fellow at'ers, just got to brag and share my excitement! after months of sitting on the fence, reading a million reviews, and generally being stuck in analysis paralysis, i finally bit the bullet and ordered the following last friday:
Thermaltake Xaser III, black, with window
Thermaltake 480Watt PSU with fan control
Abit IC7 mobo
Intel P4 2.4C
Thermaltake P4 Spark 7 with fan control
2x Corsair 512MB XMS PC-3200C2PT (2-3-3-6-T1), Silver HS
Seagate 160GB 7200rpm SATA HD, 8MB Cache
i wasn't expecting to get anything yesterday, but when i got home there it all was! let me tell you, this case is awesome! i can't imagine ever upgrading after this - it's huge and has every feature known to man. my ONLY complaint is that the placement of the stock window is lame - it's basically centered over the middle of the case, so you can't get a good look at the cpu or the pci cards - the main things to show off in my opinion. anyway, i can always mod that later.
i love the packaging of the abit board - really professional, they put some work into it. it's not a huge deal, but it's kinda fun to open the box and see all these goodies nicely displayed and waiting to be played with! sorry, haven't actually tried running it yet so no perf. numbers to share.
anyway, i'm VERY psyched about this system. i've been an amd fanboy for years but now that i've switched to the dark side it may be hard to go back - after everything i've read about the p4-c's i'm sure i'm going to be blown away by the performance of this setup. anyway, i'll post results here once i get everything installed and running.
btw, i've got a couple of questions, hope someone can answer:
- regarding my sata drive, i want to set this up as the primary. i understand i will need to sata driver disk to install winxp, but what about running DOS? i usually put a dos install on my first partition so i don't have to boot from floppy to do bios updates & other DOS-only things. but in this case i'm wondering if DOS will even be able to recognize the drive to install itself!
- stupid question, but something that's bugged me for a while. whenever i get a new mobo it always seems like the back panel adapter has some metal prongs which block some of the holes the ports are supposed to stick thru. i'm guessing that these prongs are there to prevent you from using the ports in question, however, why the hell would you want to do that? the ports are part of the basic motherboard functionality; blocking them only robs you of this functionality! for instance, in the case of this board, the io panel had prongs which would block the mouse, mic in, and firewire ports on the board. to fix this it's easy to bend the prongs back, but i'd still like to know why they are there in the first place.
that's all, thanks for letting me brag, and thanks for all the great advice - at forum rock!
-joe
Thermaltake Xaser III, black, with window
Thermaltake 480Watt PSU with fan control
Abit IC7 mobo
Intel P4 2.4C
Thermaltake P4 Spark 7 with fan control
2x Corsair 512MB XMS PC-3200C2PT (2-3-3-6-T1), Silver HS
Seagate 160GB 7200rpm SATA HD, 8MB Cache
i wasn't expecting to get anything yesterday, but when i got home there it all was! let me tell you, this case is awesome! i can't imagine ever upgrading after this - it's huge and has every feature known to man. my ONLY complaint is that the placement of the stock window is lame - it's basically centered over the middle of the case, so you can't get a good look at the cpu or the pci cards - the main things to show off in my opinion. anyway, i can always mod that later.
i love the packaging of the abit board - really professional, they put some work into it. it's not a huge deal, but it's kinda fun to open the box and see all these goodies nicely displayed and waiting to be played with! sorry, haven't actually tried running it yet so no perf. numbers to share.
anyway, i'm VERY psyched about this system. i've been an amd fanboy for years but now that i've switched to the dark side it may be hard to go back - after everything i've read about the p4-c's i'm sure i'm going to be blown away by the performance of this setup. anyway, i'll post results here once i get everything installed and running.
btw, i've got a couple of questions, hope someone can answer:
- regarding my sata drive, i want to set this up as the primary. i understand i will need to sata driver disk to install winxp, but what about running DOS? i usually put a dos install on my first partition so i don't have to boot from floppy to do bios updates & other DOS-only things. but in this case i'm wondering if DOS will even be able to recognize the drive to install itself!
- stupid question, but something that's bugged me for a while. whenever i get a new mobo it always seems like the back panel adapter has some metal prongs which block some of the holes the ports are supposed to stick thru. i'm guessing that these prongs are there to prevent you from using the ports in question, however, why the hell would you want to do that? the ports are part of the basic motherboard functionality; blocking them only robs you of this functionality! for instance, in the case of this board, the io panel had prongs which would block the mouse, mic in, and firewire ports on the board. to fix this it's easy to bend the prongs back, but i'd still like to know why they are there in the first place.
that's all, thanks for letting me brag, and thanks for all the great advice - at forum rock!
-joe