After spending a couple of weeks trying to get my old ss7 system stable, I switched gears abit ordered and received an Abit BE6-II v2, also ordered a slot 1 PIII 800 only to get a fc-pga chip instead from the seller (who said keep it and refunded me, thumbs way up for them). So back to to Ebay and mouser (remainder of the caps to refurb my PA-2013) and back to waiting for a slocket, golden orb and a slot 1 Piii 700 to finish those projects.

Well in the mean time I decided to rebuilt my AN8/Athlon64 4400+ with 2 GB of ram and an x800 which was cool, for a day. So as I did after having that system with a 3200+ for about 6 months back in 04, I built a second system, an Abit AN8-SLi with an Opteron 165 and 4GB of Gskill ram, only thing missing was the x1800xt that is long gone, In it's place is an HD3870 which allows for some newer games like BFBC2 to work mostly fine. I have to say that the era of bang for the buck does not exist like it once did. A celly 300a at 450Mhz+ a Barton Athlon XP 1700+ at 2500+ speeds and how about that Opteron 165, HTT to 3, FSB to 300 (need better ram for 333) and all of a sudden you have a 2.7Ghz screamer. The days with a little luck and some research you could get 30+% extra with a FSB or multiplier bump.

As I would do with any new system, effort was put into keeping it quite, which was not difficult. As luck would have it, I had both the Thermalright XP-90 with a new Arctic Cooling fan and Accelero S1 that was on my old x1800xt, and a quiet/silent exhaust and a thermally controlled 80mm in the front I'm quite happy with the thermal performance and noise level. After about 30 Minutes of some Quake 4 the CPU and GPU both maxed at about 55 degrees c.

This project started with having a IP35 Pro with a q9650, 8GB Ram and Xfire 5770's, but those looked a little cramped in this old Antec case and in the future will find a home in a different case. (tossed in a pic at the bottom)

Who said you can't go back????