jcarle

By the way, I was checking at prices and the hard drive is cheaper at ZipZoomFly, $175. The case is cheaper at Provantage at $81.02. And the DVD+/-RW is cheapest at mwave.com at 115.00. The connections you're talking of, the ones on the front of the case, the cables are actually part of the case. Everything is pre-installed in the case and all you have to do is match the cables in the case to the connectors on the motherboard. When you get to that step, there are instructions that come with your motherboard in it's manual, and we can walk you through the specific details of actually pluging in your power/reset switch, power led, hard drive led, as well as your front USB, audio and firewire ports.

You've made some great choices for your parts. That will garantee you a powerful machine with a long life that you will really enjoy. For your DVD+/-RW the only one I could recommend would be the Plextor PX-716SA. It's a great burner technically, but you HAVE to use good media such as Verbatim with it, or else you'll get bad burns. It's not as forgiving on low quality media as Pioneer is. And in regard to the case, it looks great, but honestly, I reconize the manufacturing and the power supply manufacturing. Add to that the price and I can say only this. The case LOOKS great and will do just fine, you may be very happy with this case BUT if you DO get this case, then for your sake, CHANGE THE POWER SUPPLY. I can't stress that enough. I just would hate to see you build yourself such a nice machine only to have it blow up in your face (literally) due to a low quality power supply. And if you do get this case and you do buy a quality power supply such as an Enermax or an Antec, then after you remove the cheap one and before you put the nice one in, weight the two and you'll see what I'm talking about. The cheap one will weight nothing and the good one will weight a hefty amount.

I agree 100%.

In my experience, the stock heatsink is just fine. However, if you're concerned about heat, you could always go for something like the CoolerMaster AquaGate R120. NeoSeeker's Review will give you a bit more overview on it.

Retail means it will come in a nice box with the company's logo. Some nice little pictures on clean white paper showing you the things not to do with your hard drive, such as running it inside your bathtub. It will come a with a helpful CD that requires you to have you drive running for you to see the tutorial on the CD that tells you how to get said drive running. And all those other wonderful things. OEM is just the part. No frils, no packaging, just raw part. I do however suggest that you buy ONE thing retail. That would be the processor. Don't buy an OEM processor, get the retail version because it comes with the official fan for the processor. And honestly, it does the job just fine unless you want to start overclocking. The difference in MHz is too small, you would be better off with the 2MB of cache for such a small difference in clock speed. As for the J at the end of the processor, it's wether or not the processor supports the NoExecute function. Basically, NoExecute makes it possible for the operating system to mark areas in memory that are exclusively used for data storage and prevent any program from running out of that part of memory. Hence where all the buffer overflow security issues keep coming from. If you can get a J, I'd recommend it, however don't sacrifice speed just for a J.

You're right, that's not a bad price. Though I'm unsure of the quality of the monitor. The video card is nice though. As for the DVI connection, DVI-D connections will fit on DVI-I connections, but not vice versa. If you look at the connectors here, in this guide, you will see that DVI-D is missing four of the pins that DVI-I has. So if can plug a DVI-D plug in a DVI-I socket, but you cannot plug a DVI-I plug in a DVI-D socket.

Make sure simple file sharing is enabled on HIS machine. Then unshare everything and re-share it.

HIS permissions are not set correctly.

Damned. That's some fine work the guy did on his baby.

I'm going to trick out my laptop with LEDs. Right now, it's just an ordinary Lattitude C610, but I'm going to add LEDs around it and make it glow in the dark.

@Zxian - I shall adopt you as my new pet.

Even an overclocked ATI X850 doesn't run 100W of power. The only reason you'd ever need 500W of power is for a combined load of a lot of components. No single component should justify a 500W power supply, but the combined total of the quantity of hardware (and the type) should dictate the power supply needed. I can build a P4 based machine on a 250W power supply, if I use everything on board (including video) and have a single hard drive and a single optical drive.

