I havent been able to force myself to jump on that bandwagon yet....

This commercial comes to mind...

to watch on PC- click here

To watch on Mac- click here

 

Water and electricity not the best of friends. Ha, good one.

Its addicting. For overclocking, its great, the rub lies in the fact that you still need some fans to move air through the case across the MB. And of course, these fans make "some" noise. Less noise than a typical air-cooled rig....

I wanted to build a totally silent PC and one day I will get there. I see now you can buy water-cooled power supplies.

 

Yes, I'm **** about quality when I build for others. If they don't want to pay my price I tell them to go buy a Dell. I refuse to support crap, it's a waste of my time.

My Frankenstein may be cobbled together, but it generally has high quality parts. The motherboard is a genuine Intel, the video card is an ATI FireGL, it has a Soundblaster Live 5.1, the DVD burner is a Lite-On - but let's not talk about the hard drives, I have 3 and they are a hodgepodge of used ones. My ePower power supply crapped out last month so right now it has an Ultra in it (yuck) but it works, it was free - a manufacturer provided unit we reviewed on our forums. Ram is Kingston value ram.

 

bmalone, Arent you the one with the home built water cooled DVR with built in screen?

If not who was that?

Now that is ultimate cool!!!
If it's not you then could someone find that thread?

 

Kind of. Yes, I have the Ahanix home theatre case w/ built-in 7" touchscreen, but it is the only air-cooled rig in the house besides my daughter's. I purposely chose air-cooled for that application because I found a case with good air-flow with one small fan (20 dba), heat-pipe MB, heat-sink video card (no fan), and SFF CPU, which is a 35w design. So, it is almost silent.

 

So just out of curiousity, what would you put in a top of the line CADing computer? No games will be played on it but there will be 3D rendering done.

 

That was/is cool, I wouldn't mind building one of those just for the experince and could probably do it out of existing parts for less than a new DVR.

Where did you find the case and what OS does it run?
What program do you use to set recording times?
Does it have live recording too like an actual DVR? Or is it more like a hard drive version of DVDR or VCR?


I think I asked before but never had time to persue it and I have forgoten.

 

One of the ATI Fire cards or a Nvidia Quadro. I prefer ATI. They basically modify a Radeon chip and optimize the drivers for OpenGL. I have an old FireGL 8800 AGP card in here, it's a modded Radeon 8500 chip. It still does a decent job with DirectX and does a superb job rendering 3D wireforms.

If you are going for top of the line, and you know what CAD software you are going to use, just make sure you research video cards on the software maker's site. You will generally find that the only cards that pass all tests are Fires and Quadros - and some $2000 specialty cards.

 

The case was hard to find in stock--it is the Ahanix MCE-701. I bought it here: http://www.directron.com/mce701sl.html. The black one you will never find, the silver one, yes. I called one day and they had it, but it is frequently out of stock. Reason being is that its $358 which is extremely inexpensive. The two other cases I know that have the 7" screen (silverstone and zalman) are like $585. I like the case a lot and it was reasonable quality--things went in fairly easily and it is an attention-getter in the family room--you can have cars pictures cycling across the screen all the time (screen savers).

The OS is Windows Media Center Edition and that handles the TV recording as well. It comes with a TV guide and is fairly good at recording. The interface is nice--not as good as Tivo, but way better than the built-in that cable companies are offering (cable box w/ DVR). On the other hand, I chose the best quality TV recording card I could buy at the time and it just doesn't compare to my cable box DVR in terms of picture quality.

To answer your last question, it is a full-fledged DVR.

[edit] looks like the silver case is discontinued, but you can still get the black one at $335. [edit]

 

get your butt over to newegg then. lots of oem parts without the boxes and stuff they would normally come in so alot cheaper. its a geeks walmart (better quality stuff i may need to add).

 

Another decent computer store in Canada is Memory Express http://www.memoryexpress.com/ I used to buy all my stuff there when I lived in Calgary.