Vitalix

What motherboard do you have? You may want to check for new BIOS revisions as other people may have reported that issue and the mobo manufacturer may have fixed it in the most recent BIOS.

The way you have it should be fine. Typically, the manuals are wrong for some reason. Check on the website. I know for my eVGA NF41, the manual has it in reverse. If your slots are [A1 A2 B1 B2] then you want your slots to be in (A1 and B1) or (A2 and B2). They are usually color coded too. Try the A1 and B1 slots together, see if the motherboard beeps at you. There also may be a manual setting for dual channel mode on the mobo. If it is on, the mobo won't let you use A1A2 together. Also, if you are using 2 blades, change the memory command rate to 1T from 2T. You'll see a big difference.

Mine idles at about 32C, and at load (Prime95 for a couple hours) reaches up to about 46C on space heater (aka Prescott) 3.4E 478 pin CPU. You can touch the base of the HSF at any point (load or no load) and it's cold at idle, and barely warm at load. The heatpipes do a great job.

No, it will not work b/c it is DDR2. You want to stay with DDR memory, and the lower timings the better. Try to stay in the $140 range for 1GB of RAM. Your pleasure on the type of memory, some prefer OCZ, others Corsair, others Patriot or Mushkin. Just try to get timings in the 2-2-2-5 1T speeds at DDR400, or close to it (such as 2-3-2-5 or 2-3-3-6 for more of a budget). The AMDs react much better to tight timings then Intel processors. Going back to the X2 commentary, since Unclassified will be dropping some cash on this rig, why not futureproof yourself for a year or two by going X2? And the X2 will also help when regular applications (such as Photoshop or perhaps even Powerpoint) start having patches for SMP support since dual core and SMP is becoming much more mainstream now. Duallies/SMP were a specialty sector in the past. Now they are becoming much more common since they are in one chip for both Intel and AMD..

If you want total silence (and don't mind taking out the motherboard to load the backplate), the Thermaltake Big Typhoon is nearly silent and will cool anything to near water cooling levels. We call it the Hemi. Here's a one or two pics about it's install on my Soyo board.

The best value for a video card right now would be the 6800GS. The 7800GT is the best performer for the money. The minimum card I would go for is the nVidia 6600GT (whichever your pleasure for brand, but most prefer BFG, XFX, and eVGA). You don't want to go any less than that. Don't go ATI since you will not be be able to link them together (unless you go with a Crossfire motherboard). Definitely go with the 256MB memory, for future games and better eye candy at high resolutions. In the US, the 3800X2 and the ASUS board would cost you about $480 from Newegg.

I think many on this board will attest: don't skimp on the PSU! Especially with SLI. Otherwise your machine will get weird and reboot, freeze, and behave oddly periodically, with nothing in event viewer and playing the catch the bug game will prove almost impossible until you upgrade the power supply and *POOF* everything runs normal. I've been there, learned the hard way...

The video card is actually more important for gaming than the CPU. Will you be doing a lot of workstation stuff other gaming, or mostly gaming? Remember, the most important item when looking at video cards is not the memory, but the GPU chipset (e.g. nvidia 7800GT, 6800Ultra, ATI 800XT, etc.) the memory is only used for shaders and makes less of an impact than the actual GPU. Let me know if you will mostly game or mostly use other applications, and I will recommend what I think is best for you (let me know your limit on spending US$ as well).

The DFI will defnitely overclock, but there is nothing easy about it! You will spend a lot of time tweaking. If you are more casual and OK with a 20% overclock instead of a 45% overclock involving liquid cooling and memory dividers, go with the ASUS board. Between the board and CPU (if you go X2) you should be under $500. Get decent memory, don't go for the Valueselect stuff. Pick up $130 or so range 2X512 chips from either OCZ, Corsair, or Mushkin. You can also check the mem compatibility with Asus. You can go 2X1GB, but that is for the purist gamer (or someone who plays Battlefield2 alot -- I have 1GB [OCZ Plat Rev2 EL] and Far Cry, Half Life 2, FEAR, all run fine). What games are you looking to play? You can spend from $140-$800 on a video card.

So what happens when you put in the Windows XP disc? It does not boot, or it does not recognize the hard drive? The old OS will not boot b/c it does not know what the new IDE controller is (you may have had a Promise controller before, and now there is a Highpoint chipset controller).

I don't have SLI (just one card) but from what I've heard it's best to get the identical card (same model number and stepping) if available. If not available, I hear the next most importnat items are that the GPUs and memory size and type match.

