The £400 Beige Monster

[theonetruewill]

Yeah, Royal Mail strikes today, so itll be here tommorow, or worse yet, Monday. I had some things coming for today (or so I thought) too...

Also, you, tkpenalty and I all have iGreen PSUs. D'you notice the noise going up under load, or is it muffled by everything else? Because it can get pretty noisy.
It's supposedly silent, but I can't say that's the case for me...

Anyhu, hope your X1900GT arrives tommorow, and have fun messing with the temp. card

Actually I found the opposite with my PSU. It's almost utterly silent at any load!
The funny thing is, my father works for Royal mail and has done so for over 25 years. Even he says it's crap. This card was Special delivery and was "supposed" to arrive yesterday, so I hoped it would arrive today.

 

[kwchang007]

Actually I found the opposite with my PSU. It's almost utterly silent at any load!
The funny thing is, my father works for Royal mail and has done so for over 25 years. Even he says it's crap. This card was Special delivery and was "supposed" to arrive yesterday, so I hoped it would arrive today.

i feel stupid, but what is royal mail?

 

[tkpenalty]

iGreen is noisy as shit, I prevented the noise by using a rubber and sandwiching it between the info side of the casing and the case itself... preventend the reasonance.... now its silent!

 

[Wile E]

iGreen is noisy as shit, I prevented the noise by using a rubber and sandwiching it between the info side of the casing and the case itself... preventend the reasonance.... now its silent!

If that's how you fixed it, it's not the psu that's noisy, it's the case.

i feel stupid, but what is royal mail?

UK's postal service.

 

[theonetruewill]

iGreen is noisy as shit, I prevented the noise by using a rubber and sandwiching it between the info side of the casing and the case itself... preventend the reasonance.... now its silent!

Mine really isn't. Not noisy at all - I would really say almost silent.

 

[Ripper3]

Well frankly, got some new headphones that completely cover my ears, I can now only hear the shrill voice of my mother when she's complaining or talking on the phone. With my PC under my desk it helps too.
Think I'll try to get some rubber to prevent vibrations I guess. Thanks for the tip tk.

 

[theonetruewill]

iGreen is noisy as shit, I prevented the noise by using a rubber and sandwiching it between the info side of the casing and the case itself... preventend the reasonance.... now its silent!

Sounds like the PSU wasn't being held well enough.

 

[tater]

i got the GIGABYTE GA-M55SLI-S4 motherboard yours is a notch or 2 above mine. I think the only difference is you have 1 ide controller i have 2 , you have 6 sata controllers i have 4

 

[theonetruewill]

I've found the board is very poor at keeping heightened voltages on the HT link and chipset consistent. Have you found this?

 

[tater]

i dont overclock so im not exactly sure what you just said

 

[theonetruewill]

i dont overclock so im not exactly sure what you just said

No problemo dude.

My X1900GT arrived!
3DMark06 - 5557 - anyone notice how many X1950Pro's this beats in 3d06
Clock speeds @ 708/810. This card's memory really does not like to overclock at all - gives me real difficulties. Although the HSF keep it icy cool.
http://service.futuremark.com/orb/resultanalyzer.jsp?projectType=14&XLID=0&UID=9943637

 

[theonetruewill]

Got some money together and bought another GB of ram. Supreme Commander was what convinced me that I really did need it. I just found that it was using all that was left of my memory after XP had nicked some, causing pagefile slowdowns- thus the purchase was completely necessary, a requirement if you will

 

[tater]

I keep trying to tell my mom that all my upgrades are required...She never seems to listen to my theory..O well

 

[mullered07]

well done mate took a whiler to get there but you should be happy, now just to find the £ to get a good case but i guess it wouldnt be the beige monster lol, and if you can at some point get 2*1gb ram nice 3dmark score though pc's pwn

 

[theonetruewill]

well done mate took a whiler to get there but you should be happy, now just to find the £ to get a good case but i guess it wouldnt be the beige monster lol, and if you can at some point get 2*1gb ram nice 3dmark score though pc's pwn

Yeah, my current case is a slight upgrade to the Beige monster but I want a new one. Maybe an Antec 900, but I do like the P180's (yeah ...if I had the £££) I probably should change the title at some point, but I like it!

 

[Wile E]

mod please delete this post...

You can delete yourself by clicking edit. Delete will show up as an option.

