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*