Icarus Online.

Finally after months of putting money together and such i managed to get my computer running and it was well worth it.


Current Hardware is as follows.

Antec 1200 case with 1 extra fan on the side window.

Asus P6T SE Motherboard.

Intel I7 Nehalem 920 quad core (2.66ghz x8).

6GB G-skill ram @1600MHZ DDR3

Nvidia 9800GTX+ by Asus.

2X DVD Rw+ drives still running on IDE that i hope to replace at some point

Aerocool temperature and fan monitor which i have yet to master. (it's like setting up a VCR clock)

1x 250GB Sata drive running at 7200RPM.



At the moment everythings running fine. Their was alot of teething issues at the very start but now it's all been perfected and i know what to do when it comes to redoing all the system when i replace the HDD next month.

In the meantime i've just been toying around with it and seeing how far i can push it, so far it's taken every game and played it on max without a problem, then again the most modern game i have is COD4 and all other games i have were bought in the past. Gonna get Crysis back from my friend but i think that's where the cards going to stop destroying my games.



The Asus P6T SE is an excellent board with lots of cool features, i had a look around Express gate and it looks pretty nifty, not really for me as i like playing games but i would'nt mind something like that at all on a notebook.

The bios is pretty sweet as well with full access to everything that you need to overclock.

After I installed windows i put all the Asus software in and updated everything. Turbo V and Gamedoctor (i think thats what it's called) offer you the ability to overclock right their and then.

The one to overclock the graphics card came up on start up and my dad decided while helping me to ram everything up to it's max which prompted a panic lol.

The 9800 GTX+ is an amazing graphics card as well and i'm truely impressed with it, i'm not sure on the FPS of some games at the moment but i will post them on the blog in my sig if anyones intrested when the time comes.


On the other side of the coin i had some issues which resulted in me refusing to sleep for 3 or 4 days, pulling some of my hair out and generally wanting to cry at the hopelessness of it all.

First issue was the sound which took a night to work out, basically the only monitor spare round here was a 5 year old TFT which just looked terrible, so i just hooked it up via the HDMI to my TV and wired the SPDIF into the GPU but no sound went through, i eventually found in the bios that you have to set the sount output to SPDIF, worked fine after that.

My biggest issue was with some games, Specifically Fallout 3 and Bioshock, i posted in another thread but basically the issue involved the Asus software conflicting with the games, after taking all the software out and putting offical Nvidia drivers on the comp for the graphics it all started working.

I also had issues with my wireless internet card which annoyed me to the point of destroying the card.

Spending over a grand on a computer, i'd like to think i'd get more than 1KPS on the net.

i ended up getting an ABIT wireless card which works perfectly fine, not bad for £15 and a quick walk to Kustom.


All in all i'm happy, only thing bothering me is that i've filled my hard drive but it's not a big issue.


I have to give my sincere thanks to Graeme and Steven in at Kustom for all the advice they gave to me and supplying me with the parts to finally get it all running, you guys on the forum, and my friends who have helped me out too. I don't think i coulda done any of this without you.


*is finally happy that his gaming computer isnt running on a pentium 4 on a 478 socket*

Now with the processer.

Well I still haven’t got a motherboard , I really should evidently, I am getting their though, I got my processer today from Kustom PC in Ayr, who I can’t recommend enough, the amount of information and help I get from them is invaluable. Anyway here’s a list of what I’ve got so far.


• Antec 1200 case
• Antec Quattro 1000 watt (1 Kilowatt) power supply unit
• Aero Cool FP-1 Memory card reader/temperature and fan monitor
• I’ve got a few sata hard drives lying about and one pata randomly, so I’ll be using one of them.
• A high speed DVD burner not sure on the details of it
• Intel Nehalem i7 920 running at 2.66 GHZ with 8MB smart Cache (basically it’s still at stock)


Still to get

• Motherboard (Foxx Conn renaissance)
• RAM/Memory (not sure on that yet)
• Graphics card (still haven’t decided on that one yet either, possibly a Nvidia GTX 285)
• A better CPU cooler as I intent to over clock it to 4GHZ

I’m looking forward to getting this all online, I’ve got a friend building one with a gigabyte motherboard and I’ve got 2 other friends who plan to start building one’s soon so it’ll be interesting to see what personal touches each other has and also I want to see what a lan party’s like with it.

I still need to get round to taking pictures and unboxing videos for anyone that wants it.

Again any advice is appreciated and please drop a line
The speed of this getting built is all down to how quickly I get my travel money from college backlogged, once I get that then I should be able to get everything in one

Stay frosty and good hunting everyone

Just a quick update

The motherboard didn't arrive when I had expected due to a stock shortage, at the moment the way things are I cancelled it to get my money back just in case they went into administration or some nonsense and I got ripped off of 300 duckets

however every cloud has it's silver lining, I was browsing about and I found Foxconns new board renaissance which supports quad SLI and quad crossfire and sports the x58 i7 architecture along with 4 x PCI express (generation 2) x 16 slots, it's also slightly cheaper so I’m probably going to end up going for that one.

also due to the business with scan and the gigabyte board they've not only given me a full refund but have also given me my next delivery from them totally free, I just have to ring them up and give them a code, which I thinks great considering they use private couriers, so I’ll probably wait till the end of this month, or if I sell my PS3 and order my motherboard and CPU in one along with memory, then that just leaves the graphics card since I’ve already got hard and optical drives going about


the decision I haven’t made however is what graphics card to go for, I know everything becomes obsolete very quickly in the computing world, I have a friend who got the GTX 280, then a fortnight later the 295 was announced,

Originally I was going to get a cheap 30 quid 8400 or 8600 Nvidia just so I could boot it up and do the usual stuff but now I’m thinking about shelling out on a 280/285 since the price is coming down hard. I’m not sure it's still 50/50 with me at the moment, also depends if I decide to get a 4GB stick of ram.


Again any advice is more than welcome and much obliged, I still need to get pictures up of the case and PSU and maybe even start a video playlist on YouTube for you

So drop a line and I’ll get back to you

Malcolm

The Icarus project

Hey there, I’m doing this as a bit by bit log of the construction of my computer system,
(codenamed: Icarus), I've got it planned out to be a high end gaming/over clocker rig. I plan to have it booted up inside a few months, (I’m a student, so moneys not in great surplus) I’m using the at the moment new i7 core architecture for this build. Any other questions/suggestions feel free to comment and I will get back to you, I’ve got a few of the parts already and I will upload some pictures. At the moment I’ve been using kustom PC in Ayr for my parts and they’ve been very helpful, also had to use scan to order my motherboard which should be arriving in a few days, anyway that’s all folks, feel free to comment and wish me luck with this, Cheerio.

Malcolm