Although I will still miss the great Thermaltake Armor Chassis,
which I cannot afford, the Aerocool Engine II on the picture to the
right, is really a good alternative for 1/3 price.

The main focus was a combined front and rear fan working inside the
PC case.

I also downgraded the CPU from a dual 4600 to a simple but fast
enough for X3 Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego.

Those two steps were enough money-saving.

To further push performance to its peek I decided to invest in a
high class graphics chipset at a low cost. The PowerColor X850XT
PCIe ATI Radeon R480 Card with 256MB.

Compared to all the other X850XT its price is lowest, but
outperfoms an Geforce 6800ultra quite nice .

Since I did not yet buy my windows OS I just did a quickrun in
Gentoo Linux, which was installed in a second(hour), and measured
about 9700 fps with glxgears.

But not enough. Regarding to the latest discussion on egosoft
forums
a lot of people suffer from AC97 sound issues, whilst people using
a seperate sound card report to get a 10% performance
increase.

Now I had two choices, buying a seperate soundcard for more money,
or buying a mainboard with high quality onboard sound.

When I saw the specs on the MSI K8N Diamond compared to the Asus
A8N SLI Premium or the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D, the thing was
crystalclear.

MSI offers 6x SATA 3GB’s with excellent equipment, and an onboard
Soundblaster Live 24bit on a lower price than the Asus…..

yummie…..

Bought …

Because of the 6 SATA’s and the possibility to upgrade the CPU to
dualcore in the distant future,

I was looking for a power supply with all those connectors for the
future and a low-noise 12cm fan.

And I remembered the tests on tomshardware that showed only a few
surviving candidates in a power supply stress test.

And the winner is: a 500 watts Seasonic S12 power supply with 4
SATA and Dual-CPU(not core) connectors ready for every usage.

Further it has an active power factor correction which saves energy
when the system doesn’t need the full power.

Let me excuse for the color of the dvd-rom drive. It’s a samsung
whatever I have no idea what version code or features it has. I
just read it has 130ms access time for dvd, which is bad. I know
that.

But it was cheap and my favourit Plextor 713 in black was sold out
that day.

And…. so to say, I just bought it to get Gentoo Linux installed
that day. DD

Since I didn’t want to have all technology and more important no
cables filling the view into a windowed PC case, I installed a
Samsung 200GB SATA2 8MB harddisk with native command
queueing.

I didn’t read much about harddisk speed yet but cache transfers
show up with 1799.89 MB/sec in Linux and buffered reads with 55.26
MB/sec. That’s worlds better than my old PATA.

Although I’m not convinced by SATA data and poer connectors yet, I
can see them breaking apart someday.

Yep, and the memory… 2×512 CL2,5 Kingston DDR400, since I’m not
the overclocking guy, everything here standard, and MSI’s
intelligent overclocking is also disabled. (maybe it’s worth
putting mem, cpu and gpu on fire when X4 is being released, we’ll
see)

so far….