Well, after losing my whole weekend trying to get my new computer components working, I've given up and gone back to the devil. I've built a dozen machines in the past and have never had the slightest hiccup, but for some reason, this time was much different. After about 4 hours on Saturday, I had discovered the the athlon 3500 processor was bad and potentially the motherboard as well. Now, if i had purchased those items online like I usually do, that would have been a huge setback, but I decided for the first time to purchase them at Computer Builders Warehouse (local retailer). The advantage, of course, was that I could immediately exchange the items for replacements and be back in business in a matter of hours. So, after all that, i was sitting on my second brand new motherboard and processor thinking the worst was behind me... I was dead wrong :( ... I installed the new motherboard and proc and powered it up, funny thing was, nothing happened. No fans humming, no lights flashing, nothing... My, thought was, it must be the new power supply causing all of these problems. So, I swapped out my new power supply for my old thermal take psu, and powered it up. Are the fans spinning now, you ask. Nope! nada... nothing. To make a long story short, turns out there was a short in the board which in turn fried both power supplies... needless to say, all that *** went back to the store yesterday with both regret and relief...
I was so distraught by the experience that I've decided to take a break from homebrew systems for a while and began looking for high-end oem rigs from Alienware, Voodoo, and Dell. I found that Alienware had some nice offerings and was also having a 10% promo on some of their popular desktops, including the Aurora and Area-51 rigs. All looked good from them until I saw the expected availability in bold text “estimated ship date is January 20th, 2005”. close went the browser and on to the next I went. Turns out dell just launched a new gaming desktop entitled Dimension XPS gen 4 which was released the last week of November. This impressive machine which is normally a bit overpriced was now on sale for 15% off with free second day, 17inch flat panel, and printer. So, after a long 5 minute consideration, I decided to give this Dell a shot. The config highlights are as follows:
- Intel 925XE Express chipset which supports up to a stupid 1066MHz fsb (w/ p4 ee only)
- 3.4 ghz P4 with 1mb cache at 800mhz fsb
- 2 gb (1x1) dual channel ddr2 533mhz ram
- Nvidia 6800 GTO 256 pci express graphics card w/ dual dvi (similar to my existing agp but WAY more bandwidth due to pci-xpress)
- 80gb sata drive, but i'm throwing in my dual western digital raptors in a raid 0 as well
- latest sound blaster wookie card with 7.1 digital surround
- and a 16x dual layer burner wich of course is useless due to the lack of dual layer media.