Recent content by Bigjohn

snagged a blackfriday deal on new egg and got 2 Asus ENGTX550 TI 1GB cards, free shipping, for 99 each after rebate. Happy happy joy joy!

Yes, While I tend to agree, I did that to myself last time... I got a 260core216, thinking I'd add another... but, that was YEARS ago, and, technology leaped right by me! The core216 card is good enough to play skyrim at a decent framerate on my Core2 at 3.5ghz...

Yes, I used a big word. But that's not the conundrum. I can get 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 Graphics Card for the same price as a good 560TI. What would you do/suggest? Will be running on an AMD 990 board with a phenom II x6 and 16gb of DDR3x1600

My current rig is watercooled E8400 C2D on an EVGA 780i motherboard. It's not a BAD unit, it's just... My wife's unit is a Gen 1 Phenom x4, and with the same startup services and programs it boots FASTER than mine - hers is Stock 9500 CPU and mine is oc to 3.85ghz. Both have 8gb of DDR2...

My build, including the MS motherboard mentioned above... is~ 300. 199 for CPU, 99 for Mobo, ~100 for 8gb ram. Not sure you can do I7 for that price...

yes, 890FX is the board I'm looking at... Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 or MSI 890FXA-GD65, I think...

Not sure what you mean there? 2500k? IMHO AMD architecture is better at multi-tasking multiple simultaneous applications, where Intel is best at single "multithreaded" apps. I've seen this in practice too. The Phenom II x6 is something that would work well for me since I run a couple virtual...

So my last build was ~4 years ago? EVAG 780i mobo and E8400 core2duo.... Thinking (very hard!) about upgrading... to Phenom II - probably the 1090T black edition. Recommendations for a mobo/ram?

plus 1. If you didn't run that thing for at least 24 hours without power to the parts, you're insane. Every WC kit I've ever looked at says to do just that. Every post from a watercooling PC builder says the same thing. If you just fire it up, it's YOUR fault, not the damn radiator manuf...

ummm, guys? Any technology is subject to potential abuse. If you trust this sort of power in the hands of the government, then so be it. When you cease to fear and challenge the government, you become their willing servant.... many slaves are happy just as things are, because it's too hard to...

I've built over 300 computers with my 2 hands, not including the upgrades I did to TRS-80 mod3's back in the day.... I still have a working 386 in the basement, and a 486dx2/66.... My first hard drive was as large as a shoe box, cost me $399, and held a whopping 5MB of data (thats Mega...

If they make it so that the driver is open sourced (a bad thing and a good thing - hackers could use it, for example, but companies could create a secured driver...) then it might be ok. As it stands, I'd not buy it.

Not even. Device serial number is all they would need, and of course that the driver for the chipset in the OS was enabled to look for the kill bit.

Those can work - he's got to run them without the OS loaded for best effect...

Y'all got me thinking... If I can find a board for an AMD PhenomII x4 (970) that has a similar enough layout.... I might just go all the way... Or get the 9450.... Oh, if I didn't have 2 kids in college....