3 weeks of intense research/what a relief!

I have never concentrated so hard on trying to make sure all my ducks were in a row in my life...

It lives!!

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Yeah, except looks like you need to clean up and organize a little bit.

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You are right! I spent the following day bringing back some semblance of order to this little lab. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have this bad lad up and chuggin'

specific applications have very specific dedicated build requirements.

Latency NOT!

 

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what are you going to do with it? send email? /kidding.

i see a modem and a graphics card. what's the other one?
what size are your drives? i noticed two of them.
where is the IDE cable?

 

OK, what is it?

 

You should rotate your CPU heatsink 90 degrees so that it blows the hot air out the back of the case, rather than up towards the top (or even worse, downwards towards the GPU). Unless of course you have exhaust fans on the top of the case.

 

Nice workmanship but why no water cooling?:shrug:

 

That heatsink will keep the CPU plenty cool. I had my q6600 overclocked to 3.2 GHz (stock 2.4 GHz) and running low 40's under load with one of those.

 

Good job electrafixtion. You officially made yourself a rig.

 

Now let's see some specifications!

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Thanks guys. I am really happy with this one. It's a DAW strictly for music multi track recording and editing. Working with large audio files is extremely demanding, but when you take that into the realm of real time, the demand on the dedicated system gets critically picky in terms of the hardware you use as related to the software you are using. Everything matters.

No IDE cables Leopold99, all drives are SATA. There are three of them total. 2) Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA in the upper hard drive cage & 1) Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS 300GB 10000 RPM SATA in the lower.

All three drives have very specific functions. There is also two Samsung writers in the upper bays.

Cosmic,
The cooling is so intense I had to hurry up and put the side covers on after firing it up. It's a fairly small room and it was starting to get chilly. That'll come in handy this summer!

I went with this specific Antec P180 case and matching power supply because of the low noise factor. The case has 3 tri-Cool fans. One out the top, one out the back and a dedicated fan in the lower case chamber which much more efficiently cools the signature series 850W power supply. The RAM which is CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 also has it's own dedicated cooler as you can see in the photo.

Idle Mind,
I went with a Q9650 & XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 120mm Rifle CPU Cooler specifically because of their combined performance/cooling relationship. The aforementioned RAM will allow me to efficiently overclock if I decide to in the future.

I deeply considered the i7 series CPU but they are pretty much useless at this point with respect to the software systems that I use. The i7 is very new technology and the manner in which information is distributed across it's architecture means that unless I am using a 64bit system with extremely intense preloaded memory applications, I would see no benefit. The i7 is also monstrously hot and requires a certified cooling system that's pretty noisy by comparison to this set up. i7s are the stuff though if you are working with 64bit memory intensive applications.

Thanks for letting me share this with you all. It means a lot to me and is actually the second complete system I have put together in the last three weeks to achieve this goal. The first one failed and had to be returned. That's when I realized that I would either a) have to by a pro build which are very expensive, or b) build my own.