Guru3D Rig of the Month - August 2008 - 1

Each month we here at Guru3D.com we choose a rig of the month. Guru3D's Rig of the Month - August 2008 is ' Le PC' from Ann Le who made a pretty normal PC (for Guru3D standards) yet did a real nice water-cooling job.

The photo's submitted are a bit of poor quality, so pelase see through that. 

And here's the story: 

Last month the 'Rig of the Month' was pretty posh -- in fact so posh that we clearly want to tell to you guys and girls, your PC doesn't have to be an uber-customized rig at all to make it as a Rig of the month. Hardware builds should be cool and about passion. And when that shows .. you already are a contestant !

I will make it short and simple, my name is Le, 27 years old and currently working as a system admin for a training facility center. I’ve been visiting Guru website daily for quite a long time for IT news and decent hardware reviews. As I mentioned before, I am doing IT for a living therefore I spend more than 10 hours on computers everyday, most of the time for work (obviously it’s a fulltime job which means 8 hours daily) but at home my Pc is mainly for multimedia and games.

I honestly could not recall how much $$$ I spent on this machine, as you guys might already know,  we, IT enthusiasts, do not have a fixed budget for new gears but recently  I stop spending on hardware since the day I had watercooling fully installed. Pulling apart and rebuild a watercooling system  are something that would take you half a day at least and that the only valid reason I can find to forgive myself not to upgrade.  Here are the specs:

• Gigabyte 3D Aurora Case
• Asus Blitz Formula (Special Edition)
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (B rev)
• G.SKILL DDR2 PC2 8000 / F2-8000PHU2-2GBHZ
• Asus DVR
• FDD
• Creative Fatal1ty Sound Blaster X-Fi
• Creative 550 Soundwork THX 5.1
• FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual digital4
• 1 x Palit 8800GTX 768MB
• 4 x Western Digital WD740ADFD Raptor 74Gb 10K RPM 16Mb in RAID 0
• 2 x Seagate 7200.10 400Gb 8Mb SATA II in RAID 1
• Razer Tarantula™ Gaming keyboard / Battle Light
• Razer Mantis™ Precision mouse mat / Control version
• Logitech G9 Gaming laser mouse
• Enermax Galaxy 1000W
• Apple HD Cinema 23’ LCD/ Sony 46X3100 LCD T
• Water cooling set
• Swiftech Stealth GPU Waterblock
• Swiftech  Apogee GTX CPU Waterblock
• Swiftech MCP655 12VDC Pump
• Swiftech MicroRes Reservoir
• Hardware Labs Black Ice GT Stealth 240 XFLOW
• Clearflex 60 1/2" Tubing
• 2 x Delta 12cm fan
• 3 x CoolerMaster 12cm fan

 Why NVIDIA not ATI? 6-8 months ago, 8800GTX was the fastest single card on the planet and I play FPS games seriously. (Some of guys may think it is a really bad idea to have a Nvidia  card on an Intel CrossFire mainboard but I did not expect CRYSIS to be such a monster ). Why Intel not AMD? I started over-clocking with E6600 and updated to Q6600 (when Intel dropped the price) and archived around 50%+, at that time AMD didn’t have any quadcore CPU available, choices were made purely based on nothing else but SPEED and value for the $$$.

There is no such kind of thing in this machine can be justified as the best or worst part according to my personal point of view, “you know what you want, you go and get what you want” – lol @ Rocky Balboa J.

The Ati X4870x2, 2 of VelociRaptor 300Gb, Intel Nehalem CPU and 2 of  1TB Samsung or WD hard drives are something on my wish list at the moment and obviously you know why.

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