Need some opinions on this build...

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for the artic silver, you can get it here with free shipping.
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - 3.5 gram Tube
you can also get these yate-loon case fans. reallly quite fans and if you google them, highly regarded for the price:
Yate Loon D12SL-12 120mm Orange Low Speed Fan 47CFM 28dBA
SVC ships really fast and really nice people. i buy a lot of my accessories from there.

and no, your computer is not a basic one anymore. in reality, if you replace the E2200 with the quad-core Q6600 for $100 more, youd have a full fledged media center minus the blue-ray player. you have two burners, avideo card, 1TB hard drive space, 4GB of RAM , pretty nice motherboard and a 22inch LCD.

most cheap computers consist of 2GB, 320GB hard drive, 1 optical drive, 17 inch LCD and crappy motherboard with onboard video. you could easy build a 400-500 computer if you didnt want all that extra stuff.
 
for the artic silver, you can get it here with free shipping.
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - 3.5 gram Tube
you can also get these yate-loon case fans. reallly quite fans and if you google them, highly regarded for the price:
Yate Loon D12SL-12 120mm Orange Low Speed Fan 47CFM 28dBA
SVC ships really fast and really nice people. i buy a lot of my accessories from there.

and no, your computer is not a basic one anymore. in reality, if you replace the E2200 with the quad-core Q6600 for $100 more, youd have a full fledged media center minus the blue-ray player. you have two burners, avideo card, 1TB hard drive space, 4GB of RAM , pretty nice motherboard and a 22inch LCD.

most cheap computers consist of 2GB, 320GB hard drive, 1 optical drive, 17 inch LCD and crappy motherboard with onboard video. you could easy build a 400-500 computer if you didnt want all that extra stuff.
Yea I guess it's not that basic, but I can't justify dropping $500-600 on a comp i won't be happy with. I used dual monitors at my last job, and one 22" is about the best bet I think for right now, since it's big, and when i can pick up another one, my desktop will be really nice. I need the storage space, the dual optical drives, and the vid card.

I guess what I meant was that this is about the most basic comp I'd want to spend my money on, without cutting any corners.

thanks for the links on the arctic silver and the fans.
 
haha totally agree with you man. its seems to me though that if you want all that, might as well eat top ramen for a couple weeks and get the q6600. that would probably take care of spending the extra money later to build another workstation or at least put that off for much longer than a year.

however, getting that e2200 isnt a bad deal either because you can always sell it later and just easily upgrade to a quad-core.
 
Who knows, I might end up using this box for MythTV in a while. I was really wanting to build one, but I needed a main pc for personal use before I could go building a dvr. I already have an older athlon 1800+ that I think i could use for the front end, so this might be the backend after I build a new one.

About going up to a better processor, I'm already pushing it since this is coming out of financial aid $$. I definitely have the money to build what I want right now, but I'm trying to keep the costs low to have enough so I don't have to work at all during school. If I were to splurge on anything it would be picking up an extra monitor right now, but I don't think thats happening :(

Now the question is...XP or Vista. I love XP speed, but I'm used to Vista now, so I'll probably go with Vista 64.
 
i would definitely get vista 64 if youre gonna use 4gb. xp and vista 32 just wont handle it as well and you wont see the full 4gb anyway.
 
So I just bought everything, and I went back and saw that there was a damn e5200 for $5 more than the e2200. Apparently the wolfdale cores run a lot cooler and are damn easy to overclock more.
 
damn, see if you can change your order. newegg is really good at customer service. while youre at it, see if you can get this coupon code applied to the 9600gso for $13 more off (VGA93013). just ask if they can adjust the price to reflect the price of the coupon since you orderyesterday.

oh btw, no the artic cooler is a really good cooler, especially if youre gonan run either the e2200 or e5200. the TRUE does not come with a fan so a good one will cost another 15 dollars or so. if youre considering to upgrade, i suggest a:
Newegg.com - XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 120mm Rifle CPU Cooler - CPU Fans & Heatsinks
excellent cooler of the price. but not worth the upgrade over the arctic if not overlcoking crazy or going quad.
 
So I ordered everything at around 1am this morning. I guess all the combo deals and stuff ended last night at midnight, so after checking out, I looked at the receipt and it was all screwed up. Basically the hdd's went up $5 each, the combo for the ram/psu was gone, so it automatically took the psu out of the cart, and a couple other small changes happened wthout any notification to me during the checkout process. It kind of pissed me off, but I called them at 8am this morning, and sorted it out. I tried to switch the processor, but the guy said the order was already being posted to be shipped, at 8:15 am. So what he did was had me order the psu in a seperate order, and took $60 off the price. on top of that I get a rebate, so the psu ended up costing me like 5 or 10 bucks. About the cpu, he said if i wanted to I could send it back and buy the e5200, otherwise he'd have to cancel the order and redo it all with the e5200 in there, which woud tie up the $$ in my account for a few days.

Now if i want the e5200, i'd have to pay to ship the e2200 back, plus pay the $5 more for it. I'm not sure how much the cpu would cost to ship, but I'm thinking I should just stick with whats on its way now. i dunno.

I'm still trying to decide on XP 64 or Vista 64. If i do Vista I might just suck it up and buy the real thing, since from what i've seen so far, its a p.i.t.a. to get it to show as genuine if i dl it.
 
