Jayp1981

I like best that the ASUS product page for the G550JK lists three options for operating system: Windows 8.1 Pro Windows 8.1 DOS - JP

Sorry for falling off the face of the earth for seven months. The project was on hold due to some extraneously high workloads at my job, and of course my wife not wanting a "giant box that makes a bunch of noise and heat in the house..." So I've rethought the concept a bit and I am working to build a pc in a shelf that we have in our living room, that will be both hidden and silent. I have a very old winxp machine I built in 02 that will be phase 1 guinea pig, and then a I have my current system, Q9650, ASUS Rampage Extreme LGA 775 that will be the phase 2 machine. I have the current modules of a custom acrylic case that I want to make with the intention of making this an oil cooled PC. The depth of the box is 6" so the front half of the shelf it will be mounted in can still be used for storing DVDs like it is now: I plan to use dual swiftech pumps for cooling redundancy and a 9x120 or 9x140 radiator mounted to the back of the shelt on an angle to allow air to flow up behind the shelf. I will post more pictures as I continue designing. Phase 3 will depend on how much money I have left when my wife divorces me for spilling 7 gallons of mineral oil on the living room floor cheers, - JP

@ Sheldon_King: Thank for the input. Roanoke is a beautiful spot, someday I'll be out there vacationing on Smith Mountain Lake ) My intro was just for some fun going back and forth. Just for clarification, this isn't so much a "need" system, but a build I want to do. I've been running SolidWorks on consumer grade cards for a year now, without ECC on the system or video memory. The only major downside has been the unavailability of certain CAD features that are unlocked with the professional drivers. Not entirely worth the extra $$ money, when it can be tweaked for a similar result. My experience so far has been that ECC is terribly overrated for CAD work. A lot of SolidWorks users have had awesome results on overclocked Intel processors and NVidia GPUs, so that makes Xeon a no go for me. I agree entirely on the P9X79-E WS, however it's almost the Same Board/Same Price as the Rampage IV Black Edition. Since it's the first system were I'm hoping do something attractive, the rampage is a much sexier board to look at. Build quality between the two seems to be very similar. Again, thanks for your input, and happy holidays. @MrSuperb: Haswell-E on the LGA2011-3 socket is a bummer when shelling out this kind of money for enthusiast hardware.

Hi. I'm new here, I'm Canadian, and I live in Virginia, so feel free to poke fun. I'm working on a spec for a my new workstation. I do freelance design in SolidWorks for Sheet metal, machine design, and custom product part design analysis. My challenge is SolidWorks is a single threaded application, so multiple cores doesn't do it any good. Overclocking does however make a significant improvement. The simulation software I use does very well with multiple cores, so it seems like Ivy bridge-E is a smart choice to get the best of both overclocking for modelling performance and 6 cores for analysis performance. I think Xeon is over-rated. I have a dual Xeon system at work, only time I see a benefit is when doing big simulations, or running multiple background conversion tasks. Water cooling seems to be an important feature, due to some simulations solving for hours. My current setup without OC or WC gets into the 70 degree C range. This is what is in my shopping cart so far: Asus rampage iV black edition (just because it is cool... and I'm a self-proclaimed Asus fanboy) Corsair XMS 64GB memory CMX64GX3M8A1600C11 (going to give RamDisk a shot.) Stuff I'm thinking about adding: Whatever unlocked 6-core i7 IB-E I can afford when the shopping cart is full. I can always upgrade the cpu, right after the haswell-E release. I've been following gnif's work from EEV forum on converting GTX 690s to K5000's so there may be a GTX 690 in this build. ;o) Fittings and rads from Koolance. Probably a 480 to start with up top, and then maybe a 240 in the basement and a 360 in the front as an upgrade I'm having trouble deciding on a good case, I'm falling in love with idea of a water cooled 900D, probably just one or two rads, but with many drives since my work can be very data hungry and raid will be important for data redundancy. I realize there are many cases that could work for me, but I'm liking the idea of this one. my current system is in an Antec P182. I like the layout of the 540 Air, but not exactly what I'm looking for with this build. It's been 5 years since my last system build so I'm looking to have a fun conversation with this one. I've never taken the time to do a build for looks, but since my office is moving to the dining room, I'm thinking of doing a black on black for the build with just a few polished metal accents and minimal lighting. It will be an experience for me to do good cable management and tubing routing Usually my builds look like a thrown together test bench mock-up in case. Maybe I should sleep less and model it up in SolidWorks? Maybe not. I wonder how hard it is to paint a noctua black? Is that sacrilegious? The budget is a little bigger then reasonable for this, however its a business expense, so I'd like to hear ideas, I'll create a build log as the stuff rolls in over the holidays.