First off a big THANK YOU to the guys who helped me pick the right parts. You are truly awesome and I cannot thank you enough.
Second, I bought various parts from Newegg, Micro Center, and Xoxide. All of them were delivered correctly and lightning quick.
Pics and full specs are here.
I will try and make this as short as possible.
I decided to use my old case since to this day it is the best case I’ve ever worked with. This meant I had to swap my old stuff out of the case. This was fine since many of the old parts will become a Linux only rig. After getting everything installed I fired it up and checked out the mobo BIOS. I would have to say I’m quite impressed. I changed, enabled, disabled all the options then rebooted back into the BIOS and let her sit for a couple of hours in the PC Health screen. This allowed me to keep an eye of the system temps to make sure everything was OK. Then a reboot to set up my RAID 0 drives. 2 – Raptor 150’s will hold the OS’s, 2 – Raptor 75’s will hold page files and my docs. No worries about my docs in RAID 0, they are backed up to a 500 gig drive. Next I’ve got the aforementioned 500 GB and another 36 gig Raptor set to non-RAID on the Gigabyte SATA.
First I installed XP Pro (32-bit) and fully updated it. I installed only PerfectDisk 2008 and Acronis TI and DD. This will sit as is until SP3 is released. Next I made an image then installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit (because I could). First up was all the latest drivers, then SP1 and Windows Update. Then all my apps. I haven’t had a single issue with any app I run under Vista 64-bit. The only error so far is the same post-SP1 error I have on every machine I own. It is HTTP event 15016 which MS says, oops ignore it.
I haven’t had the time to game or anything on this machine but boy does this thing fly!
Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R
Processor
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (Yorkfield), 2666 MHz
Video
BFG Tech NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT(BFGE88512GTOC2E)
Hard Drives
2 x WD Raptor 150’s in Raid 0 (operating systems)
2 x WD Raptor 75’s in Raid 0 (XP page file, Vista page file, docs)
WD Raptor 36 GB (mp3’s)
WD 500GB (everything else)
DVD Burner
Samsung SH-S203B
Monitor
Samsung SyncMaster 226BW (22″ LCD)
Keyboard
Saitek Eclipse II
Mouse
Logitech MX Revolution
Speakers
Logitech Z-5500
Power Supply
CORSAIR CMPSU-620HX
Operating Systems
Windows XP Pro (32-bit)
Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
waiting on openSUSE 11