Maxim

1 post and it's a thinly-veiled ad for a paid utility. And there's a whole bunch of techno-babble going on at the end of that first sentence. Please nobody buy this program. Handbrake gets my vote. It works for Windows and OSX and is totes free. Tons of options if you want to play with it but the presets work well if you just want to rip away.

ya? wait a few years. My oldest son is driving now and about to graduate HS this year. My youngest son is about to get his permit this year. One can grow a beard almost and the other has a little stashe' coming in. Talk about not being able to keep up. It sucks bro, enjoy those babies while you can because it comes faster then you think. I'm 22 and I can't grow a beard.

Aha! I knew you'd get the six core at some point! For all the video work you do I was amazed that you went with the quad-core initially.

Splinter Cell Maxim

32 man server...it's adaptive. Starts at 8 slots but expands as players join. Cool. I just bought the Digital Deluxe version and it finally finished downloading BF4 and the China Rising pack. There goes another 30GB of my SSD. Good thing I upgraded to a 512GB model. I'll give the campaign a play through and then join you guys next time you're on

I still need to get BF4. Maybe I'll pick it up this weekend and join you guys next time you're on. Is the server only an 8-slot server? If so, that seems bizarrely small for a Conquest Large server.

Damn. People got mad as hell because of the whole thermal paste thing. He did it according to the manual and used the paste that came with the blocks. It's applied that way for a reason; thin paste like that will spread way out under the mounting pressure of the waterblock. Non-conductive, non-capacitive paste like that could be slathered all over the card and not harm it at all. Steve, you still need to overclock this thing. You told me you had no reason to overclock before because you had enough performance and then you went and upgraded the whole rig with a new CPU and a 3rd card so I'm calling BS. I want to see what that 3DMark score looks like when all 3 of those cards are running at 1200 MHz+ and the CPU is OC'd. And I'm going to sit here and demand it over the internet because that clearly works. No but seriously. Pretty please.

He can always run DVI if his future monitors don't have DisplayPort. Dual-link DVI supports 2560x1600@60Hz. My 30" Dell is running off a DVI cable.

Seriously though, this thing is going to be a monster. Stupid jealous right now.

Damn it Steve. Why did you have to go and do that? Until I see some 3DMark scores I still consider my rig to be faster than yours! You no longer have a reason not to overclock this thing if you're putting it under water. Also, I know you love criticism. You should have gotten the 6-core and the Black Edition mobo. And some matching RAM.

you are overclocked to 4.6, mine is not. I THINK i might have the "turbo" setting at 3.8ghz. You also have a 3rd card. Our scores are pretty damn close, that is probably the difference. Don't make me go get that new DVI oil and put me over the top. Just put a little on the tip of the cable before plugging it in gets you 1000 3dmark points i heard LOL anyway, welcome to the 2% club The third card is just for PhysX. It doesn't affect the 3DMark score as 3DMark doesn't utilize PhysX. The CPU overclock definitely affects the score though. I haven't OC'd the GPU's yet. I might have to see if I can join the 1% club.

Looks like a Corsair K90: http://www.corsair.com/vengeance-k90-performance-mmo-mechanical-gaming-keyboard.html Cherry MX Red switches for the QUERTY keys, arrow keys, and number pad. Membrane keys for the macro keys on the left, the F-row, and the cluster above the arrow keys:

HAH! Looks familiar! I finally have you beat in 3DMark though! P18623: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6872209 X8680: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6872221 http://www.stevemeadedesigns.com/board/topic/172208-updates/

You're starting a wall build this weekend and you don't even have a design for the wall yet?

Double tubing probably isn't the best idea. It's not like the tube is going to split somewhere in the middle. If it's going to leak anywhere it would be where one of the tubes connected to one of the fittings, in which case double tubing would do you no good. It would only make it harder to bend. I got a kick out of this one. Turn that frown upside down! http://youtu.be/W2NUzaQrzCI

It wouldn't really matter whether you bought EVGA or ASUS cards for the GTX 690. All the vendors have the exact same design for the GTX 690 (Nvidia's reference). It just comes down to whose support team you have to talk to if a card dies. You don't even get any extended warranties or anything included. EVGA stopped offering lifetime warranties in the summer of 2011. You now get a 3-year warranty with the option to purchase an additional 2 or 7 years (making it a 5- or 10-year warranty). The extended warranty purchase must be made within the first 30 days after purchasing the card.

Motherboard must have at least 2 PCI Express x16 slots (most boards that support multiple cards have 3 slots). The monitors can be attached to whatever card you want on whatever connection you want as long as they support the resolution of the monitor. You can use HDMI for up to 1920x1200. If you're running larger screens you'll need to use DisplayPort or dual-link DVI to connect the screens. The cards used here are single chip cards so it's only 2 cards, not 4 (though those cards do exist, just very, very expensive). The advantage of having multiple cards is to increase the number of frames per second your computer can render to increase how smoothly games play at higher settings. For a 2-card setup each card renders every other frame. If you're playing at 60 frames per second with a 2-card setup the top card will draw frames 1, 3, 5, etc. while the bottom card draws frames 2, 4, 6, etc. Each card now only has to draw 30 frames per second instead of the 60 per second a single card would have to do. Because each card only has to do half the work it had to do before you can crank up detail settings and still keep that same smooth frame rate. For 3- and 4-card setups the same concept applies. Card 1 draws the first frame and then the next card draws the next frame and so on until you get back to the 1st card. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Great case choice! I was looking at getting that when I built my machine but $300 was too much to cough up for a case for me at the time. If I had Chicken's budget though... All the people suggesting stuff are starting to piss ME off and it's not even my computer. The parts he picked out are phenomenal and you can nit-pick all day but in reality this is damn near the fastest desktop money can buy right now. Yeah, there's a newer Intel processor. Yeah, quad 680's beat dual 690's in benchmarks. Yeah, there's faster RAM out there. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with what was picked out and once it's all under water and overclocked there's only going to be a handful of rigs on the planet that can compete with it. I'd pay money to see 4 things in real life: Steve's Tahoe Chicken's Hoopty This fucking badass computer N8's completed build log (with comments and suggestions from users)

#UD# is right. You can only use 2 GTX 690's in SLI due to the 4-chip limit (the 690 has 2 chips per card). The same limit applies to AMD's CrossFireX. 4 GTX 680's would theoretically outperform 2 GTX 690's due to their higher chip clocks but at 200+ frames per second it's not going to make a difference to anyone in the world. Plus the GTX 690's have the absolute upper hand in the BAMF category. The PassMark link that was posted is useless in this scenario. The benchmark only uses one of the two chips on the GTX 690 card. Given that the chips on the 690 are slightly slower than the chips on the 680 in order to cut power consumption (there's a limit on what one board can pull for power) it makes sense that the 680 would outperform one half of the 690. Can't wait to see this thing all built up! Pick a killer case Steve!

I'm still on the PC. BF3 is the shit. Though I never drive vehicles. When did you add the side monitors?

SMD's SMD's everywhere

I love Slender. I've only ever played it during the day. Can't bring myself to play it at night with the lights off. For those who don't know: http://slendergame.com/game.php

What kind of budget do you have?

If the CPU is a Pentium D 820 and the RAM maxes out at 2GB it's definitely not worth throwing any money into for a gaming machine. What kinds of games were you looking to play? You can build a nice mid-level machine for a few hundred bucks.

If the drive has issues booting into Windows and won't get into safe mode and I suspect a virus I pull it and run a scan from another machine. Saves the time of trying to work on the issue from the machine having issues.