greatbear | Speedy, quiet, watercooled Athlon goodness...

...Is finally getting a shakedown cruise here in my combination studio/den. After about 5 years of my faithful old PII-450 digital audio workstation, it's finally getting an update. Nice and quiet for an overclocked XP 3000+ Barton core. I built this one with the ability to do video editing and capture along with my audio dabblings. I kept it even quieter than the one I put together previously with thermally controlled fans. Removing the fans from the CPU, northbridge and GPU and using watercooling got rid of any whiney fans humming away. Not to mention a nice boost in performance from overclocking the CPU and Radeon graphics a healthy amount. Add a terabyte of hard drive spaces across 5 drives and I should not need to do any drive upgrades for a while.

Problems I foresee are somewhat minor, as in the UPS that I have with the studio overloads trying to power this thing (this is not a surprise) and the fact that the case is too big to fit in it's space in the desk. This is gonna require a rearrangement of the mixers and other crap on the table and the PC either set on the table or on an outrigger shelf attached to the side.

I am impressed with the performance of a Soundblaster Audigy 2 eX as well, it's nice and clean, and has no issues whatsoever taking the digital signal from the TASCAM digital mixer. The Audigy can do 24 bit recording and playback as well. Not bad for a 'consumer grade' part. Sounds like I need to upgrade the desk one day. lol

System specs for the geeks among my LJ friends:

Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton) at 188MHz FSB
Abit AT7-Max2 mobo w/ AGP8X, 5 PCI, 10x USB 2.0 3x Firewire
512 meg Kingston PC2100 RAM running 3-3-3-7 (without problems even at 188/376 DDR!)
ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro running at 425 GPU 355/710 DDR
2x 120G Maxtor DiamondMax 7200RPM ATA133 Hard drives in RAID 0 (240G)
3x 250G Maxtor DiamondMax 7200RPM individual drives
Soundblaster Audigy 2 eX 24 bit sound card with external I/O and control unit and remote
ATI TV Wonder Pro video capture/tuner card with remote
TEAC 840 8/4/40 DVD +/-R +/-RW burner
Plextor 48/24/48 CD R/RW burner
No-name DVD/CD ROM drive
Y-E Data internal 7-in-1 media reader/floppy drive
Antec 550W Truepower power supply (soon to be replaced with a PC Power and Cooling 510W SE PS
Koolance PC2-B case with integral watercooling setup
Win XP Pro SP1

If you can read this, it means I had no trouble posting like I had recently. :P