My new beastie

[Image: Beastie]My old beast is now four years old, and is retiring. It’s a gigantic Dell Dimension XPS, which is basically a humongous and very heavy case with regular size computer components inside. If you open it up it looks like you found a miniature city tucked inside the corner of a box that was clearly meant for an elephant.

It still runs just fine, it’s stable, I’ve got about 80 gigs of hard drive space left, but the processor is old, and the motherboard is dated. It was no longer running games the way I wanted it to. So I built a new beastie, this time from scratch.

Yesterday I booted it up and put it through it’s paces. I plan to overclock it a bit as soon as I’m convinced that it’s stable and working and happy in its current condition. I have a gigantic Zalman fan, courtesy of my friend Chris, that runs at 2500 RPM and keeps my cpu at a cool 37 degrees while idling, and I’ve only got up to 46 with a full load. That should give me plenty of room.

[Update: I got to the bottom of this weird temp reading thing, and now I get full-load temp readings of 41c, which is much closer to what I expected. Turns out you have to plug your CPU fan into the CPU Fan power plug on the motherboard to get accurate readings. Who knew. ]

Almost everything else is up to spec: just installed Vista Ultimate, 500GB SATA HDD, Asus P5B-E motherboard, a nice 600 watt power supply, and the processor is Intel’s E6600 - core 2 duo at 2.4ghz. My graphics card is currently the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT, despite the fact that I ordered the GTS, but since this is a hold-over until I feel comfortable buying the 8800 GTX, it’s not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a place in the new case to put the elephant.

It runs Supreme Commander just fine with the settings up. I runs Counter-Strike: Source will the settings cranked at about 90-100 fps, with spikes both directions. Oddly enough, it runs Half-Life 2: Episode One at only 44 fps, which is bizarre, because it’s still Source. But it never dipped below 30, which is the number that really matters.

At this point, I think it’s safe to call it a success. First time I’ve built myself a computer from scratch, and it’s working great. Awesome.

So, let’s recap on the specs for My New Beastie, the ultimate gaming rig:

Monitor: 22” Widescreen Dell
Motherboard: ASUS P5-BE w/ 5.1 surround
CPU: Intel Dual-Core E6600 @ 2.4 (I’ll probably overclock it later)
RAM: 2GB @ 800Mhz
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 8600 GT (DX10)
Hard Drive: Seagate 500GB SATA