12K Club

I'm happy with my ~5600 3Dmark05 on my XPS2, but I decided if i wanted real horsepower, that I just needed to redo my gaming desktop. So thats exactly what i did. I'm hitting 12381 3Dmark05. Overclocked and stable for a while now, I am happy with its performance. I know if I would have chosen the FX-57 for the same price, i'd have better single threaded gaming results which would mean a 3Dmark score of over 14000, but the dual core is just so nice. I am able to fully use my computer as normal and play WoW at the same time. You set WoW to "windowed / maximized without border" and it runs WoW out of full screen, letting me move my mouse between the three LCD's without alt-tabbing. Its so nice. I don't use SLI mode while in WoW, because benchmarks show that WoW is severly CPU bound. Even one 7800 GTX isn't hitting over 40% utilization at 1920x1200 max everything. Battlefield 2, on the other hand, is way different. In SLI mode, at 1600x1200 max all, both GPU's hit around 90% used on this setup. The Raid 0 stripe writes to my 2TB raid-5 fileserver (computer on the left in the picture below) at over 54MB/sec. Thats great disk performance for only $240. If anyone has any questions I'd be more than welcome to give advice. Also for you hardware geeks out there, check out my website that i run http://www.firingsquad.com !!

AMD 4800+ X2 Overclocked to 2.64Ghz (240x11 @ 1.50v)
DFI UT nF4 SLI-DR Motherboard
4 OCZ PC-4800 512MB Platinium Elite Limited Edition DDR Sticks
Dual BFG 7800 GTX's OC'd to 500mhz Core / 1350 Mem
SB Audigy 2 (X-Fi on order when released)
Dual Hitachi 250GB SATA-II disks in Raid-0 Striped
PC Power & Cooling 510w SLI Power Supply
Pioneer DVD 8xRW
Dell 2405FPW (DVI)
Two Dell 2001FP's (DVI for both)
Creative 7.1 Speaker setup
Koolance Modified Lian-Li V1200 Case
Koolance CPU Cooler
Dual Koolance GPU Coolers
Zalmann Video Card Ram heat sinks

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1093260

Before the Koolance, the CPU ran around 65c and the GPU's at around 81c under full load. The CPU now never goes over 51c and the GPU's max out at 54c!! Absolutely Amazing!

Cost was right around $6300 (LCD's included).



Various pics while assembling:

That's including the cost of the LCD's

2405FPW @ $850, and two 2001FP's @ $500 each. That makes system cost at about $4450.

Classic. haha thats too funny. I totally agree. I've had this IKEA desk for a few years now. I'm looking for a replacement. Have any ideas?

3d05 is strictly a benchmark. I play WoW & BF2. I also work from home in front of this computer 8+ hrs, then game another 8+ hrs on it! So yes, it is worth that setup. I can play games on the center screen and still do work, encode my movie rips, do all my normal work on the other screens with the other core.

This setup works exactly as i designed it, FAST.