Technical Rockabilly

For Christmas I asked for a few upgrades to my system. Only hoping to get one or two, I got them all! This is great. However, I will be needing a new motherboard to take advantage of the new CPU’s unlocked clock speed and multiplier. But here are some pictures:





The specs are:
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition
GPU: Nvidia Geforce 8800GT, 1600Mhz, 640MB
RAM: 2GB 804Mhz A-DATA
Mobo: MSI K9VGM-V *crap
HD: 2x 200GB Maxtor 7200 SATA in RAID 0
Cooler: Zalman 9500
Case: RaidMax Smilodon
PSU: 500w RaidMax

Mods: Added LED array inside the case for more blue lighting. Added holes to a 5.25 bay cover for the power control for the Zalman. Added a switch to same bay cover to turn off the two side door fans, and the HD fan for a “sleep mode.” The one sleeping being me. The side panel door fans are quite loud. I can think of other mods to apply, but this case is a beaut as is.

As far as software I have installed the following OS’s:
Main OS: Ubuntu 7.10
Gaming: Windows XP Professional
Experimental: Windows Vista (Business Edition), Gentoo, OpenSUSE 10.3

Performance is very nice. A simple benchmark test provided by Omac placed me above the Opteron 185 2.6 Ghz and just slightly below the E6600 Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz. With a render time of 7:47, I made it into the upper ring of machines. Below is the rendered image and my time.

I took a chance with smartpunk.com again and once again I get burned. The first order I placed with them in November of 2006, which I got in January of 2007… And shipping didn’t take 2 months… They are just slow or lazy. I called their CSR who told me it had been shipped in mid december… (a month and a half after I ordered it.) That was ghey. Anyways, I ordered something else yesterday, at the time it said “In stock and will leave the store in 3-4 business days.” “Ok.” I thought, I’ll buy it. I check the status today, and it’s on “BACKORDER”!!! Wtf is the deal with that?

Long story short, don’t buy from smartpunk.com they obviously don’t know what they have, when it should ship, or even if someone has ordered it. Booo!! I’m going to sleep now.