The system

So, here are some pics. Again, nothing too special:

- Biostar T-Series board; mATX, and happens to have a lot of cool BIOS overclock settings
- Pentium D 3GHz (dual-core with 2x2MB cache)
- cheap-brand CPU fan and heatsink (quiet and moves a lot of air, but I'm not convinced it's keeping the CPU as cool as it should, so I may upgrade)
- 2GB DDR2 6400 (1GB is G-Skill that I already had; the other GB from that pair died, so I saved the heatsink and put it on this new cheapie one)
- 512MB GeForce 7900 (from my stash)
- 320GB WD Caviar Green (from my stash)
- APower 420W mATX power supply (all the cables were pre-sleeved...sweet!).



Just for the hell of it, I threw in a pic of the case it's in right now. That was my first "daily driver" case mod; all I did was the top, though (the handles and blowhole, and there used to be a gold chrome grill over the blowhole; that black thing up there is my little 250GB external drive). It's not looking too impressive these days, but it's still a cool case. I took out the VFD in front for the shuttle build. The blowhole and the vents in the lower front sides used to glow red from the front fan LEDs, which was pretty cool. Anyway, the case got abandoned a couple years ago when I undertook a slightly more involved mod on a bigger case, which I'll see if I have pics of as well.

I'm happy with the way the new PC is performing so far, other than the relatively high heat (is 50C+ too much for a Pentium D? I'm kinda used to seeing around 40C). I know the Core2s are more efficient, cooler, have a faster FSB, etc., but they also cost about 3x what I paid for this guy, so I'll hold off and decide if I really need something better later on. This chip is easily enough for what I plan to do with this system. Rendering my model in Blender (pics when it's done, which will be soon, I think) is taking less than half the time it was on that old 1.8GHz Sempron I was using (it's just a basement machine :-P). The only other thing that's bugging me is that the BIOS seems to detect my 800MHz RAM as 533MHz (yes, the board is dual-channel...yes, they're both 800MHz...yes, I'm sure); looking into that soon.