First, what is your budget? Second, what is your video card? Third, how much do you like to tweak? If you go the Asus, Abit, or Giga, they are mostly plug and play, with some overclocking options. If you go the LANPARTY route, first of all, get the Expert model (better stability from what I hear), but BE PREPARED TO TWEAK for 2-3 weeks to get optimal settings. The LANPARTY SLI-DR is an overclocking banshee, but very particular with memory and how it is setup. You would have to goto DFI-street for directions to setup, but you can FSBs in excess of 400 with the DFI. THE DFI will let you change like 20 memory settings and give you up to 4V memory o/c (read: enough to fry anything not Winbond or Vx). The ASUS is widely considered the best OC board other than the LANPARTY, just easier to use. As far as CPU, I have the 3800+ X2, and I wouldn't trade it for anything! runs better than my duallie Xeon 2.8GHz before! First post? Welcome to the forums!

Man, how many FPS do people really need? I think at some point, it turns into pi55ing contest so just you could say 'my machine benches faster than your machine.' Is 266FPS in Far Cry really that much better than 80FPS? Beyond my vision. You have to be on crystal meth to tell the difference! I have a 7800GT (not even overclocked - best pricepoint card) and I don't plan on upgrading for 2 years at least. I would only go SLI if newer games down the road start dropping frames.

The hard drive is probably fine, but as a check, unplug it. You should get a boot disk or boot partition not found. If you get that error, then there is something wrong with the drive or the boot sector of the HD. If not, u may need BIOS upgrade. When the PC boots, can you hit <F2> or <DELETE> and get into the BIOS and play around? Is everything recognized in the BIOS settings correctly (e.g. memory, memory timings, CPU, temperatures, etc.)?

My decision are generally based on the 12V amperage. If you look at the top end PSUs, you'll see like 30A on the 12V rail on the OCZ 420W Powerstream. Compare that to a Powmax or another cheapie which boasts 580Watts, but has 20A on the 12V. You really get what you pay for. It's not the wattage, and in most cases not even the amperage, but the stability of the rails under load. Higher end PSUs don't fluctuate under heavy loads.

Funny you should mention this b/c I've noticed lots of 'enthusiast' people start selling their SLI boards (which are 8x in dual mode) for the 16x dual SLI speeds for the graphics cards (Such as the ASUS A8N32-SLI). I find that mind boggling. Even in dual mode at 8x on PCIE, the vid cards are maybe at 10% their bandwidth limit, yet they MUST have the 16x on each SLI slot!

Agreed. I heard socket M is going to use DDR3, the nextgen, and skipping DDR2 alltogether (essentially what Intel did to AMD with DDR2, even though DDR2 still performs crappier than DDR b/c of the horriffic 5-9-9-18 timings or whatever tr@mp looseness they have, IMHO).

Also confirm the BIOS version that you have supports X2. For the newer boards, they support it fine, but for some of the older ones (as early as September) you may need a BIOS update from the motherbaord website. Also, what power supply do you have? The 7800GT eats power. Now, when you say you upgraded the motherboard, video, and cpu, are you actually trying to boot the old hard-drive with XP installed? If so, that will blue screen everytime. What are you upgrading from?

Exchange 2003 on a laptop?? Yikes! We have a duallie Xeon with 4GB RAM and it's sluggish. VMWare and Vis Stud alone will need 2GB RAM. None of them are extremely CPU extensive, except SQL Server. I would get a light laptop for XP and Office and Vis Stuf, and get a separate box at home (via VPN or the like) for testing out your Exchange, Server 2k3, and SQL.

Hey guys and gals, Looking into my Exchange server (2003), I see that the System Volume Information folder has over 22GB of files, each one froom 180MB-500MB. Seems to happen at 7PM each night. Thought it was Shadow Copy service, but it's off! Now Veritas backs up our Exchange Server, and I think it may use the Shadow Copy. Starting to run out of space. Anyone familiar with either of these products? Not sure who to call; don't want to wreck Exchange, but don't want to stop backups either! Thanks in advance as always! Vitaly

The Athlon 64s run much faster than the Athlon XPs. I have an Athlon64 3800 X2, and that frequency is only 2.0GHz stock.

Try running just the DVD drive on its own IDE (take off or unplug the power to the CDRW) and see if it acts the same way.

Is it on its own IDE cable? Is it correctly jumpered as master or slave on the IDE channel? Do you have it in DMA mode on the IDE controller or PIO?

Nice, looks like it would take two 120mm fans. Where do these radiators typically go one the machine?

For these WC systems, you can just piggyback heatsinks to the video and northbridge sets right? With that the case, wouldn't one think you would need to piggyback a second radiator (if such is possible) with 4 devices being cooled? Or is the one radiator and fan enough to cool 2 vid cards, northbridge, and cpu?