpu comfy no matter how hot the office has been.

The four gigabytes of ram let me handle the large graphics files I need to on occasion, and are guaranteed against any failure, even if overclocked.

The video cards. Originally, I used a single 6800GT, big enough and fast enough to run the current software. Since a few generations of vidcards have passed since then, I was able to pick up a matching card at a bargain price. This gives the ability to run the latest software/games with the increased speed. Now I have replaced them with a EVGA 896-P3-1257-AR GeForce GTX260 Core 216 Superclocked 896MB, which is MUCH faster and runs cooler.

The viewsonic LCD monitor replaced my old Dell 21" CRT unit, which started delivering an uncorrectable trapezoidal picture. The power & space savings are both nice!

Two DVD recorders? Yes, once again, going with belt & suspenders. They probably won't both die at the same time.

The 850 watt Power supply is the third in this box. The first one died after a year, luckily without taking anything else with it. (The last PSU I lost took the mb & cpu with it.) The second one is now in an older computer at home whose PSU died. I picked this one for size, price & features. Hopefully it will be fairly bullet-proof. This one is set up for SLI video cards, which the last one wasn't, which is why I did the switch instead of just getting a PSU for the unit at home.

Logitech G15 keyboard. This KB intriques me in terms of the things that are being done to utilize the LCD. There are a lot of mods and applets out there. Here are the ones I use. G15-TeamSpeak - SirReal's Panel - Everest - Miranda-g15

I used a Microsoft trackball for many years, and wore out a lot of them. I learned to hate mice back in the day before optical/laser mice became available, but when the last trackball died and I found that a USED one went for well over a hundred dollars, i bit the bullet and went for a mouse. I had a Razer Copperhead for a few months, but it died, so I got this MX518 & love it.

The Nostromo compensates for my extremely-below-average uncoordinated typing skills and lets me play games with at least a modicum of control.

I haven't said much about the hard drives - they tend to come and go. I run four, and have any important stuff replicated on all four drives. I have in the past lost waaay too many records when a HD failed.

I am satisfied with the machine, It is not state of the art, but it is fast enough, and stable and dependable besides.

How it stacks up, then & now:
PC Wizard benchmarks:
Processor Global Performance : Then: 3269.813, Now: 110506.10
Cache Global Performance : Then: 13068, Now: 70600
Memory Global Performance : Then: 4364, Now: 6065
Video Global Performance : Then: 2670, Now: 293920
Hard Disk Global Performance : 59 Then: . Now: 106
PCWizard Rating : Then: 2343.08 : Now 18747
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Misc. information:
Hardware Monitoring : ITE IT8716F + Analog Devices ADT7475 +
Voltage CPU : 1.20 V
+5V Voltage : 4.61 V
+12V Voltage : 12.07 V
VTT : 3.18 V
VBAT : 2.96 V
Chassis Fan : 5973 rpm
Processor Temperature : 60 °C
Mainboard Temperature : 51 °C
Power/Aux Temperature : 59 °C
ACPI Thermal Zone : 40 °C
:
Processor : Thermal Diode
AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Core 1) : 51 °C
AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Core 2) : 55 °C
:
GPU Diode : 56 °C
GPU Fan : 100.00%
:
Hard Disk Monitoring : S.M.A.R.T
Hard Disk WDC WD5000AACS-00ZUB0 : 41 °C
Hard Disk ST3500630AS : 48 °C
Hard Disk ST3500630AS : 47 °C
Hard Disk ST3500641AS : 43 °C