New Computer

I decided to go with the Sapphire HD 2600XT 256MB Edition as my video card, it is crossfire ready so down the road I can get another one and run it in crossfire.

So as it stands currently my computer specs are as follows:

CPU: AMD Opteron 148 Running 2.5Gig (Thermal Right XP-90 Heatsink)
Mother Board: Asus A8N-SLI
Video Card: Sapphire HD 2600XT (Core 850 Memory 1175)
Ram/Memory: 2x512 Corsair 3200PT 2.5 2 2 8
Sound Card: Creative Audigy 2 7.1 ZS
PSU: Mushkin 550watt SLI
Case: Thermaltake Armor Jr. Black W/ Window
DVD Burner: Samsung 18x Duel-Layer
Hard-Drive: Seagate 250 Barracuda Sata
Input Devices: Logitech G11 Keyboard, Logitech G5 Gaming Mouse
Monitor: Philips 17" 107T
Sound Output: Logitech X-530, Sennheiser HD570

As it comes to over clocking the video card it is maxing out at 857 core and 1179 for memory because of a hardwired limiter on the card itself. On Oblivion with the settings the way I wanted them to be at most scenic spot I was getting 20FPS then with the upping of the Memory to 1179 I was able to get it up to 32, then I turned on temporal AA it jumped up to 40 FPS in the same spot.

The CPU I have not tried much more passed 2.5GIG up from 1.8GIG however later on tonight I will be playing with it some more after doing some more reading. I am crossing my fingers that I will be able to get passed the 2.7GIG mark and maybe even 2.8GIG for a true 1GIG over clock. I am going to see how much of a frame increase I get if any. The CPU heatsink with the 90mm fan on it is working very well.

The Thermaltake Armor Jr. has to be one of the nicest cases that I have seen, the hard drive tray could have been designed so that the cords face out the back however for a much cleaner look. I bypassed that by putting the HDD in backwards and putting the cords out the back anyways. The other flaw that it has is when you try and get the PSU in it is a very tight squeeze due to the output panel on the top of the case (Firewire, 2x USB2, Sound Jacks). The fans that came with it are nice looking especially with the green glow from the 120mm fan on the Mushkin PSU. The front 120mm Blue fan with the matching blue power light really give it a nice touch. The screwless ports needed a little jimmying when it came to the Video Card due to its heavier weight.

The other thing I have to do is plug in the top of the case sound jacks into my sound card, I completely forgot to do that because the computer was almost done and we were just waiting on the Video Card and when it arrived we got overly excited and well now the top ports aren't plugged in.