 

[tater]

You can delete yourself by clicking edit. Delete will show up as an option.

Thanks i accidently posted some information i had previousy posted in this thread

Anyways,

Antec 900's really arent that nice looking to me. except like everybody owns one lol

 

[theonetruewill]

Fricking heck! Supreme Commander is still bottlenecked by something - an I know it is the the CPU as reducing the resolution doesn't make a difference. However it has become less of a lagfest with the 1000+ unit patch and 8 players I am very pleased at the moement, although i had to reset the CMOS after installing the RAM as the computer failed to boot past the BIOS screen (which didn't fully load). After this and a bit more voltage to the DIMM's they sang happily away @ 715MHz.

 

[theonetruewill]

I'm getting some stuff off mullered07 in a couple of days so I'll have an excuse to open up this thing again and take some photos. It looks very different to the OP's pictures now.

 

[theonetruewill]

5793 - screw you X1950Pro's
- 2.84Ghz Athlon 4600+ X2
- 715/810 HIS IceQ3 X1900GT
- XMS2 DDR667 @ 808MHz 4.4.4.12-15
Finally got my memory working faster (lowered the multi). It refuses to do it any other way- it will just not be set @ DDR 800 speeds manually.
Better OC on my CPU too as a result too

 

[GraveFiller]

man u r a freak!
a 120Wpsu?
Your joking one!!

Lol, my pc i just retired looks like that piece of junk...Jk...kiddin here.
So what u doing man?
You never told me your going to build new rig...
Sup brah!

Project Completed​

To anyone who's interested I am going to attempt my first build as I finally have just enough funds to support it.

Although from the title of this thread you can see that the funds are not that much
However I am determined to prevail and I will try and document it and update this as much as possible and hopefully get some answers to some ineveitable problems that WILL arise

How can you make it for £400? I hear you say. How could you make it any good?

Well the answer is simple....I can't. No but seriously I'm considering this a constant work in progress and I will slowly upgrade it past its original form. (That case is going to have to go!) Remeber that I am also currently and have gamed on my laptop (see sys specs) so I'm used to not necessarily cutting edge performance.

The specs (atm) are:

some incredibly rubbish Jetway mobo
An AMD 1600XP
256mb DDR
Riva TNT
160watt PSU
CD rom drive(not R/RW)
20Gb 4100rpm HDD

It is going to be (hopefully)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Socket AM2 (And yes I am going to oc the hell out of it) EDIT: now X2 4600
Arctic Cooling (AC-FRZ-64P) Freezer64 Pro (because this case has crappy fans and the cpu would probably blow up without it)
Corsair (CM2X1024-5400C4) 1024MB, 4-4-4-12 (upgrade to 2Gb this when next cash injection arrives)
Gigabyte GA M57SLI-S4
Western Digital WD2000JS Caviar SE 200GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 8MB Cache£35.10
Linksys Wireless 54mbps PCI Adapter Card
Coolermaster eXtreme Power 500W PSU
ATI X850XT PE (upgrade to DX10 when they are cheaper and I have more cash - will probably give this to a mate who is running on SIS unichrome gfx ) EDIT: Inno3D 7600GT EDIT: upgraded to X1900GT

Have a good laugh at my expense at the case and current internals. I got it off my Gran - how humiliating

EDIT: Final Pricing after ordered
Price up so far
Cpu: £71.77
Mobo: £67
Gfx: £65
Case+PSU: £38 (made a deal for the two together)
HDD: £45
DVD: £23
RAM: £47

Total: £356.77

What a pwnage of a price! And proof that a gaming PC does not have to cost the Earth

3DMark06: 4309(with 7600GT)
3DMark06: 5793(with X1900GT)

 

[GraveFiller]

Dude, get the armor! Case!
It's sick man...
check out the pics

Yeah, my current case is a slight upgrade to the Beige monster but I want a new one. Maybe an Antec 900, but I do like the P180's (yeah ...if I had the £££) I probably should change the title at some point, but I like it!

 

[theonetruewill]

I am looking to get a new case- but the new build is now over 4 months old, lol. I built it a few months after really testing out the market and thoroughly researching my build to create a monster PC at a bargain-basement price. I hope I achieved that; it certainly is brutally fast.

 

[theonetruewill]

Just an update: Got an X1950XTX

 

[kwchang007]

Just an update: Got an X1950XTX

Congrats