[airspirit]

Hellion, I already disclaimed out the K8W up top due to the lack of any real BIOS modifiers though that is a frickin' sweet board otherwise. If I had to do this now I would go that way, but otherwise I won't buy a board that I can't tweak all to hell ... especially when $500 is on the line!

I've totalled up the cost of this project from top to bottom all tricked out how I want and it is around $3950 ... though to get the full shebang on the memory brings it to $4600. If I'm going to do this then I'm going to do this right, because at that cost I better not screw it up.

That cost assumes the following parts:

Thunder K8W, 2xOpteron 246 (248 in two weeks, methinks), 2 GB TWINX1024RE-3200LL, 9800XT 256, Audigy2 ZS w/ faceplate, Seagate 120GB EIDE, Maxtor 160GB SATA, DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW, TruePower EPS550, Casetek EATX case (nice case for cheap), clear round cables, wire wrappings, multiple 80mm blower fans, dual Venus 12 K8 HSFs, a HDD fan kit (to cool the forward RAM banks) and miscellaneous costs for minor case mods to enhance breathing to account for the 90 degree blowers. The reason I want to use the blowers is to be able to pull air off of the rear RAM banks and GPU in a controlled manner so that air is brought in from the front and not pulling heated air from my cooling chest exhausts. The Venus 12 kits will be able to adequately cool the processors when tuned down, so no watercooling will be needed (at full tilt they tested a FX-51 with one in a 75F room and it only reached 31/41C ... that is more than acceptable, especially considering the fact that at full tilt it only generates 36dB and this will overshadowed by the 36dB coming from the watercooling rack).

When all is said and done I will have a dually with twin 1GB RAM banks (2GB if I decide to really splurge) in a dual channel setup. Combine that with the XT and the fast SATA HDD and I'll have one hell of a killer winblows box, and the EIDE HDD is for gentoo use (the support for SATA in the current stable kernel blows ... but I have two Serillel kits for when that problem is rectified, hehe).

The only thing holding me back at this point is the board, really. When the NF3 duallies appear I'll probably jump then, since the 248 chips should be available at current 246 costs, and I may swap that XT card for a Volari Duo V8 at that time ... I am really turned on by that card, and at only 50-60W total heat output, it won't be too much of a liability in a solely air-cooled case.

When I put this together (barring emergencies that force me to give up the project) I will definitely do a MASSIVE write-up with gratuitous pictures so all of the hardcore geeks among us have something to wank over, hehe. Pro/Cooling has been off the front page of AMDMB and AMDZone for too long, dammit.