Hot damn!

Well, I got my computer together last night. Unfortunately I made one mistake. The heat sink takes an open chassis fan and I picked up close chassis fans. I will have to dremel out the extra plastic. For now I am using one of the case fans that came with the case. The Antec Tricool fans that came with the case are pretty quiet on their low setting. Medium and high are very audible. I am going to keep one at the top. After some cpu tests I found that when I am stressing the system I can just turn that fan all the way up and the system stays very cool.

The system is very quiet when all the fans are on low. Right now I have 2 of the quiet Nexus fans in the system, one on the rear exhaust and one on the front intake. I am using hte stock Antec Tricools on the top exhaust, heat sink, and power supply chamber. I am going to replace the heat sink and power supply chamber with the other Nexus fans I have, then this should bet absolutely quiet.

The hdd is quiet. But then this case mounts the hdd on silicon too. The only loud thing on the system is the dvd drive.
talking about silicon, the psu sits on silicon too. Everything about this case was designed to be quiet. When you tap the side it makes a low thud, not the usual clank.

That heat sink is very large. I don't think there will be a problem with it's weight if I don't move the computer much. However, being that I want to take it to the LAN for Shadowrun I might help support the heat sink with some wire.

I love how easy it is to put a computer together these days. You just have to plug stuff in. No jumpers, no master/slave, just plug and play.  The bios is even smart enough to make good decision on setup.

Also, some performance numbers for you guys
At idle the system is about 43°C and the CPU jumps between 20°C and 24°C. Not bad. After running a 10 minute cpu stress the system was at 44°C and the CPU was at 34°C. This was with all the fans on low. Bumping all the fans on high only cooled the CPU 2°C. I am impressed, that's a cool processor. I need to find out where that system temp is taken. I also noticed that the processor dynamically clocks itself down when it is in low use. The util that came with the abit motherboard showed that it was running at 1.6ghz most of the time, but then jumped up to 2.4ghz when needed.

Shadowrun complains about my system. It ranks it as a 1, and requires a 3 to run. I find it funny that it couldn't detect that I was running Vista! I told it continue anyway and it seemed to run fine. at 1600x1200 I can turn everything on with no hiccups. I maxed out my monitor to 2048x1536, Shadowrun ran fine but chugged a little when many bots were on screen. Counter Strike, being an old game, runs AWESOME. the Half Life 2 dev demo I can finally see all the effects they talk about :)

Yes, I am running vista. I've been running at work too. I don't think it is that slow. A service pack is definitely needed, but the first version of all variations of Windows really sucked. It runs fine, it's pretty speedy. It boots fast, programs load quickly. It is a memory hog but when I look at memory usage it is mainly the Aero graphics taking it up. At idle with virus scan, spyware, and other essentials running my system is at 36% memory usage (out of 2gig). Talking about service packs, SP1 beta should be coming out this month.

One thing that surprised me when playing Shadowrun is that Vista handles the controller better than the 360. Yeah, I used a controller. I had a cheap motherboard and mouse plugged in. I'm not going to setup the controls until I get my wireless keyboard and mouse hooked up to it. anyway, the controller had NO deadzone. One thing I don't like about playing FPS on the 360 is the controller has a large deadzone. It's tough to fine tune the aiming then. But on the PC there was no deadzone. If I am not going to snipe I think I will stick with the controller for awhile, at least until I migrate everything over to the new computer.

I am going to have to reinstall a lot of this stuff though. When you buy Home Premium it is only the 32bit version. You can get the 64bit DVD for free (but you have to pay for shipping) using your product code. Though I am not sure if I need to go to 64bit. All 64bit does is allow you to have more than 4gig of memory and REALLY large raids. It doesn't increase performance that much.

Cool, while typing this the rest of the computer arrived. 20" LG monitor, battery backup, and speakers.

Now, I can't wait for BioShock and UT2k7...