ASUS P5N32-E SLi board (second only to the Striker Extreme, same chipset) Intel Core2 Duo E6600 (second only to the E6700, and of course quad core) 4x 1Gb sticks of DD2 800MHz ASUS 640Mb GeForce 8800GTS Thermaltake Toughpower 850W cable management PSU Thermaltake Mozart TX case Windows Vista Home Premium You can see a "normal" case next to this giant beast! The case has a 7" drive bay for a touch screen LCD monitor, 5 5.25" bays and 7 3.5" bays. It can hold two water cooling radiators, and has provision for a second (ITX) motherboard to run as two independant systems (requires 5.25" bay PSU)! We used 2x 320Gb SATA2 drives RAIDded, which seems a bit of a waste really!
I used to run a case a bit bigger than that. All that space means dead air, and heat. So to keep it cool, you need a lot of noisy fans. If you pack it with drives, it will result in a ton of vibration. A standard case requires less fan. If you're running water, that large case is ideal though. Plenty of room. I would not run that case with air. I personally prefer a main pc that only plays games and does internet, I have slave boxes for my torrenting and encoding. All the little bits add up and bog down your pc.
Nah, no point with that board - unless you abide by the QVL, which is mostly either costly or not amazing RAM, and quite difficult to source.
Very nice! I always like the sight of PC parts in there boxes before the build! I still love my PC even though I guess now its getting old, A64 3800 and GF 7900.
Only way to ensure no dead air in that big case is to have equal number of inlet fans as you have outlet fans. STick with 120mm fans as they move good amount of air and they are quiet than most 92-80mm fans. THe design of that case is generally more for a watercooling/mod setup. Stick some LCDs and cathodes in there!
We actually ended up using an Antec gaming case instead. It has a 200mm fan on the top, and yes the thing is virtually silent. The Northbridge gets pretty damn hot, though!