SLI is about to die off just as fast as it came onto the market. It costs too much to build SLI machines, and the technology is too young, not many people want to get into it. Or if they do, not by very much. The trend is changing instead to create video cards with dual GPU on the same card instead of SLI solutions. ATI and nVidia are both developing new dual GPU video cards.

I have a BEFSR41 Cable/DSL Router with Integrated Four Port Switch, I have a WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster, I have two EZXS55W EtherFast 10/100 5-Port Auto-Sensing Switches and I have two WPC54GS Wireless-G Notebook Adapter with SpeedBooster. Never had any problems with any of it. People I know that have Linksys products don't have problems. But anyone who has a NetGear, D-Link or some no name product, keeps having problems.

"A man's case is always up to his style and no one can pick that for him."

In ASUS, the A8N-E is the definite choice.

If you look at the CPU Support page at Asus.com, you'll see if a new motherboard revision is needed for a new processor that comes out. However, most of the time motherboard revisions are released without anyone really knowing about it. The only way to know what the current motherboard revision is for a particular board is to call or e-mail Asus directly.

By the way, thought I'd show you the next power supply I'm buying for the media server I want to build in my living room. It's the Antec Phantom 500. It's so beautiful and so quiet.

Power supplies adjust themselves to the equipment connected to them. That's why they're called automatic switching power supplies. The wattage rating of a power supply is it's peak power output possible. To get a better idea of what kind of wattage you need, you can use this Wattage Calculator to get some aproximate numbers based on real world power ratings of common components. My suggestion if you're going to be buying these parts over a period of time of more then a month is to buy them in order of least likely to change to more likely to change. What do I mean by change? Well change in price, change in product revision, change in availability and change in new items of the same type. For example, a 400W power supply is likely to be the same price, quality, availability, revision and technology in a year from now then today. The power supply you buy today at 400W may very well likely be the exact same power supply at the exact same price in a year. Nothing changes very much in power supplies. The same with cases. However, the ASUS P5WD2 Premium you buy today at Revision 1.00 may be up to Revision 1.02 in 3 months from now. The same with optical drives. Say you want a specific optical drive that burns DVD-R at 8x, the same optical drive but one generation later may be available in 4 months from now that will burn the same DVD-R up to 12x or 16x. Here is my suggestion in which order to buy components for a computer when the components are bought over a period of time that exceed a month. The following is in order from least likely to change to most likely to change along as to why I think their position is where it is. The first item to buy is listed first, at the top. Keyboard & Mouse - Nothing new for keyboards and mice ever since optical mice and wireless technology. Price is steady. Case - The ATX standard is not likely to disappear anytime soon. Price is steady. Power Supply - Current market power supplies will be good for at least a few years before new requirements come around for them. Price is steady. Monitor - Price keeps dropping, but not very fast. Video Card - Price drops, but not too fast. New technology, but not at breathneck speeds. Hard Drives - Hard drives are always getting cheaper and bigger. Processor - Processors are not being developed in as fast a pace as they used to, but price is always dropping steadily. Optical Drives - Optical drives are constantly improving, new versions of the same drive come out frequently nowadays. Memory - Memory has a history for being one of the fastest price droppers when it's a new type or a new speed. Motherboard - Motherboards always go through revisions. The higher the revision, the less likely you are to have problems with the board.

I'd like to mention that a switch will allow full duplex operation. And that a lot of modern routers have integrated switches (at least the good ones do).

Very nice. I remember "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." But I always understood to mean "By my fault, my very own fault."

If you plan on sticking with the basics, meaning motherboard/cpu/memory, video card, one to two hard drives and one to two optical drives, then a 350W power supply should be sufficient. Though if you can, 400W would be ideal for your machine. Just remember, you're better off buying a reliable quality 350W that's more expensive, then a poor quality 450W even if it's cheaper.

I'm glad it's working for you. Linksys makes good products and I was very suprised to see that you were having so much trouble with their product.

I know what RTM is, but what's GDR?

You should be eligible for Linksys technical support, no?