Sarah’s New System

Today I finally got off my butt to build Sarah a new computer system. The motherboard in the last system blew up a month ago and she has been using my Dell XPS gaming notebook ever since.

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The new system is based around ATI’s new X200 chipset motherboard with CrossFire multi-GPU support. This means it can run two ATI video cards for up to double the speed. The CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and memory is supplied by Corsair’s high performance CAS 2 PC 3200 RAM. They have a funky scrolling LED that tells system stats.

The big cooler is by Zalman. CNPS9500 LED is their newest unit. The cooler is design to be very quiet. It achieves this with a big slow speed fan that that moves more air than smaller high-speed (and louder) fans. The big fan also means the heatsink is HUGE!

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Here you can see the system fired up in all its glory. The Zalman has a LED fan that glows blue. The motherboard also has blue LED that lights up the two ATI X850XT video cards. The Corsair memory also adds to the light show with a power meter and scrolling text messages.

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The system was placed inside a Coolermaster Wavemaster all aluminum case. I had the view glass etched with The TechZone logo to add some bling. The view inside is dominated by the huge Zalman cooler, which is installed in a way to aid airflow. Cool air is drawn in at the front of the case by two fans. Air exhaust out the back via a rear case fan and power supply fan.

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The blue glow at the front of the Wavemaster matches the blue at the inside of the case. Because of the CrossFire video card setup, the system can power up to three monitors at the same time. I have it hooked up to two Samsung LCDs at this time.

So what is Sarah going to do with this multi-video card, multi-monitor monster? The system is powerful enough to run any games on the market today and run them at insanely high resolutions with all the eye candy turn on. However, Sarah won’t be using it for games. She’ll be using her new system to surf the web and chat with friends on MSN and Skype. That’s kinda like using a nuke to kill a fly.