Well, as you've seen from my previous post my motherboard is going to Asus for repair/replacement. If I have to rip the whole damn thing apart just to get at the MB I might as well look into buying new toys anyhow.

This is my current puter:
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
Amd X2 64 Dual Core 2.2 GHz
2 Gigs XMS3500 438 MHz Ram
8800GTS 640 meg card.
Raptor 140 gig HDD
Barracuda 500g HDD
PC power and cooling 510 SLI Psu.
Soundblaster X-fi soundcard


I was thinking I could use my current nice Antec case, Video card, hard drives, DVD rom and soundcard and just pick up a newer power supply, MB, Ram and CPU?

Was thinking the same PSU neesha had asked about (damn shame the rebate is gone from it) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341011

But beyond the PSU I'm UTTERLY clueless about what is a good gaming MB/CPU and ram trio these days. I figure I could get those 4 items for 5 or 600 bucks and have a massively upgraded computer. I have a lot of stutter and lag in wow these days.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Well, you could get a nice i7 920 fro around $288, cheaper if you watch the sales closely.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115202

An X58 chipset Motherboard for around $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128375

And 6gb DDR-3 Tri Channel for $89
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148246

And that PUS still has a $20 rebate on it making it $89

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

That cpu would be such a gigantic upgrade =) That Mb you linked seems to have issues tho. Prolly want to seek something different.

Will Xp even recognize 6g of ram? Thought it was a cut off of 2 or 4 or something like that?

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Install vista 64 bit.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Or even better Windows 7 beta 64bit.

Windows 7 + X58 is a bad combo for the moment. Wait for the RC, it's due soon.

Really all the x58 MoBo's have had some issues and most are being ironed out with new bios updates.

You could also go last gen for a lot less...

C2Q Q8200 2.33ghz $169 Free shipping
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115055

Asus P5Q Mobo $124.99 ($15 rebate)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131299

G.Skill 2x2048mb 4GB kit $54.99 Free Shipping
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231166

Put good cooling on it and OC the 8200 to 3ghz and you are set for another couple of years.

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
_____
VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

Actually what you listed doesn't seem terrible, Khan other than I'm still iffy on vista after seeing how disgustingly slow my mom's vista laptop was. Also, I thought vista was getting replaced sometime in 09' since it seem to be universally reviled?

I'd have to look into some sort of cooling solution as well I'm thinkin. This puter I'm using right now sounds like a damn 747 airliner and still has cpu at 120ish F temps. Not really sure what's too high.

I think I'd spend 800 bucks max though.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

vista is fine if you're running the appropriate version (64 bit is always the answer on newer cpu's or systems with more than 3gb of ram)

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Ah that's good to know. Wasn't really planning on upgrading OS, but I suppose if it will allow me to triple my memory it might actually be worthwhile. I'm just shocked how cheap most of this stuff is.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Yup, hardware is super cheap anymore. If you want good quiet cooling get a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme. If you don't OC you can pretty much run it without a fan even attached. Just be advised, it if fucking huge and you meed a good mid sized case. Your 300 should work though.

frozencpu.com is a good reliable seller of all of Thermalright's products.

Or if you really want quiet, spend a couple hundred bones and get a passive water cooling kit and block your CPU, chipsets and video and have virtually no noise!

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
_____
VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

This is the case I currently have http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129025

Real nice case, quiet but for the 2 monster fans on the back and one on the front. I have to keep the fans going pretty high to keep the CPU and GPU chilly (for some reason the Nvidia temp program does nothing but freeze my puter so i never know how hot my vid card is) and they are pretty damn loud lol.

I looked at that one gigabyte MB and apparently it absolutely hates crucial ram or something. Been trying to read up on the new technology in regards to x58, the newer MB's etc. This being a spur of the moment thing I'm pretty much going with suggestions lol....since my puter comes apart tonight or tomorrow and I'll only have access at work.

Also, i think with vista I'd need a new soundcard? I remember something about having to get new Vid cards (mine is ok, its dx10 compatible) and new soundcards, etc.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

You're getting a new motherboard. Just use onboard sound.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Hehe, I guess I've gotten spoiled using my X-fi for music/game sound and the onboard for ventrilo =P

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

With Vista, you wont have any trouble doing that with onboard. You could be doing it in XP but sometimes it flakes out. I'm assuming you have a USB headset so it sets itself up as an independent soundcard anyway so it is a simple matter of telling Vista that all voice in and out go through the headset, and everything else through the speakers/.

Nothing pisses me off more than people who pipe vent and game sound in through their speakers and play wow, LIKE HALF THE FUCKING GOD DAMN ORYX GUILD.

EDIT

That case you have, I have put several machines together with those and if I remember they are kind of thin. Just to be certain I would see about getting the demensions of that cooler and check it against how much actual free space you got inside there.

