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I know that Deathawk will enjoy this thread. I hope a few others do as well.

Here's the deal. I'm going off to college next year, and I need (well, want) a brand new kickass PC that tears through everything without breathing hard. The sucker is going to cost me $3500-$4000 (just once in my life I want the absolute best money can buy). As an early Christmas present, my mother decided to buy me the SST-TJ07-BW case by Silverstone. This thing is absolutely wonderful, and I'll tell you why. I can sum it up in three words: strong, classy, and beautiful.

Oh, and this thing is big. Here you can see it dwarfing my brother's old HP tower:


If you have any doubts about size, forget them. You can see the ruler on the motherboard tray here (a 12" ruler with room to spare from the back to the front 5.25" drive bays):


I'll be sure to update you regularly as I decide on parts to buy. Here's how it's looking so far though:

1. Quad-core Processor (4x4 or QX6700)
2. 2 or 4 GB of DDR2 800 Ram
3. 320GBx2 7200rpm hard drives in Raid-0
4. Dual graphics cards
5. Liquid cooling
6. Dual DVD-Burners
7. X-Fi Premium Sound Card
8. NVidia TV Tuner Card

College... I wonder if I'll have enough money by then to buy myself something like this. Doubt it. Well, I'll be watching!

7200GB hard drives, eh? Lemme know where I can get one

College = Laptops > Desktops, by far.

The ability to move your computer along with all your data and information becomes invaluable when you go study, do a presentation or any other computer related work.

Thats huge and awesome. I wanted to do this too, but no time or money. I am just gonna stick to my laptop for now. Good Luck on pimping out your computer.

Whatchoo talk'n 'bout?

If the R600 is significantly better than the 8800GTX, I'll be getting that. However, I'd actually like to stick with only a single card solution to cut down on power (those high end graphics cards take 225-300 watts of power each) and cost ($650 is still a lot of money). I'm so clumsy though. I accidentally pushed the Silverstone case onto the HP a few minutes ago. After cursing very loudly, I picked it up. Not a scratch on the SST-TJ07 case, but there is a HUGE dent in my HP case. The SST-TJ07 is an absolute beast.

4x4 will have four cores, but technically it will be using two dual core processors. It costs a bunch too, you might be better off using a single processor, really depends on whats out there.

4gb is good but there is more to RAM than size.

HDDs look good.

Dual graphics cards isn't what I would recommend now, or the arrivals of the r600. Overkill. Get one, when you actually need more power, get another.

Liquid cooling sounds cool, but you should do your research on it. Don't get the bigwater, just trust me on that one. The pump doesn't pump for crap. Or you can just buy everything yourself, but requires a bit of knowledge

Dual DVD burners, yeah okay standard.

X-FI, if you're an audiophile, okay, but do you need it? 100 dollars can be spent wisely somewhere else ~.~

Personally, I like brands like Hauppage when it comes to tuner cards.




Also, Silverstone makes very nice cases, high quality, along with their high performance fans, which I think are the best fans.

I would post pictures of my computer and area if I had a working camera. I have a nice setup going on:p PS: just got my arctic cooler freezer 64, only got it because of the sale, I have no actual use for it till December ~.~

Actually, I'm going to replace all the fans with super quiet and high performance Scythe S-Flex fans. This is my CPU Cooler of choice: product link

I'll probably go with a tide water or other VGA cooler for the R600/G80.

I'm not sure about those fans, but silverstone's higher performance fans move A LOT of air, I mean a lot, like the 120mm ones have a cfm rating of like 117, but I'm not sure how loud they are.. As long as it's not Vantec though, it's good

With liquid cooling, I'm not looking to push as much air. The Scythe S-Flex fans are silent, and they still push a really good amount of air (not as much though).

Also, no chintzy lighting for this baby!

Where the hell are you getting the money for this? This will cost thousands. I want it.

It definately looks like it'll be top of the line in 5 years. Definately owns my computer

Gotta get it for college

So.. do you have any laptop for college.. because as BeeR said, it's much better than having a desktop.

It owns my computer too, unfortunately And to think an upgrade for me is an Opteron 146 ~.~

Arrgh, now you're making me feel bad about my own computer.

Maybe I'll skimp out and get a single GPU to start out and a basic $600 notebook to type and browse the web and stuff on. Heh heh. We'll see.

You want the best money can buy? Liquid nitrogen heatsinks!

In all seriousness though, good luck with this, I want to try building a laptop before I go off to University, just for the extra challenge.

You can't really.. none of the parts you would need are sold retail... and a lot of stuff is embedded onto the PCB, so you can't add it on yourself... the most you can probably do is make your own case and transfer parts from one laptop into the case.. or make a laptop using like a small form factor and some weird case you make yourself..

Can you even build a laptop?

*Edit* Thanks for the good luck, but I don't think I'll much need it. I probably need more luck with making sure that all the parts I get work correctly and have long lifespans. I've already built a computer before for my brother's graduation present from my mom.

It's not that hard to put together a computer... especially now, where you don't use as much motherboard jumpers.. if your BIOS supports it, I think doing stuff like tweaking your computer... such as tightening latencies on RAMs, getting the best out of RAM dividers and multipliers is more difficult to do... at least for the best results..

Desktop = easy. However, I've never seen homebuilt laptops.

I've been comparing memory, and it looks like DDR2 800 is the way to go. You can get 2 GB of good DDR2 800 for $200 (with a bit of searching), and with a bit of tweaking you can probably hit CL3 with a lot of sticks. DDR2 667 is probably my next choice because of the slightly lower timings, but as far I've seen, speed is more important than timings. However, a lot of DDR2 800 sticks can hit 1000 MHz fairly easily. This just in: preliminary tests show the QX6700 having a 5-10% performance lead over a 4x4 FX-74 system. Still, kudos to AMD for lowering Intel down from a 20% performance lead. Can't wait to see Barcelona. It's honestly looking like a G80 over G70 performance leap.

Yea ditto on that BeeR.

Updates already!

Here is one of the three 120mm fan grills I'm going to get, and we can't forget the two 92mm fan grills I'll get later:



Also, I'm really proud of this (I'm such a geek lol):



I modded the case window with an applique, and I'm happy it turned out as well as it did. I was half afraid I'd have some trouble with it, but it went really smoothly. It does have some air bubbles, but the website said that they'll disappear in a few days (apparently it happens all the time).

You probably wont get two gigabytes of RAM for 200 dollars that's actually decent higher performance RAM..

Not all DDR2 800 sticks will hit 1000... it really depends on the type of memory it is. Value RAM won't run much higher than it's stock settings.

The window mod looks nice.

I found a 2x1 GB kit of G.Skill DDR2 800 @ 4-4-4-12 here. It seems pretty decent, and I'm getting 4 GB of the stuff, so it doesn't have to be topnotch. I'd rather have twice as much of slightly higher timed memory than half as much of really tight latency memory at the same speed.