Current Machine Put together Q1 2006, upgraded to Sli 2 years ago.
MoBo: Asus A8N Sli Deluxe
CPU: AMD Opteron 185 (Denmark)
Memory: 4Gb Patriot DDR PC4000 Eased Latency CL3 Dual Channel kit (XP sees 2gb)
Windows only accepts 1.75 Gig of the mem’ but BIOS see’s it all. (64 Bit or vista required?)
Graphics :2 x XFX 8500 GTS 512 mb each
1 x Maxtor Pata 150GB HD
1 x Maxtor Sata 150GB HD
1 x Maxtor Sata 250GB HD
2 x DVD-R
1 x Floppy Drive
Running XP home with 3 user accounts – 90 gigs of crap on the C: drive.
Machine Used as follows:
Wife: A teacher, therefore loads of poorly written, bulky educational software on it.
Tons of (to her) invaluable documents.
Daughter: Facebookaholic, messenger, photos, school work.
Me: Work stuff, Accounts, Photos, Music, COD 2, 4, 5 & Crysis.
I also like to tinker with it which invariably results in a big a crash!
Drawbacks: Won’t OC massively, always falls over if pushed beyond 2850 MHz.
Very cool, Max ever seen 60’c on CPU – Vid’s get up to 90’C gaming with O’clock on
Bios V1016 a bit flaky, has the feeling of unfinished work in progress.
The SATA drives will actually disappear from BIOS!
Once crashed it takes a lot of effort to get everything defaulted and back up.
Windows can get corrupted on crash, it’s simpler to boot from PATA then clone the SATA back.
PATA slow but bomb proof!
I run games at 1260 x 1024 on a 19” at 60 Hz. COD5 stutters occasionally. Crysis can drop to 10 FPS and become un-playable. COD 2 & 4 pretty good.
Am contemplating building a new machine and going for Windows 7.
The machine has got to be robust, upgradeable, capable of screaming for me, an office donkey for my wife and indestructible when it comes to data preservation.
My plan is as follows:
Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 Intel P55 Socket LGA1156
Core i7 860
8 gigs of quality DDR3 ram
1 x 32 Gig SSD to hold the OS, peripheral drivers and associated software inc AV.
2 X 250 Gig Maxtors, one to hold all the apps like Office, Adobe, music, pictures, documents etc, the other disc to be its clone.
I haven’t a clue what to do about graphic cards.
It has to fit in the current machines Thermal take Soprano case and will have the same DVDs and stuff already fitted. (That way the wife will think I’ve only upgraded the OS!!! )
Any comments or advice about the above and how it might perform or meet my criteria would be appreciated please.


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