So is it worth it to lap the heatsink before i put it on?
 
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it could be worth it to get the E5200 because you will being an extra 1mb of cache and a higher multiplier which usually means a better overclock. and like you said its a 45nm wolfdale so it should run cooler.

were you able to get the price adjustment for the 9600gso? i promise you wont be disappointed for the money. i bought one for friend and hes able to play most of the games out there and a good resoltuion and fps.

as for lapping, i have the arctic 64pro version and i havent lapped it yet. ive heard a good 2-5C drop from it even though the manufacter insists it doesnt need to be lapped and the grooves are there for a purpose. if you have time, its couldnt hurt. just make sure youre making it even =)
 
it could be worth it to get the E5200 because you will being an extra 1mb of cache and a higher multiplier which usually means a better overclock. and like you said its a 45nm wolfdale so it should run cooler.

were you able to get the price adjustment for the 9600gso? i promise you wont be disappointed for the money. i bought one for friend and hes able to play most of the games out there and a good resoltuion and fps.

as for lapping, i have the arctic 64pro version and i havent lapped it yet. ive heard a good 2-5C drop from it even though the manufacter insists it doesnt need to be lapped and the grooves are there for a purpose. if you have time, its couldnt hurt. just make sure youre making it even =)
I didn't get the price adjustment for the 9600. I'll give them a call tomorrow to see if they will do anything about it.
 
Sweet! Everything finally got here right now. I was waiting on the fans, arctic 5, dvd drives, psu, and the E5200, and it all just arrived. Now I just have to go find a decent computer desk and I can build this thing.

I lapped the heatsink on Wednesday using 400, 800, 1000, and then 2000. It looks good and is nice and flat. I'll probably put the comp together and make sure everthing works right before doing the processor.

I have xp 64 and ubuntu 64 ready to go, decided against Vista only because I don't want to deal with any issues right now. I like it, and will probably put it on there later, but as of right now, I want something that I know will work the way I want it to out of the box.

Hopefully I get around to building this thing today...
 
sweet man. sorry i couldnt get back to you sooner. i had a 12hr shift yesterday and im on my lunch right now.

anyway, yeah i think the 5200 is worth the extra $10 bucks (5 to ship back and 5 for the extra cost). the extra cache will help and ive seen those 5200 put some high clocks. with the p5q board, im seeing around 450-470mhz fsb. another cool thing about the asus boards now is that they have a mini linux intergrated on a flash ram so you can boot up and check email or whatever without having to turn on the whole thing.
 
Good. It's all together and running well. The monitor had some vertical lines in the screen, though, so I had to send it back on Monday. It looks like the new one's being shipped tomorrow, so that's good. I ended up putting XP 64 on it, but am considering going to Vista. It turns out that the Zune software is incompatible w/ XP 64. It pisses me off that fucking MS makes their own products incompatible with so many of the rest of their shit. I use my zune daily, and sync it atleast a few times a week, so I have to have that software on there,a nd one of the reasons of building a comp was to have storage for music/vids, so they are crammed on my laptop.

Other than that its all good. thanks again for the advice. If i would have done it on my own, it probably would have turned out like crap. I actually just got an email today from Newegg saying that most of the products I bought have been nominated for their customer choice awards, so I guess that's good.

So far, I didn't get a chance to push it much at all. I got some monitoring programs on there, and the one time that I looked at the temps, it was like 31 C at idle, which is pretty good, right?

Also, it took me a couple days to get to finishing the computer because I had nowhere to put it. I looked around for a nice desk under $100, to things that apparently don't exist together. I have a tiny bedroon, like 9x10 or so, so I needed a place that I can have the monitor, speakers, schoolbooks, notebook, and maybe teh laptop if i need it. After finding nothing, I did a couple quick sketches and went to Home Depot to get lumber, and built this:
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The main desk part is 4' wide and 3' deep, and it has two 18" deep shelves and a 12" deep on top. I spent $90 on the supplies and am totally satisfied with it. I didn't care to get a flashy desk because it will most likely end up getting messed up anyway, and with this one I can add stuff I need or cut it down or whatever I want.
 
I put a few coats of polyurethane on the top of the main part, but I don't really want it stained, and am not that worried about the rest of it. The ply I used was 3/4 sanded birch. It has a nice pattern, and after sanding it w/ 400 grit and putting the clear polyurethane on it, it looks good and is smooth.
 
awesome man. :thumbsup: glad someone thought my verbal garbage was good advice :p

but that sucks that xp64 wont sync with zune. thats one of the reasons why apple is gaining so much market, "it just works."

anyway, as for monitoring, the scene favorite goes out to coretemp for cpu temperatures, rivatuner to control and monitor gpu temps and everest for the rest of the system. also to make sure everything is stable, i would run as least one loop of memtest (i go for 2, diehards go 8hrs) to make all the columns on the ram is good. and then burn in test with orthos or two instances of prime to stress test your cpu.

as for temps, it really varies with test setup which dictates airflow and ambient temps. but 32c is pretty darn good. for load, i wouldnt go past 60c and no more than 1.4v if youre going to overclock.

good luck and keep us posted. btw, i hope you like those yateloons.
 
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