I just upgraded mine but used the same old Antec server case I"ve had for years. A friend in our clan just built one with the same case you have. I like it.

What can you get in Aquamark 3? Here's my score after my upgrade. You should be close to it or probably better.

Asus P5K-SE w/E6850@3.2
OCZ 700W PS
2x1gb OCZ DDR2 8500
XFX 8800GT 512
74gb 10000 Raptor
200gb Maxtor
New SATA DVD writer will be in my mailbox tomorrow so I can do away with my last ribbon cable.

The E6850/8500GT combo really rocks. You will be very happy with it. I'm amazed at how cool it runs with the stock hs/fan. I have a Zalman on my old D930 I was going to use but don't see any need to.

 

what's everyones 3dmark06 score?

 

never heard of it before. Gonna have to download it n try it out later..

 

Thanks for the props all. I did spend a whole lotta time putting this together. I ended up shelling out around 1500 in the end. My budget was 1000, so I think I did ok The video card is likely to get upgraded every year, so I picked the best running card I could get for $300 (3 weeks ago - I'm sure it's $100 now...) As for Vista, I love it. I was really on the fence about it, but it made a believer out of me once I got to drive it. I knew I was going to be happy when I didn't need a FRIGGIN FLOPPY DISK to install my RAID drivers All my peripherals, and my printer worked fine. Performance so far has been fantastic. I play RTS games, so Supreme Commander has been my best real worl test, and it was night and day compared to my P4 3.0 rig that I just replaced. No more lagging, freezing, and overheating! I haven't benchmarked it yet, but I plan to, as I move towards a more aggressive overclock.

 

Closest thing I have to a benchmark. I will try 3dmark06 tonite.

 

I haven't run 3dmark06 yet. Will do it tonight.
That's not a bad pricetag 1muddytruck. I have close to 1050.00 in mine and I only bought the mb, cpu, ps, ram, videocard and dvd. I used my old case and hard drives.

 

5.9 is the highest you can go? I'm at a 4.9...

 

I haven't run 3DMark06 in awhile, I can't even remember my last score.

As far as aquamark goes, I got 161,242.

Here's the picture with a couple CPU-Z and GPU-Z shots.
http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j9.../E68504GHz.png

 

The laptop im on right now had it and i had it and i couldnt stand it. Had XP put back on.

 

Water Cooling is the way to go.....

 

Well not always. The low end kits made by Thermaltake etc. perform extremely close to high end air coolers such as an Ultra-120 Extreme made by Thermalright. It's not worth the extra 100 dollars for the same performance, not to mention the quality. On those Thermaltake BigWater kits the CPU blocks are notorious for cracking right down the center. I wonder if they've fixed that yet.

 

I was a little apprehensive at first having water in a box of electrical components, but I took the plunge (pun intended) and now have the most consistent cooling of any configuration I have ever used and I have been messing with computers for a while. One main advantage of water cooling is that most of the heat is removed to outside the box, traditional air cooling is self defeating as the more efficient it is the harder it has to work, adding additional heat to the surrounding environment and requiring additional fans and noise to remove heat from the box. Because the heat removal device is in the same area as the heat producing device can lead to a runaway condition that is almost impossible with a water cooling type of system.

 

Awesome computers guys. I dont know anything about them, but they look incredible

 

Those liquid cooled machines definately have some OC potential. Don't discount the capabilities of air though. Here's a guy from Overclockers.com who must have part ownership in ThermalRight:

 

I wish I knew all of that crap.