Dmitri's Bucket of Projects

Yes, a tiny god. Ok, maybe not so tiny a god. I'm talking a gaming machine. A machine for that pushed eletrons like they've never been pushed before.. (at least not in my house). I'm not talking bleeding edge though. No, I don't need to do anything too stupid from a price perspective. I'm looking to ride the front of the value curve rather than the crest of it.

The case I'm going to use is the same at the one I used for my last machine: the Coolermaster ATC-210-VX1:

I love this case. Seriously. I first saw it in an article in Computer Gaming World. It was used by specialistic PC maker Voodoo PC in their high end system. Only they had painted it an utterly striking shade of high gloss red and installed a window in the side of the case. It was a thing of beauty. I admired it quite a bit over the following week, and decided to mail Voodoo PC to see if I could acquire a case from them. They replied that it wasn't available by itself. I was heart broken. I considered buying the PC from them, but quickly dismissed the idea as it, like most enthusiast PCs, was priced extremely high. I decided to take a closer look at the images and see if they had built this case themselves or if they'd taken someone else's. It turned out to be a Coolermaster. I had experimented with case modding, or case ricing, as I like to call it. I thought I would try to replicate their addition of a window and paint job, but cancelled those plans when I saw the case myself along with the price tag. It was over priced, but it was what I wanted, and here we are alomst three years later and I definitely staying with it. I do think about the paint job from time to time, but I don't think I have the skill or the equipment to do the job right.

Ok enough about case. My current target machine is:

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (90nm) - Why? the 3800 is 200 MHz faster and more than twice the price.


• nForce 4 SLI mother board. I would like to go with the ASUS, but it's looking like DFI is coming out with a very comparable offering. Yes, I saw Anandtech's article. Here's my response (item #25).


• Video card: This is the big problem. I would LIKE to get a PCIe Geforce 6800GT. I would also like to NOT pay the redicules markup over MSRP and the AGP version, that most retailers are charging, IF they even have it in stock. This is very frustrating to me. Especially if ATI is able to deliver their x800 XL is any sort of quantity. The typical MSRP on the 6800GT is around $400, for the x800XL, $300. I want the SLi upgrade path but I really feel like nVidia doesn't really want me to have that path. This alone is what makes me consider putting off the project until April or May, so I can reconsider my video card and motherboard options.