LOL, i often use my 2nd monitor for NRL and the V8's.

Congrats LightStar. That is one sweet rig.

I understand that you are using Win7RC as your primary OS. Any issues?

That's exactly it... over the top profiteering, especially by the retail giants.  Shoot, even my local PC store, a 3-man operation beats Harvey "We won't be beaten on price" Norman.  Now I can understand a small concern like that having higher prices - less trade/fewer bulk purchases to reduce costs - but the larger stores have no excuse to profiteer as they do.

Not only that, we in Queensland generally pay higher retail prices on PC items than our Southern counterparts, so yeah, we're behind the 'rip-off' 8 ball in that regard... and ordering cheaper products online from interstate dealers often works out little or no cheaper after S&H costs.  For example, when I bought the Phenom II 920, I could have picked one up for $289 from a Sydney online dealer, but the S&H was $30, so went with one locally at $310 retail and had it that day.

Having very recently upgraded, I doubt that it'll be on the cards for a while now, but thanks muchly for the offer.  Apart from i-Tech, you might also want to keep an eye ob PriceSpy for PC related gear... they scour for the best prices daily and post the updated results regularly.  There are some Qld dealers listed, but many are located down your way in NSW.

looks like a beauty....goodonya!....

Thanks for the tip. don't think i had come across that site in my travels. (adds to list, can never have too many sites to check pricing from  )

Congrats on your new machine Lightstar!

Which Coolermaster full tower case did you get?

I have the Coolermaster Comos S and love it. I am using Win 7 RC as my main Os, have been using Win 7 since January, got fed up with Vista ultimate. What a difference, stable, fast to start up and shutdown!

That sounds like a more than capable machine,congrats. All you may need to upgrade now is your chair. Who would want to leave the computer?

Dual 500GB disks? Meh. Wake me up when you switch that crap for 2 x 256GB Samsung 256GB SSD on RAID0 for the OS / VM / Sins / other apps, plus 2 x 2TB HD for storage.  Core i7 is a great platform though, congrats to you .

In theory Raid0 would be less safe, but with all the abstraction of actual physical addresses on flash, There is no such thing as 'bad blocks' , corruption is only likely if you have problematic software. If you ever hit bad blocks on a SSD, it's end-of-life for it anyway, you should replace is because the write cycles are all running out. should take quite a few years for that to hit though. 

But current system's bottleneck is the storage part of the equation, you will still drag the system if the disks are slow. I bet you got high quality parts, even if they are 'just' 500GB each. From what I have read, those Samsung  SSD are really good, head and shoulders above anything else (even the intel ones).

Although you may want to wait till Year's end or 2010, cause SSD will get cheaper fast.

[begindaydreaming]

My personal hunch is that they will be able to saturate SATA2 300MBps speed next year. SATA3 ups the limit to 600MBps, and is expected to be finalized at this year's second half. With Any luck, next year we will also see SATA3 SSD breaking the 300MBps barrier.

And you will have to buy a PCI Express SATA3 controller for your wonderful rig, to take advantage of all this newfound speed...

[/quitsdaydreaming]

If you look at the higher-end HDD parts (SATA, not SCSI), you will find that they are also making speed progresses with perpendicular recording. The latest 2TB disks pack quite a punch. If you simply don't want your chkdsk to take forever, you can use a technique of using a small partition at the outer end of the disk surface and leaving the rest unallocated. Being the fastest part of the disk, and having the reading arm travel faster can get you 10-20% more performance, at the expense of storage space. Plus the pragmatic bonus of faster disaster-recovery.

i think i'll build it myself, tom. thanks for the offer, tho.

Well, other than having some software that will nto run in Windows 7, expecially since i am using the 64-bit version, nothing major at all.  Very good OS, and it's great that you can turn off transparency if you wish.  Nice feature! 

It's the Coolemaster 840, huge, but a great case, and I had Ultra ChillTec cooling and a Corsair 1000w power supply put in it too!  The case is almost 24" tall, 24" deep and 10" wide! 

Yeah, my chair squeaks a lot too, I definitely need a new one! 

Dayum!  My desktop needs replaced here soon.  I'd sure like to build my own...

Yeah, the great thing about PriceSpy is that they cover both on-line and retail dealers Oz-wide, listing the cheapest on each item at top of each category, descending through to the more expensive.  That's how I found the best local price for the Phenom II 920... GoComp's retail price even beat some of the more local online dealers, and with no S&H, waiting days for it to arrive.

Yeah, I'm finding some differences between the beta and RC with my Soundblaster X-Fi's software.  While all software and drivers ran fine in the beta, none of the apps run in the RC, and new drivers had to be dowloaded from Creative to get sound.  Also, I can't get my AverMedia TV tuner card software/drivers to install in the RC.

Oh well, most everything else works, except many SD apps I've become attached to..... but patience is a virtue and they'll arrive in good time I'm sure for the full release.

As for the squeaky chair, well I might have to replace mine... don't want the neighbours thinking things when they hear it squeaking frantically after I get all wriggly with excitement over SD apps getting full Win 7 support.