CrashCodes.com

I recently assembled a new PC. For about $1,500, here's what I ended up putting together:

• Antec Performance One P180 Silver cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail
  
  
• ABIT AW9D LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
  
  
• BIOSTAR V7602GS51 GeForce 7600GS 512MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
  
  
• ENERMAX EG465P-VE FMA 2.2 ATX12V 460W Power Supply - Retail
  
  
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6600 - Retail
  
  
• CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-6400C4 - Retail
  
  
• 2x Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM
  
  
• Sony NEC Optiarc 18X DVD±R DVD Burner Black E-IDE/ATAPI Model AW-Q170A-B2 - OEM
  
  
• Hauppauge WINTV-PVR-150 PCI Interface Tuner Card - Retail
  
  
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional With SP2B 1 Pack - OEM
  
  

I used Tom's Hardware's cpu charts to help in my CPU selection.

Many of these components contribute to the system being quiet. However, the 10,000rpm hard drives are gonna make some noise. Luckily the case came with special screws and silicon to mount the drives which significantly reduces the vibrations transfered from the drives to the case. The case is really sweet. It's more than I'd normally like to spend for a case; but the added features are well worth it.

The motherboard has a neat little feature that the sound that would typically be "on-board" is partially on a seperate card which can reduce the amount of interference of the audio by the motherboard.

It's not all fun and games. I have had a few of problems with it.

• I got checksum errors when I first booted the thing up. Some of the mobo documentation suggested reseting the BIOS. Other sections of the documentation indicated that I must clear the BIOS before first time use. I had to use some needle-nose plyers to move the jumper that clears the BIOS.
  
  
• Setting up the hard drives to work in a striped RAID array was difficult to find in the mobo manual and it wasn't it obvious (to me) in the BIOS.
  
  
• Firefox has caused the system to completely lock up. So I switched to Opera. (I wouldn't recommend using Opera if you use a proxy server to access the net as it constantly prompts for authentication)
  
  
• World of Warcraft runs at like 5fps in full screen mode! I think this problem may be related to me running dual-monitors. I was able to work around this by checking the "Windowed Mode" and "Maximized" boxes in the WoW video options. I found that I like this mode better anyway because I can have and use my web browser on the other monitor without having to alt-tab over. I still find it strange that this mode fixes the fps problem.
  
  

With my old pc hooked up to my TV, I still spend most of my computing time on the old system. I'd put the new pc in the living room except that occasionally the wife likes to use some questionable software to watch Chinese subtitled japanese animation on the TV.

I'll be sure to post more if I do something half-way interesting with this new acquisition; but that's it for now.