Has anyone upgraded!!!

[Slightlyoff]

I've been looking at the latest MoBo's, Processors, and Vid cards
and some of this stuff looks rightously impressive to the point I'm thinking about making another pute, albeit expensive still but I thought I'd see if anyone here has tried any of the following:

ATI Radeon X600-700 vpu Vid chipset (these use the PCI Express slot)

any MoBo that utilizes the new (Intel 925x chipset) PCI Express graphics slot (if someone could give me a realistic idea as to whether this is truly better then the AGP slot)

any of the double processor mobo's (they take slower processors but supposedly run as fast or faster then a 2.8E Intel processor) which is supposed to cut down heat generation

The newest Intel 4 3.4EE processor with the L3 cache (if theres any overheating problems; specifically) (LGA775 socket)

or if anything you've gotten lately that you have found to be truly impressive, I'd love to hear about it

Thanks

[Elvtin]

Hrrmmmm... the last upgrade i did was to a liquid cooled case.. and that was a year ago.... :)

[Slightlyoff]

annnnd? whatcha think?

[Elvtin]

of my liquid cooler case? Oh it's pretty cool! Very quiet for the most part.. has 3 settings for the fan's on top... it's pretty heavy though.. I would say it's around 50+lbs and thats with nothing in it... I'm cooling my CPU, Vid Card and 2HD's with it atm.. gonna hook the Motherboad up to it here soon sometime... But it run around... 100-110 degree's when i run games... but i have poor circulation in the room and it get's hot in there... So thats pretty tight..

[Riddick]

Ask Roo about upgrades, I hear he has to upgrade the box hosting these forums almost daily just to support Elvtin's sig. :hump:

[Slightlyoff]

I figured if I posted I wouldn't just get one persons opinion about some of this stuff...as theres LOTS of neat stuff out there.

Elvee's sig is gonna get longer when WOW comes out :p

[Rooster]

I've already posted once about Elv's sig. I shall have to beat him across his head if he doesn't shorten it.

I haven't done any dual-CPU's lately, probably not really worth it (unless you're talking very application specific stuff here).

I did build a friends box recently:

AMD 64 3000+
AMD X800 Pro (AGP)
1GB PC3500
74GB Raptor II (10kRPM SATA150)

It's OMG fast. :)

I would steer clear of the dual CPU and go for a better video card in your case.

You're probably not going to see a bump in speed going to PCIe, but it's better for "futureproofness" - which is always a good thing.

[Slightlyoff]

So what do you think of the Raptor 10k SATA..that was something else I was looking at I would think getting rid of at least some of the ribbon cables would neaten up the box and the increase in rotation is definately something I want but I've personally never used the SATA connections on the mb's do you see any overall difference between SATA and the Ribbons?

[Rooster]

SATA has faster throughput & burst rate + lower cpu overhead (it's already small).

The Raptor screams. Don't bother going for 2 in a RAID0. In raw benchmark's it's drool worthy - but in real life apps & game benchs, like 1% difference. :(

[Tammarion]

Elvtin needs a scrolling sig :D

[Slightlyoff]

Some of the mobo's are claiming wireless ethernet, I don't know if they mean capability or if its actually on board, but I was thinking that would be a whole lot nicer then running cables through the entire house (Ive never networked so now were getting extremely experimental on my part) :p

[Rooster]

Probably not worth paying the extra bucks for having it on board. You can't upgrade that.

Just get a wireless NIC.