Also if you upgrade video card, you might want to see how much room you got lengthwise. All the cards out now are sporting peter norths.

This is what I bought and it cost me around $800 when it was all said and done. However, I got Vista Ultimate for $50 and the Case (and DVD burner) were free, so you'd have to add at least another $150. But even at $950, it's a pretty good deal, in my opinion.

Case Antec Performance One P180 Silver cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case (mine is black, but this is the same case)

Power Supply PC Power & Cooling S75CF 750W EPS12V SLI NVIDIA SLI Certified (Dual 8800 GTX and below) CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply

Motherboard GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Processor Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

Memory OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Video Card HIS Hightech H487QT1GP Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported IceQ 4+ Turbo Video Card

By the way, look at the onboard sound on the motherboard. It's pretty nice.

P182 is a good case, nice and quiet once you swap out the antec fans for something like SilenX fans. They move just as much air but don't sound like a wind tunnel. Keep the screens clean on the front as well.

The TRUE (ThermalRight Ultra 120 Extreme) heatsink will work fine in that case as well.

For the 8800GTS, remove the fan and heat sink and scrape off the 4lbs of thermal paste they apply at the factory and re-apply some Arctic Silver 5 in a thin layer and re-attach your fan and heatsink or get a HR 03 Plus to replace the stock cooler. The AS5 alone will drop your GPU temps by about 5-10C and replacing the stock cooler with a HR 03+ will lower them by 10-15 idle and 20-30 at load.

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
_____
VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

Yeah I've really liked the case. Vanamar suggested it 3 years ago if i recall. I replaced the stock fans early because 2 of them had bad bearings with ....I don't remember the names lol...thought they were supposed to be quiet however. They have individual velocity controls which is cool to have but to keep the CPU at less than 115-120 degrees I gotta have that thing screaming.

The only major downside of that case is I've no idea how you'd do SLI in it. That 8800gts towers over damn near every slot in the puter, so much so that I had to relocate the soundcard to the absolute bottom pci slot. No way in hell I'd get another video card in there. Not really planning on SLI anyhow.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

115-120 is not bad temps, thats only 49-50c. Max temp is 72c and unless you are running something like Priime95 that uses all the cores at once then I wouldn't worry too much about it. Try switching over to a temp monitor that uses Celsius instead of Fahrenheit and it wont freak you out as much.

Here's a couple of the standards for monitoring your temps...

Coretemp 32bit & 64bit -- http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

Realtemp 3.0 -- http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/Real_Temp/

CPUID - http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

Or if you want to go hardcore, get Everest Ultimate -- http://www.lavalys.com/products.php?ps= ... =en&page=1

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
_____
VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

No new puter yet. Motherboard has arrived from RMA. I now have 2 HDD's. I'm using the 500gig one on the Sata 1 slot and I want to use my older Raptor as the gaming drive slave. I put it on Sata 2 but the system doesn't detect it as a drive...what it does do is try to install a raid system. Is there something I don't know about Sata?

How do I simply have 2 drives? I thought SATA didnt rely on the whole master/slave that IDE did, that each drive was individual. Bios sees 2 drives, but windows doesn't seem to.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Did you go in drive management to partition and format the drive?

I'm not even sure what drive management is hehe...It's the raptor I had previously with windows and everything on it. It should already be formatted as it was functional before this.

My computer only shows the C: and the Cdrom, doesn't even show that there is another disk to format.

*Edit*
I found out how to use the disk management and sure enough it shows the other drive there, saying it's not initialized and not allocated. I brought it "online" but it's still not showing up under my computer as a disk thats available. Do I really have to format it? I don't want to lose the stuff thats already on there. It's talking about using the partition wizard and creating a primary or extended partition or logical drive, etc..I think I know enough to do this, its the terminology that's tripping me up right now.

** I went and told it to make a primary partition using the max space on the raptor. I told it not to format it and hit ok. It sat with the hourglass for like 5 minutes then BSOD'd and rebooted. Now the raptor doesn't show up at all. After a reboot the raptor shows up but any access attempted on the raptor causes a lockup and BSoD.

I guess I'm just used to plugging it in as slave and having all the data be sitting there.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

The reason it shows up as and tries to config as a raid drive is because it was previously set up as a raid drive even though not utilized in a raid array.

Go into your bios and set your SATA to raid mode and start from there.

Also go out to WD's site and download their drive tools and run a diag on it.

If all else fails, the raptors have like a 5yr warranty...

PS: if you reset the partition your data is gone now anyway so i really wouldnt worry too much about it..

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
_____
VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

Yeah I think the drive itself might be busted from whatever was happening before. Trying to access the drive earlier caused a freezeup and a screen o doom. Event viewer now has multiple events stating the drive has a bad block. I tried running WD's diagnostics on it and first it locked up the puter and then ran for 29 seconds, froze up and caused a Bsod reboot. Gonna look into RMA.

_________________
Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW