Just ordered my new system through Ncix. I was putting together a new build this summer, but ended up cancelling my order after it was announced that the DX10 cards and the Quad core chips would be coming out in Q4 / 2006 instead of Q2 / 2007. I am really looking forward to running the Quadcore chip through the paces with 3DSMax and some of my other rendering programs. Who knows, it might even able to run Flight Sim X at low to medium detail levels. All the bits should be here early next week save for the Tuniq Tower heatsink. This beast of a heatsink made by Sunbeam is very hard to come by, and they say it will be around December 15th before they get their next shipment in stock. For a board I went with the new Intel Bad Axe 2 / Intel 975 board. Even though these don't seem to be able to reach the high FSB speeds reached by some of the Intel 965 or Nvidia 680 boards, it stability is rock solid, and this is the first board to have some beefed up power circuitry to handle the extra load of the Quad core chips. The average overclock for the Q6700 with this particular board seems to be around the 3.6 - 3.7 Ghz on aircooling - a full 1Ghz over stock speeds. Other than that, I opted for the 4 gigs of the Corsair Dominator modules with optional cooling fan that attaches to the chips. For video, I went with a single EVGA 8800GTX which should be more than enough to drive my Dell 2405 at its native res.

I can't wait for everything to get here... Will post some benchies when I get everything setup.

[This message has been edited by loafer87gt (edited 11-23-2006).]

Look's damn sweet to me!
Can't wait!

Here's hoping everything gets here before December 15th in time for my holidays. Speedwise, for rendering most benchmarks indicate it should be about 4.5 - 5 times as fast as my old 3.2 Dual Xeon workstation. At the end of the day, it should save me a lot of time at work. If I ever get some free time to play some games, it should also play a decent game of Doom too.

[This message has been edited by loafer87gt (edited 11-23-2006).]

I'd do 3 things differently:

1) I'd get two video cards (if the M/B supports it) for SLi

2) the second Hard Drive I'd make a 750 gig or larger. (I have too much junk on my comp)

and finally:
3) Ditch the floppy (a drive. Use a thumb (USB) instead.

Other than that it seems to be an awsome system.

S. Williams
Heck who am I to tell someone else how to fix up a computer when I still have a P133 mhz running w95 set up nearby LOL

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1988 Fiero Formula T-tops
CJB 143 of 1252 "factory T-top cars"

[This message has been edited by htexans1 (edited 11-23-2006).]

As far as the video cards go - the single 8800GTX should be more than enough to handle most programs in the near future. If it is does start to get long in the tooth, then I'll wait for the product refreshes to come out and then buy a second when the prices drop. Also, even through the 975 series of chipset unofficially support SLI through modded drivers, there are currently no hacked driver sets available that have support for two of the 8800 series of cards. For the hard drive, I am going to relegate my old dually Xeon to file server duty, and it has an extra 500GB of RAID 1 storage ready to use. In regards to the floppy, you would think that in 2006 that you wouldn't need one of these archaic devices, but you wouldn't believe how many motherboard and other device manufactuers insist on using floppies for BIOS updates. For 8 bucks, I figured its better to be safe than sorry and include one.