New System Build for customer...

[GT40_GearHead]

the wife is taking me on a snowboard trip for my birthday

IT'S YOU'R BIRTHDAY ?!?!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAN (hope i'm the first to say it)

have a gerat time boarding, and be carefull

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

[Zephik]

IT'S YOU'R BIRTHDAY ?!?!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAN (hope i'm the first to say it)

have a gerat time boarding, and be carefull

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

LoL

I'll second that! Happy Birthday man! I hope you have a great one!

Do some crazy stuff on your board so you can tell us some sweet stories when you get back! :p

[GT40_GearHead]

oh and dont forget the photos, we must have photos, but dont over do it, we dont want you moding you'r leg or neck, do we !

HAPPY BIRTHDAY !!!.... again

[Airbozo]

IT'S YOU'R BIRTHDAY ?!?!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAN (hope i'm the first to say it)

have a gerat time boarding, and be carefull

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

LoL

I'll second that! Happy Birthday man! I hope you have a great one!

Do some crazy stuff on your board so you can tell us some sweet stories when you get back! :p

Thanks and thanks. I always try and be careful and I do wear a helmet. Since this is my first day of the season, I am going to take it easy and use the time to get my gear adjusted. Plenty of time for the crazy stuff this season... Need to build up my skill for the 20' super pipe at Sierra... I will land that 360 grab with at least 15' of air!

This is where I have my season pass this year;
http://www.kirkwood.com/winter0607/


I have a bunch of pics to post when I get back to the office Tuesday. This system is being setup and configured this week for a trade show next weekend.

[Airbozo]

Ok since I got all the pictures and the system has been gone for a week, I thought I would delight with some pictures. I will start posting and see how far I get before I _have_ to go home (manager gets a little upset even if I have .02 hours of overtime...)

Here we go. I bubble wrapped the top of one of our carts so I could have a nice surface to toss the case and parts around on;

Mobo and case just came in and were delivered to my work area;

Here are a couple of shots of the broken side panel and front door assembly;

The mobo packaging;

...and all the included bits;

Top down of the mobo, lots of shiny copper!

The sound card and mic;

The El-Wire I/O plate;

The processor box;

Interesting fact; We have 2 options when buying processors. Buy the package you see here, or buy in bulk with no heat sinks. Now common logic would tell you that buying in bulk is cheaper, but not so. It is almost $15 more to buy in bulk with no heat sinks, PLUS the bulk cpu's only come with a 1 year warranty, whereas the boxed product costs less and has a 3 year warranty. Go figure. Kind of a waste since we refuse to use the stock heatsinks anyway. We recycle the xeon copper ones (won't fit in the 1u systems) and these aluminum pentium HS's as well. The money goes into the company "party fund".

I will post up more on monday if I am not too busy. I have 4 of the dell 690's with the Cintiq 21UX displays to setup and install with M$ server 2003 x64 (plus other stuff), so I may not have time on monday. I will try though.

[klingelton]

i take it the striker board is basically the intel version of the crosshair... looks to have additional cooling on the northbridge chip too.

[Produkt]

ZOMGOHT!

You've got a wonderful board there my best wishes to your modding project

[Airbozo]

OK,, some down time to finish posting the pics.

The OS. Notice the OEM packaging...

closer look

The drives the OS will install on (well one of them anyway the other is for data storage);

The drive cages removed for easy viewing and drive assembly;

A nice little stash box for all the emergency supplies (so long as they are small and you don't mind removing the HD cage to get at it);

Notice the rubber grommets in the drive mounting holes;

...and the screws and spare grommets;

Since this is a black case I will need to swap the face plates on the DVD;

Handy dandy drive tray opener;

Done;

With the mother board in and the drive tray installed you can see the close fit with the sata cables;

Power supply, heatsink, and video cards (did I mention I hate the intel stock coolers?);

The power supply mount (notice the silicon gaskets for reducing vibration);

...Which mounts onto this...;

Installed. (I am suggesting a different power supply that matches the frame color);

Here are the cables and stuff that came with the PS. Not sure I would ever use the pouch again, but it is nice quality...;

Some more pics in a few minutes. Have to call a custy and should be done in a few.

[Airbozo]

OK that was a quick call. Some users need you to spell out commands, some type ahead a screw it up and some are patient enough to let you finish before hitting a return key. The later get my attention faster and more detailed help.

OK more photo's...

Here is a shot of the new heatsink's mounting plates. Notice how close the top one is the the HS fins;

...and the caps underneath...;

Shot of the video cards. For some reason those heat sinks seem, uhm, well, WIMPY!;

Since the power supply is on the bottom of the case I had to route the cpu power cable under the pci-e release clips. It was a tight fit;

The second video card sits really close to the plate that separates the power supply from the rest of the system and the cables were tight;

Getting crowded at the back of the video cards...;

Top down with everything installed;

Notice the tight fit between the power supply cables and the PS compartment cooling fan;

Shot of the side panel where some wires are routed;

System powered on and loaded. The middle screen is theirs. They have another on on site already and a 32" LCD as well;

So here is where things get a little screwy. We were trying to load a custom image into the bios and I screwed it up. Yes! I admit it. I loaded the wrong file size image into the bios (should never rely on others for something like this). We could not get the bios in time so we popped down to our local fry's and picked an eVGA i680 board (need that chipset for later upgrades). I was worried this board would not work well due to all the horror stories I read about the initial launch fiasco so I crossed my fingers and went to work on a transplant. SCALPEL PLEASE!

Here they are side by side;

...and single images for comparison;

New board installed in the system;

Notice the clearance... WHEW!;

And a shot of the final cabling mess;

Still had to route the cpu power cable below the pci-e release clips and I am not really happy with the cabling, but I had to let this system go since it had to be there the next day. This is the first of hopefully many of these systems so the next one will be a little different based on what we learned putting this system together.

Things I am recommending be changed;

Case. This case looks great so long as you don't actually touch it, then you feel the cheapness of it. I doubt the front door will last very long if they start burning training dvd's for clients and have to constantly open and close it.

Power supply. I just don't think it fits both visually and physically.

CPU Heat Sink. I have used this heat sink before and really have no complaints other than the fact it is sooo top heavy I am worried about it coming loose in shipping. I may come up with a simple shipping bracket to make it work.

Mother board. We originally spec'd the NON striker version of this board which was not available. We may go with that or standardize on the evga board, Now that the bios issues are mostly fixed on this board it is a good cost effective solution over the ASUS board.

Keyboard and mouse. We did not provide the input devices for this system, but the next one needs to have a high quality setup that includes media controls. We are looking into a couple of products including one made specifically for the video editing market. More on that later.

Video Cards. This system is way over powered for what it is used for. We may go with the 7600's in the production model depending on performance issues.

FireWire card. We ordered the firewire card specified by the customer because ALL ports were supposed to be powered. Turns out only one is. We need power to all ports for the cameras attached.

BTW I got the replacement bios chip within a week. NO cost since it was under warranty and because I think there was an issue with the earlier release of the software that inserts the custom graphic in the bios. They would not confirm this, but told me not to use the earlier version due to "unrelated bugs". Yeah, right... Good thing is I now have this board under my desk and hope to lay claim to it at our cost (not quite sure what that is, but I know it is at least $50 below retail)

[cbelmo159]

good job. where did you get that storage box on the side of the HDD cage?