Last week I ordered the parts needed to build two quad-core PCs.  On Saturday the parts arrived but I didn’t get around to building anything until today (the weather was nice …).

I’ve not finished building yet but here’s a sneak peek at what’s going into the systems:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
  Four cores, each running at 2.4GHz.  The version I bought is the newer 95W G0 stepping which makes it cooler and better suited to overclocking.
• Asus Striker Extreme
  This has the NVIDIA 680i chipset and is packed with numerous cool features.  The downside is that it’s not the easiest motherboard to set up.
• 4 x 1GB Corsair XMS6400 DDR2 800MHz
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB DDR4
• Western Digital Raptor X
  It’s only a 150GB drive, but it’s 10,000 RPM and has an access time of 4.5ms.  In other words, it’s blazingly fast!
• Corsair HX520 PSU
  A system like this needs a decent quality PSU.  The 520W Corsair PSU is not only nice and stable but has some beautiful features such as modular cabling to keep things tidy.  If I was planning on going SLI/CrossFire I’d probably go for a bigger PSU, but for the configuration I’m planning, this is more than enough.
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
  I really don’t like the stock coolers that come with Intel CPUs (of with AMD chips for that matter, but I haven’t bought one of those in ages …) so I replaced them with something better.

So far, I’ve got one system to life – and the process was much easier than the Asus support websites and forums had lead me to believe that it would be.  I’d expected the process to be a real pain but in fact, the process was so easy that all I had to do was shove in the parts and turn the system on and it worked.

More soon!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 16:40 and is filed under Kit!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.