3. April 2009 by Terry.

So, Built the new rig about a month ago, its running sweetly, as is the MAME cabinet with the now donated P4 that I was using to test the Win 7 beta.   On a side note I have to say that the whole process of actually setting up the cabinet for MAME was amazingly simple, in fact the hardest part of the whole ordeal was gutting the bad arcade crt and the wiring.   Granted the 17 inch wide screen thats in there now is very ghetto’ly (is that a word?) mounted, it works.   Still haven’t wired up the marquee or the power for the coin door lights, but its miniscule stuff that I’ll do one lazy sunday probably.

Anyways, me and my good buddy Matt came up with an awesome Idea a couple years back when we were both working at the east store.   Matt does custom airbrushing, ya know the realistic flame, hot rod flame, skulls, etc.   I thought it would be a cool idea if I could get him to do a realistic flame case for me, because for one it’d look sweet as all hell, and 2, because I might be able to sell them.    So, exhibit A is the pic of the case before Paint.

and exhibit b, after paint….

Pretty wicked huh?

And thats BEFORE wet sand and buff, thats this weekend.

Only a few problems considering this was our first attempt at doing a case.   First off, I taped the case up.   I taped OVER the drive bay covers so they wouldn’t get covered with paint, problem is that by doing that the paint didn’t lay exactly the way I wanted it to on the edges of the drives.   This isn’t really a big problem as I can just lightly sand the clear a little smoother around them, but next time I’ll just remove the covers entirely and tape behind the panel.    The power led, as well as the hd led and reset button were a PAIN IN THE ASS to tape up, so next time I think i’ll remove those too, I didn’t wanna take the time on the trial run considering they were hot glued in.   Its hard to tell, but the front vents on the bottom of the panel, the dial to open and close them was painted, but since its cheap plastic the paint rubbed off the first time I opened the vents, no biggie, just get all the paint off and touch it up with some 99 black.   One thing I didn’t think about is how much dust would accumulate inside the front panel when it was sprayed, it came right off but jesus christ it was dusty.   And the biggest problem I have is that the temperature last weekend when matt sprayed it wasn’t exactly warm outside, therefore some of the pearl ran a little.   Now I’m gonna try to wet sand it out, however I’m very weary about going through the clear and into the base, but say la ve……If I do go through, I Might just have to wet sand the whole thing a little more, and re-clear the panel with nasons aresol clear and start the process over again.   But for the amount of stuff that went wrong, I’m very happy with the results.

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28. February 2009 by Terry.

So……..its tax return time…and to many that means that bills get paid, money gets saved, etc……….not so much with me.   Lets see over the last 3 years because of my tax returns I’ve bought my 46 inch wide-screen LCD Sanyo….my PS3……and some odds and ends.   However this year I decided that I would build myself a new tower, considering I had to use my P4 for my MAME Cabinet.   So I was faced with a decision to make.   I had a budget of about a thousand bucks to work with.   One thing I really wanted was a bigger monitor, so with that in mind I decided on a 22″ Wide-screen Acer.   Suckers huge compared to my old 17 inch Standard res.   Another thing I wanted was a system that I wouldn’t have to overhaul again in a year.   I’m not a DIE HARD PC gamer, so the option of SLI was there, but I decided against it for now.   Storage was also kind of second fiddle on this build as well.   Case wise I wanted to go with Cooler Master Cosmos case, but just couldn’t bring myself to spend the extra 200 bucks on it when I still had my perfectly good Cheiftec full size windowed just laying there.   So, taking that into consideration, here are my new specs.

Cheiftec Full Size tower case

AMD 7750X2 Black Edition (I decided to stay dual core because honestly, triple cores are useless and I don’t multitask or game enough to warrent a quad core of the same clock speed).

4gb ddr2 1066 OCZ 5-5-5-15

320gb Sata HD

Dual Layer SATA DVD Burner

Biostar TF8200 A2+ Motherboard (heat pipes on north and south bridge chips, as well as some pretty decent reviews, decent onboard video and optical audio with onboard HDMI, future board for the HTPC should I later upgrade to AM3)

Cooler Master v8 CPU Cooler (good lord this thing is fucking massive…lol)

OCZ Fatal1ty Modular 550watt SLI Rated Power Supply

XFX 9800GT 512mb ddr3 Video Card (I could of gone with a Gtx240 or so, but for a hundred bucks more it just didn’t seem worth it to me.)

Vista 32bit (Student copy, plus I don’t see myself using more than 4gb’s of ram for anything in the immediate future.)

Asus Wireless Card

Rosewill Media Card Reader

Logitech 5.1 speakers (Same speakers I’ve had for the last 5 and half years…………just cant killem…still work great.)

All in all I spent around 600 on the system itself, and then another 150 on just odd and end stuff I needed for around here.   Personally I think I came out on the right side of it.   I didn’t need anything extreme, and going AM3 was just too iffy, there’s only 3 or 4 boards on newegg that even fully support it and ddr3, and I refuse to buy intel.    Upgrade options later on are a faster quad core (when software is actually WRITTEN for quads), and more ram should the need arise which wont be anytime soon.   Build time took around an hour as I had to figure out how the v8 mounted onto the board, and it was a bit akward mounting the board with that hunk of stuff on there.   Overall though I’m very happy.   vista installed in about 10 minutes.   Didn’t have to install any drivers really, downloaded latest vid drivers, and installed the board drivers and I was pretty much good to go.    And might I say, I installed the demo version of DeskScapes from Stardock………that is some cool software, not sure if I wanna drop the 20 bucks on it, but its still really cool.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that it has the coolest red ambient glow from the PS and the Cooler……….looks devlish in a way….lol

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