Say a prayer for me please...

[Skrying]

Most cases these days are tool less for the most part. Its not uncommon.

 

[Rainbow Man]

I really don't think you're looking at the right cases.

I look at what's shown in stores. I don't see a lot of Lian-Li or Antec etc cases there. Probably because they're expensive and peoiople don't want expensive.

Or it could be that people see the PC as merely a tool and they don't care about the insides or know what indicates a case of high quality. It's enouhg if it doesn't look like a complete dogturd on the outside.

Heck most people barely know how to start a PC and surf a little on it.. I don't expect them to be able to appreciate the finer points of case design.

HP and Compaq are by far the worst in my experience.

Figures since they're one and the same these days AFAIK hehe.

Actually I've never looked inside one of these. Was quite a time since I even saw one in real life. Compaqs used to look sort of like spaceships I thought with a rather sleek front bezel. They were standard PC beige however so that kind of screwed up the impression heh!

There should be no issue with putting a ATX form factor motherboard or psu into that case.

WOW really?! I ttruly did not know!

I looked at the PSU. It seemed much much bigger than a standard ATX. And the holes for the cooler aren't in the standard places either so I assumed the mobo was proprietary also.

Guess that serves me right then for making guesses! Thanks for the info. I stand corrected!



P
eace.

 

[Recall]

oops

 

[Tahir2]

Hi guys

Just wanted to add that watercooling does not equal silence. You have the radiator fan and the pump which add to the noise and then there is the choice of PSU. Also with Dell they probably use some other fans just in case (no pun intended).

 

[John Reynolds]

Oh and I think I hate windows vista. They moved everything around and I can't find stuff anymore.

Heh, Vista is nothing compared to Office 2007. I installed it at work this week and it took me probably 5-7 minutes to find where I could adjust Access' security level for macros. I swear the changes were made so Microsoft could make more money from training centers/classes.

Grats on your purchase, though. Run some #s on it and report back.

 

[BRiT]

Correct. Though watercooling done for silence and high performance can be done very easily. A DDC pump with custom top (DDCT01S) placed on gel stuff is completely silent, even when running two in series. A Thermochill PA radiator with Yate-Loons hooked up to a Rheobus is completely silent. Then add in the various water blocks like a Fusion or GTX for CPU, a MCW60 with ramsinks for GPU, and optionally MCW30 for northbridge/southbridges.

The loudest item in that system is now the PSU, Hard Drive, and DVD-Rom drive.

 

[Rainbow Man]

I swear the changes were made so Microsoft could make more money from training centers/classes.

You know that was almost my first thoguht too. Scary.

Grats on your purchase, though. Run some #s on it and report back.

Thanks! All I've really done so far is faff around a bit and played some HL2 (because it's so convenient to just DL via steam) and WoW (not as convenient I'm afraid). Oh and I ran 3dmark 06 too and got a 12k score before overclocking anything.

I'm still not sure if I should reformat the system and go 64-bit or not thats why I've not installed much yet.. Don't wanna sit there juggling discs and applying patches only to have to do it all over again soon.

There ARE drivers for 64-bit vista these days right? Do USB devices need 64-bit drivers too? I have some cameras and cell phones and joysticks etc that could become obsoleted if it does.
Peace.

 

[BRiT]

How much memory are you running in that rig? It's SLI-8800GTXs right? Since you're running a 32bit OS, the most amount of addressable memory that system has is 2.5 Gigs. The SLI cards are using 1.5 Gigs out of the 32bit limit of 4 Gig max addressable. Adding in other devices and you're likely down to 2.25 Gigs of addressable memory.

As for Vista 64bit, I'm running it without any major issues. My USB camera, printer/scanner/fax, tv-tuner, ups, keyboard/mouse, and LCD's memory-card reader all work flawlessly. Vista auto-detected all of those devices and installed the proper drivers. The only drivers I had to install myself were for the Nvidia GTX and the Creative X-Fi.

 

[Rainbow Man]

2 gigs at the moment. Thing is I'd like to go up to 4 at least so that's when I'd have to go 64-bit. Besides it feels sutpid having a 64-bit CPU and not using its full capabilities..

Like when we were all hamstrung by MS while running windows 3.x/95/98/ME on 386 and up systems. Gives too many bad flashbacks for me to feel comfortable.

But its a load of bother to reformat and reinstall. But better to do it sooner than later I suppose.

Peace.

 

[stevem]

It's not hard to trace the genealogy back to some Dell XPS Precision Workstations I had a few years back. The PSUs are larger physically & conservatively rated. As far as total package goes, only Apple do things as well as Dell. You'll have to check stand-offs for mb compatibility. Dell used to have sliding slot retainers not screw posts.

P.S. Out of curiosity, who's the PSU OEM?

 

[Rainbow Man]

It's screw standoffs in both this guy and my previous Dell too. The first one had the sliding clips thingys however.

No idea who makes the PSU. Some company in china heh. The ring transformers in that thing are huge I can see em from the rear vent..

I agree on the conservative rating. The first Dell ran a P4 1.7GHz (pretty hot and hungry) and OCd GF3 running at 220something core and quite a bit on the mem too with all card slots filled and 2 optical and 2 HDDs and just for fun I connected an old 5.25" SCSI monster too that alone pulled near 60W all on a 250W power supply.

 

[Albuquerque]

Heh, Vista is nothing compared to Office 2007. I installed it at work this week and it took me probably 5-7 minutes to find where I could adjust Access' security level for macros. I swear the changes were made so Microsoft could make more money from training centers/classes.

Grats on your purchase, though. Run some #s on it and report back.

Quoted for truth on the Office 2007 front. I really don't know what they were thinking; that new "ribbon" is almost impossible to deal with. One thing
MS Office has been generally good at in the past is a semi-intuitave interface; even if you didn't know where something was, you could find it just by looking around for a minute or so. Not anymore

I spent almost 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get rid of some stupid mode where you have little center-placed period characters rather than spaces, and paragraph markers in place of line feeds, and a bunch of other wierd jazz. But nooooo, it wasn't "markup" mode at all -- it ended up being some stupid button on the ribbon that was auto-engaged when I wanted to create a table of contents / index thing.

W...T...F....!??!?!? Grr...

 

[Skrying]

I love Office 2007, its finally got me using features I would have never used before. I've heard nothing but great things about it to people I've sold it to as well. I could see maybe if you were a hardcore user before and knew the ins and outs of the old interface, but to put it simply to a new user or someone who wasn't using a ton of the features before it was a vast improvement. Of course, you can't please everyone, I could sworn people were complaining a ton about the old interface... I would hate to work at Microsoft, worst job ever, even when you do a great job you're shit on by the people who buy your products.

 

[nitteo]

I will definitely pray for you. I would never had considered a DELL for that price. If you think your system was THE absolute best for that price...consider what I put together for almost (actually a 'lil more than what you paid Micheal Dell, but I had so much fun building it), consider my MONSTER.