Here's my new Rig [pics!]

[aidanjt]

serious? hahaha, thats a scarey prospect.. my appolgies, that just seemed all wrong, since the sticks are right next to each other and different coloured slots.. oh well, silly msi

I guess their lead design engineer fell asleep at the dual-channel conferance and only heard 'its important to note that 2 of the DIMM slots should be different colours.. zzZz.. further more the ram sticks should.. zzZz.. be right beside each other, thank you for your time folks, please hand back your specification sheets and remember your notes.'

shiato, see that earth cable on the psu?.. i was able to screw it in the very top slot just above the agp, kinda lap it over the 120mm fan and under.. it will add a tenny weeny bit of friction between the cable and the side panel, but it slides with just a wee bit more effort, nothing to worry about, it doesn't stick out much and i didn't make much of an effort.. but its starting to look well tidy now

I might suggest an airflow optimisation around the hard drives, if you move the bottom hard drive to the slot just below you can create a tunnel effect for the air from the front 80mm fan, so hopefully it will cool the disks a little better and supply fresh air for your GPU, fold the ribbon cables over to reduce their blockage.

on the audio cable thing, yea they are worthless now, all audio data is extracted from the IDE cable.

[shiato storm]

right o, audio cable's a go-go!!
oh and i tried looping he groud wire as you said you have done but it dont wanna stretch so nope...
ta for the cookie ...speaking of which - whats happend to richtea?

i'll continue 2moro about dual channel on the board...the g/f is waiting

[shiato storm]

ok, dual channel. well I used to have an asus nforce2 - which exploded! - but before it did I understood that there were esentialy 2 channels of memory. slots one and two where one channel and slot 3 was the second. Now, a similar situation is on the MSI board only its colour coded - purple and green - signifying each memory channel. the documentation I read noted this and also is labeled correctly, denoting the placement of ram in a green and a purple channel enables dual channeling... its also recommended to inset memory into slots 1 and 2 before filling up 3 and 4 (perhaps soemthing to do with the way the system 'fetches' memory for usage...?).
so, without much trying I got the dual channel to work first time I turned the computer on which means one of two things, I'm just damn good - or - the mobo is. (i think its a bit of both )

p.s. I'm at work at mo' but can't help flicking back a page to admire my handy work... *sigh* ...

[shiato storm]

p.s. and to round off my string of posts (woohoo!), I'd just like to say thanks to everyone for helping me out over the past few weeks as I asked rather banal questions about various computer setups and the like...there's too many names to mention but if you're reading this then you're probably one of them.

Thank you

[aidanjt]

no thats ok.. so long as the POST is reporting Dual-channel its all good, and your right about keeping them together, in DIMM1 & 2 instead of 1 & 4, DIMM4 has a longer track lead than 2, so it would be better for signal quality and crap like that.

Are you gonna try that hard drive gap that i suggested? it does a good job for me on cooling the disks.. its not so much for me on cooling the gpu because i have a zalman block with a 92mm fan hanging off the side pulling air from that vent just below the 80mm fan mount on the side panel. but it does a great job of keeping my raptors freezing.

[shiato storm]

yeah, might have a go...wondering which one to put where - primary drive above or below the secondary one? i'm guessing below as it'll stay cooler that way...well, a bit cooler as they'll beth be kept cool from fan blowage right next to them!

[aidanjt]

have a dive in the very bottom one, leave the second slot gapped, and leave a drive in the 3rd one. most of the direct induction air flys down slot 2, you can even see the centre of the fan from there.

[shiato storm]

yup, was what I was thinking too...great minds think a-like and all that !