Baby Gaming Rig gets Liquid Cooling and an 8-core brain

I did a couple of updates over the weekend and more than just video cards. The baby gaming rig I bought off a co-worker also went under the knife and came out with some new parts. A buddy helped me make some pretty hefty changes. If you recall, that was a Phenom X4 965 Black Edition which had excellent speed and I stuffed it chock full of 32GB of ram. Well, everything was right with the world and I was having a fine time playing Call of Juarez … Until … The AMD FX 8350 8 core processor went on sale. I’d already bought the liquid cooler for it and since we were going to be in there anyway, why not turn up the processor speed to 11? And so we did. The old fan and processor came out and the 8-core and liquid cooling went in. We had far less trouble this time around. Everything made a lot more […]

8 Cores, Liquid Cooling and now NVIDIA SLI

I’m still making some final adjustments to the 8-core machine I put together a few months ago. I recently added the liquid cooling to the AMD FX 8350 CPU that I put in and I also got my hands on another EVGA GeForce GTX 600 video card. Now, these aren’t the most powerful cards in the world, but they do support two-way SLI and are very affordable. They’re good gaming cards, at least for the stuff I play, they’ve got the CUDA cores which makes them good for encoding video and like I said, they’re a good price. So, I put two of them together on my Gigabyte motherboard. Now, if you look at this picture closely, you can see my festive 32GB of ram, the Corsair liquid CPU cooler and that I committed one of the classic blunders when putting the cards in. The second card is in the wrong PCI Express slot. There are 4 – 2 PCIx16 […]

And then I brought home a mini gaming rig

When you work in the IT field it’s inevitable to come across that "one guy" who lives on the bleeding edge of technology and buy all manner of gizmos just to toy with them for a short time before tossing them aside for the next "shiny" object. I work with such a guy. He likes the thrill of the hunt. The excitement of building or using something. Long term relationships do not apply. This explains how I have a new gaming rig. While it may not be the most powerful thing in the gaming realm, it’s actually pretty decent and is working like a charm. The heart is an AMD Phenom X4 965 Black Edition. It rides on a lower end, but decent Gigabyte GA-78LMT motherboard that sports plenty of USB ports and SATA ports. It also allows for 32GB of Ram and can run two video cards in SLI. It also has a Cooler Master 500 watt power supply. […]

AMD 8-Core 5Ghz

AMD has belted out a new series of chips, the 9000 series (FX-9590 to be specific), which will clock in at the 5Ghz mark. That is insanely quick, especially since this is an 8-Core processor. I’ve got the FX 8350 4Ghz Black Edition and that’s a blazingly fast chipset on it’s own. This will best me handily. It’s hard to think of what you can do with all that speed and power. This certainly goes beyond a couple of games or encoding a couple of DVDs. That is some big league gear right there. The chip is scheduled for a "late summer" release and who knows how much the damn thing will cost. No matter what, it’ll be thousands cheaper than the Intel equivalent. I have no plans to upgrade, but I do have a buddy who’s looking to build a new machine. I wonder if I can talk him into making a build with this new chipset at the […]

The AMD FX-8350 4Ghz Black Edition

Today I’ve put the finishing touches on the fastest machine I’ve built to date. I’ve put together a brand new AMD FX 8350 Black Edition running at 4 Ghz with 32GB of ram. I’ve outfitted this new rig with 6TB of hard drive space, a DVD Burner and Blu-Ray writer as well as 256GB SSD. I also included an NVidia GTX 630 video card with 4GB of ram. It’s all wrapped up in massive case by Silverstone and I installed Windows 7 Professional as my OS. And let’s not forget there’s a 1000 watt power supply giving life to my new creation. And what do I plan to do with this? Well besides the obvious answer of any damn thing I want, it was indeed built to hand Virtual Machines. It will easily handle the task of running a couple of server systems simultaneously. Plus, it has enough juice to do some decent gaming in the off season. I also […]