I just finished creating a beast. I just had to brag somewhere, and this seemed to be a good place.

Intel quad core Q8300 (would have preferred the new I7 architecture, but had the 8300 laying around)
4 gigs ram (will up to 8 after I upgrade to 64bit)
BFG 285 Graphics 1g of DDR3
MSI P7N SLI MB
Thermal Take tough power 750w
1.25 TB of HD
Creative XFI Platinum w/front panel
Thermaltake Case

I'm waiting on the display, a 60" Mitsubishi DLP 120hz big screen! (already bought, waiting on delivery to my new house June 1) 3D ready! Resolution via HDMI 1920x1080.

Wireless desktop (matching revolution mouse/kb setup)
Logitech X25 steering wheel (super nice!)

I'm going to see how stuff runs with XP for a while, then upgrade to Vista Ultimate 64 (already have)

I'm looking forward to some couch computing. LOL

:woowoo:

Why Vista? XP is great already, wouldn't you eat up more system memory with Vista installed?

What games do you plan on running on that rig? I can has envy.

Well, primarily because I have a 64bit version of Vista, and wouldn't mind bumping up the system ram to 8 gigs. Other than that, I agree, XP is great.

I just loaded Crysis on it, but since I'm at work, can't play it yet. I will tonite tho.

I have all the NFSpeed titles, and some other driving sims, a couple of painkiller's, quakes and doom.... I'm not really into the war sims or the WOW craze, can you suggest some titles?

oooooo Dave, you just gotta post some pictures!!!

Well, primarily because I have a 64bit version of Vista, and wouldn't mind bumping up the system ram to 8 gigs. Other than that, I agree, XP is great.

I just loaded Crysis on it, but since I'm at work, can't play it yet. I will tonite tho.

I have all the NFSpeed titles, and some other driving sims, a couple of painkiller's, quakes and doom.... I'm not really into the war sims or the WOW craze, can you suggest some titles?

Get the Orange Box. Portal is a very fun quirky game. Team Fortress 2 is soooo fun and it will run smoothly on that rig of yours. Left 4 Dead is another fun online coop game.

With all those gorey FPS, fast paced driving games, and horror survival games...you can always get Sims 3. That way, you can give your woman something to play on the machine. LAWL...

oooooo Dave, you just gotta post some pictures!!!

This is the rig prior to the 285 card install, and it was still sporting the Striker extreme MB. (it had a GTX7950 vid at the time too).

Other than that, it still looks the same:
Thermaltake Computer Video by Dave - MySpace Video (http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=41915566)

(the lights make it run faster LOL)

nice setup.

i'll second the recommendation for the orange box. i'd also recommend fallout 3.

-M

Get the Orange Box. Portal is a very fun quirky game. Team Fortress 2 is soooo fun and it will run smoothly on that rig of yours. Left 4 Dead is another fun online coop game.

With all those gorey FPS, fast paced driving games, and horror survival games...you can always get Sims 3. That way, you can give your woman something to play on the machine. LAWL...

Oh cool, I have portal, never installed for some reason. I'll look into team fortress 2 as well. Got rid of the woman, but I do have a daughter. She plays the hell out of Spore. I'll bet she'd like Sims....

:tiphat:

I'll third the Orange Box suggestion. Call of Duty 4 is another good one, especially if you can find a good group to play with online.

nice setup.

i'll second the recommendation for the orange box. i'd also recommend fallout 3.

-M

I forgot about Fallout 3. I'll second that and I'll also second COD:4.

OH YEAH!! If you have a great surround sound system set up....GET FEAR and FEAR 2!! I never had a game that scared the [OH MY!] out of me! It's so [BAD WORD HERE]ing scary especially if you play at night.

Yeah, I got fear when it first came out. Pretty intense.

My surround sound is a home made 5.1 with two yamaha tuners and an 18" down fire sub. Bose surrounds and some homemade fronts (comp 12vr with mids and tweets LOL) Klipsch center.

I got Crysis up and running, and at full res with 8x AF at 1900x900 it performed without any lag at all. Flawless. A quick check of the MSI temp guage after running for about half an hour showed a balmy 32degrees centigrade on the CPU.

It'll do fur sure!

I built one a couple of months ago....

Intel Core i7/920 CPU
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P Motherboard
12GB of DDR3/1066 MHz Triple Channel RAM
ATI FirePro V3750 video card
CoolerMaster Centurion 590 case w/ 6-120mm fans
CoolerMaster V8 CPU cooler
LG Super-Blu/HD-DVD ROM
Vista Ultimate 64-bit

I built this for Revit/3DSMax work. Need to get the Adobe bundle so I can start video editing on it and plan on adding another 1TB drive and a Blu-ray burner in the future.

The i7/920.....drooool
I should have gone that route.. I'm kickin myself for not getting the 8 cores.

BlueDog, do you do outsourced B.I.M work? I've seen a couple of projects here lately that require B.I.M's (for the electrical portion). We currently have no one on staff that can do this, and would have to outsource that portion.

This thread makes me feel very acoustic and old.

MS Flight Sim is awesome if you are into aviation. About as real as you can get.

The i7/920.....drooool
I should have gone that route.. I'm kickin myself for not getting the 8 cores.
I got it on Fry's weekend special, $249 ago I think a few months for the retail CPU with Intel CPU cooler. I just felt that cooler wasn't going to be enough when I stress it.


BlueDog, do you do outsourced B.I.M work? I've seen a couple of projects here lately that require B.I.M's (for the electrical portion). We currently have no one on staff that can do this, and would have to outsource that portion.
I have done some HVAC modeling on a pharmaceutical project that I was the project manager on, the MEP firm wasn't doing it in Revit so we were going to do it after their design was done. I haven't done any electrical yet. We have a one firm using Revit MEP that we use and I know of a couple of others down here that are getting up to speed on it. We also have a structural engineer using it. Our firm has been using Revit for 8 years, the Austin office has been exclusively on Revit for 5 years. I have been using it for almost 2 years after almost 18 years on Acad. Revit Architecture reminds me some of the first system that I learned on in the late 80's, Computervision CADDS4X on Sun workstations.

I don't really know how many are using it in OKC, I know we have had several consultants (both MEP and structural) here in Austin who have approached us because of experience in it.

Yeah, it's new to us to. The mechanicals have been doing isometric layouts forever, but we're just now seeing it in electrical.....hopefully it won't catch on. LOL

I think it's too late for that.....seems like it already has.