The New Gaming Rig [30 Dec 2006|08:51am] About a year ago I purchased an AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ for a class project. I installed the processor and took some photos of the installation, but that’s about all that ever happened. It’s been sitting on my shelf since then. Instead of letting it collect dust I purchased a Shuttle barebones kit from NewEgg (one of my favorite PC component online-retailers). I ordered the parts on Thursday and by Friday, the next they were sitting on my desk. If you ever need PC parts you must check out NewEgg. They’re absolutely the best in the business. Very good products at very good prices. Anyways, besides the Shuttle unit, I also got the e-VGA 7950 512MB, NEC dual layer DVD drive and an 80GB SATA hard drive. All of that for about $500. Pretty damn good if you ask me. Everything was quite easy to put together and took me about 30 minutes. I was installing Windows Vista and was having some trouble. It wouldn’t expand the files at all. Of course I Google’d the issue only to find out it was a known issue that Vista has had troubles installing on several brands/types of optical drives. I swapped out the drive with my other DVD burner (which had done at least 3-4 other Vista installs). That worked. I am not sure what was up with that. I’ve used the dual-layer drive since and had no issues. Oh well, that was about the only snag I ran into for the “project”. All of the drivers I needed were installed except for sound and my new Z-Board (generic keyboard driver was installed though). On some of the software I installed I did need to install it using Windows compatibility mode, but no a big deal. Networking, video, USB, firewire and all worked right out of the box. I’ve been getting a constant 60FPS in World of Warcraft, maybe a bit higher at times. The card is very impressive. I’ll try cranking up all the settings to see what happens. I am sure it can handle it just fine. I might have to install Half Life 2 and Battlefield 2 again, although The Burning Crusade is coming out soon so I doubt I’ll have time. The new keyboard I got was the Z-Board. Basically this keyboard allows you to swap in and out keysets at any time. Keysets are made for various games, I have the World of Warcraft one. The include special buttons which make navigation and communication easier. Much like shortcuts! The one downside to the keyboard is that it only works with Windows. Jeez, comon, get with it and make some OS X drivers. It’s too bad they don’t! I found out that the Z-Engine is a piece of crap so don’t use that. Go and just download the drivers, they’re on version 4 or so, and they came out in may I believe. Everything will work with that… I think I need to get used to using the special shortcuts, I am so used to using the normal buttons they have set, but I know with the new shortcut keys it’s going to be a lot more fun! I wouldn’t mind getting the Battlefield 2 keyset eventually…if I play more of it that is. I am sure I will pick up The Burning Crusade keyset too. Overall I am very impressed with the new machine and the keyboard. It’s a great little gamer rig!! post comment

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