After an exceptionally long and extreamly intense war, my new system is up and crunching SETI...it was a long and bloody struggle, but the Romulan Empire succeeded in this endeavor. The new system, which should give many years of service to Empire:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Processor Socket 939
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Athlon 64(FX)/Athlon 64 X2/Sempron Skt939 DDR ATX Motherboard w/Audio, Dual Gigabit LAN, RAID/Serial ATA
Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Cooler
eVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX W/ACS3 PCI Express 256MB DDR3 Video Card w/HDTV, Dual DVI & VIVO (got 2 of them)
Thermaltake Swing VB6000SNS Mid Tower Case (Silver)
Thermaltake W0049RUC Silent PurePower 680W Power Supply w/Active PFC
Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2PT 1GB DDR400 XMS3200 Dual-Channel Memory w/Platinum Heat Spreader
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3250823AS 250GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer
Shuttle CR40 16X Double Layer DVD±RW Drive
Case and initial components went together fairly easy. The Case wiring was just "ok" not as nice as the power supply though, with more than enough color coded power taps. Very nice gets the thumbs up on great design!
The Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Cooler was interesting to install, and somewhat painful. Google for an pic and imagine those copper vanes penetrating any soft fleshy body parts that just happen to come into contact with it. In hindsight, should have gotten a pair of thin rubber gloves for handling it. Would have saved many drops of my own red vino (I left a couple on the case as a reminder that thin copper vanes BITE).
Everything went together smoothly after that and initial power test went OK. Plugged a moniter in and started to install win xp pro w/ sp2....even that seemed to go well...too well it seems.
Got WinXP installed and made a error...I decided to put some of the additional non essential hardware in and plug it in to the network to update drivers. That destablized it in a major league way...BSOD and lockdown was trouble shot methodically over 48 hours...more installs than I want to even contemplate, though I tip my hat again to da boyz and gurlz over in Redmond...the XP installer is very robust....back to the battle.....it turned out that my MB really did not care for the SB512 card in any of the PCI slots so I had to remove it, install all those itty bitty audio plugs for the front panel - but that gave me the time to re-cable every thing nice and pretty and more critically air flow!!!
I also couldnt get a stable install w/ both Vid cards in...had to install with a single, load drivers, then put it in...weirdness overall weirdness. Never had such a battle w/ hardware quirks like that. Once things were basically loaded and tested (except the sound) I install the only single disk stress software I possessed, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3...loaded that graphic intensive diversion and was absolutely blown away with the crispness and smoothness with all the bells and whistles maxed. Plopped down a couple stock coasters in Sandbox Mode and jumped in and took a ride...It was smooth and not a frame dropped even while looking around while on the ride. Once I got it upstairs from the basement "dungeon and raceway-30 foot HO scale slot car layout", I updated windows and installed CoH -- it also ran flawlessly with all the bells and whistles turned up to 11.
Of course the next piece of software to be loaded was boinc and things are looking nice that way, each core runs a separate piece of work and my other romulan buddy has been convinced that running boinc on his duel core would be a good idea for the Glory of the Empire. Cannot wait to see what the numbers are going to look like in a week or so.
Topic: SETI Thread (Read 201773 times)