From prebuilt to homebuilt

kennebell347

kennebell347

Member
Last year I bought a Gateway Dx4200-09 prebuilt from Best Buy. It was a good computer for what it cost and I played a few games here and there on it with no problems.

After a few months I decided I wanted to play games like Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. So after a good bit of research I bought a Corsair 550w psu and a Sparkle GTS250 1GB gpu. I could play Crysis on high with no AA with decent FPS.

I kept the computer like that for awhile but started having temp issues in the Gateway Case. So I researched again and decided on buying an Antec Nine Hundred Two Case. I swapped all of the gateway parts, GTS250 and Corsair psu over to the case. My temps dropped 20+ degrees Celsius immediately.

Then, a week or so ago I decided to drop some cash on a Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P motherboard, a AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition quad core, Windows 7 and 2x2gb Corsair XMS3 1600mhz ram. Its currently up and running and every part is new in it minus the cd drive and hard drive.

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I have a Cooler Master V8, 4 more gb of the same ram, motherboard power wire extension and a 4'' cold cathode light coming in the mail.

The next items on my wish list are a HD5870 (one more later down the road for crossfire), a 300gb Velociraptor HD and NZXT fan controller.

Let me know what you guys think. I know the pics are not good but I cant seem to find my camera.
 
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Nice, I love the look of it. That top fan is huge!

Good choice of components too.

Do you still have the OS disk from the gateway? You've pretty much got a second computer there...
 
No they did not give me the OS disk. They told me all prebuilt computers are sold without the disk. They just give you the drivers and repair disk.

And thank you for the kind words! That top fan is big! It moves a lot of air.
 
kennebell347 said:
The CD drive and Harddrive.

I replaced the mouse and keyboard with the Razer Lachesis and Mirror Lycosa. Oh and I have the Gateway speakers. Not for long lol
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Oh noes! The conversion's already begun! It's too late, all hope is lost for the poor, unsuspecting Gateway Desktop. Heh heh, nice job on it, anyways. :D:good:
 
I personally would just get a 7200rpm drive and wait until ssd's get cheaper. Raptors are not worth the money
 
Thanks a lot for the comments. Im happy with how it has turned out but I am far from done.

linkin93,

Are those hard drives fairly fast? If so I will pick one up soon as I may run 3 anyways and if its not fast enough ill just run an ssd or raptor anyways.
 
Dang... Nice Rig! Wish I could afford something like that... Wanna sell some of your old stuff since it could run crysis? :P JK~!
 
Looks pretty sweet.

Making me feel guilty about all my exposed wires in my Antec 300 - but I don't have to look at it anyway - so all is good :D
 
Jamin43 said:
Looks pretty sweet.

Making me feel guilty about all my exposed wires in my Antec 300 - but I don't have to look at it anyway - so all is good :D
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No worries ha. I took an hour or so about 2 days ago to go through and hide what I could. Before that it was pretty bad looking. I still need to hide the sata cables (turn the hard drive backwards) and hide the smaller motherboard power wire. I have to wait on an extension o hide that though.
 
Rit said:
Dang... Nice Rig! Wish I could afford something like that... Wanna sell some of your old stuff since it could run crysis? :P JK~!
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I think the only reason it ran Crysis was because of the gpu. But even that gpu is pretty weak for Crysis.
 
I know.. if you look in my sig you can see my current set up... I'm lucky to even run Pong w/o lag :P Just amazes me how some computers can turn out.
 
Ya I really hope this thing will run Crysis or any new games that come out with the 5870. I plan on crossfiring two of them in the future so even if one cant quite do it.... I am sure two can
 
kennebell347 said:
Thanks a lot for the comments. Im happy with how it has turned out but I am far from done.

linkin93,

Are those hard drives fairly fast? If so I will pick one up soon as I may run 3 anyways and if its not fast enough ill just run an ssd or raptor anyways.
Click to expand...

Yes, they are fast. I have a Caviar SE (caviar blue) with only 8mb cache (still 7200rpm) and load times are not slow. But it also depends on the amount of RAM you have. For now i have 2gb, but when i had 4gb (i had issues with filling the ram slots) load times were ~30% faster.
 
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