Antec Performance P180B
I just got a new case for my PC, which i am currently (re)building, basically the only thing i will keep from the old one, is the hard drives. Since everything else have been replaced recently. And i am just awaiting more price drops on Quad core processors from Intel. Anyways, i got this 1000 Watt NorthQ silent PSU, which i will need for when i buy a new graphics card.
I fittede it in my new case from Antec, a P180-B which i really really like since the second i saw the mechanical drawing to it :)
I took some pictures as i unwrapped the case, forgot to take some during and after i sat in the NorthQ PSU. They will come later :)
All i need now is for my new hardware to drop sufficient in price, so that i wont have to go to bed crying over buying it too expensive :)
That should happen shortly, since Intel plans on the price for the Q6600 Processor to drop to 266$ during 2007 Q3.
Update: i honestly belive they have mistakenly sent me a P182 instead of a P180B since my new kabinet has all the features of the P182 that are “fixes” from the P180 =/ The box for it does say P180B though Look for yourself here.
Soundblaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS
I got my self one :)
No particular reason to why though, since i already had a nice and fully working Sound blaster Audigy 2 ZS. I think the main reason was the fact that the X-Fi had the 64 MB RAM on it, which among other things, allows it to free the CPU of some processing, plus i heard “rumors” about how inferior it was compared to the Audigy 2.
So, is it actually worth the money?
Well, if you asked me the day i got it, or even sometime the same evening, i would have said no, simply because of the hassle i had installing it. Its simply because the way Microsoft and creative choose things to be.
See, in the old days you had to manually assign a IRQ to a piece of hardware in your ISA/PCI ports but windows has taken over for this ow, which is a good thing, but Creative does not share Microsoft’s idea on how they can share IRQs.
Anyways what happened was that Windows Vista, which i use, wouldn’t “let go” of the Soundblaster Audigy 2 drivers, and when i finally manged to get it to forget them something was corrupted in the core somehow in vista so that it wouldn’t allow me to install the X-Fi drivers OR install the Audigy drivers!
This resulted in me having to reinstall Windows Vista. After which it worked like nothing ever happened. I installed the driver i got from creative.com and i got the full effect of the sound. I was like .. OMG is this possible ? i actually made a difference, i heard details in game i did not hear before ( Company Of Heroes in this case ) well, just everything was awesome. So now I’m thrilled about it :)
Project X
the other day i was surfing around various abandonwarez sites, and suddenly found my self on https://secure.team17.com/ where i found this awesome classic which i remembered playing on my Amiga 1200 somewhat 15 years ago!
I decided, what the hell, even though shipping cost more than the game, i needed to own an original copy of Project X, i remember the game for its insanely nice graphics ( at least it was 15 years ago :) ) and for its awesome soundtrack of synthesized music.
So, today was a smashing day, as postal services arrived with the long awaited package :)
Thermalright Ultra-120
Well, in short, i decided to go to a more silent way of cooling my CPU, since my old intel stock fan startede making quite a bit of noise when i fully used my CPU.
Anyways, i ordred a Ultra-120 from overclockers.co.uk since no danish retail stores had any home at the moment. Below youll find some pictures from the installment :)
So .. was it worth the money? Indeed .. the 19db from the Papst is nothing compared to the 45db or so the intel stock fan could produce. Also the idle temprature for the intel stock cooler was around 47 degrees celcius, now its more like 38. And working temprature with a closed case ( no air ventilation in it at all atm.=/ ) is still lower than the intel stock ever was :) Im very happy with it :)
