sheesh, there is 300 new posts here and the 300 before that i barely skimmed.
I wanted to wrap up my computer building story.
I have two boxes built now. almost identical
boxed 300A on the abit board with 128 megs of PC100 8ns ram all from mushkin
14 gig IBM 7500rpm HD with cooling fans mounted in front
one has a viper 550 agp and two cheapo S3 pci cards to run three montiors
the other box has a viper 330 pci
both are in super micro 750a towers and both have the diamond monster sound card and altec power cube plus speakers.
only thing missing is a huge flat panel for the second box, but i am going to wait a few more months.
both boxes are running @ 450 mhz @ 2.00 volts with absolutely no trouble.
side note, a friend bot a 300a oem and could not OC it. he brought it over here and we put it in my puter and it still could not OC.
It flunked even at 2.10 v.
anyway both boxes are way over kill . the only "lame" part about them is win 98, but for me it is fine. so i guess the only lame component is the user. haha.
about buying on the internet. when its good its very good, when its bad, it sucks. I bot about 4k worth of parts from ten vendors
mushkin was absolutely impeccable, and took great care of me when i had a bad mobo.
buy.com replaced an LS-120 that got funked up during installation <gggg> whoops. no speed record, but not too bad either.
but they did blow one order and i had a two other minor glitches with other vendors and i found them to be completely unresponsive.
example, my second super micro case did not come complete, I am missing the little back panels that fit around the mobo outlets.
you only need one panel, the case comes with two differet ones for different mobo's.
anyway the vendor totally ignores my VERY polite emails and the phone gets you voice mail, my messages went unreturned.
so, not the end of the world, and yet fairly sucky. what if it was a critical part missing?
i am going to fill in the space with a layer of duct tape and cut out around the sockets for all the plug in's to keep dust and dog hair from tumbling into the box directly onto the mobo.
out of ten vendors i would say three of them i would avoid in the future based only on my limited experience.
the net is still way cheaper than compUSA though.
anyway, i am a happy camper, been trading during the day with Real Tick III, and mirc and a web browser, at night been grinding down to the very last of UNREAL, playing some TRIBES and HALF-LIFE.
nothing very constructive <gggg> i plan to keep it that way too!
see ya,
thanks for all the help
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