My computer

I got my computer about a year ago and assembled it myself. Though I like playing around with hardware from time to time, I’m always really glad when it’s all done - and working! So here’s what I have (only main specs):

• AMD Athlon64 3000 CPU (1,8 GHz)
• Asus Motherboard A8N-E (nForce4 chipset)
• XFX 7600GT video card with 256MB DDR3 RAM
• 1,5 GB RAM
• Innovatek watercooling system (for CPU and GPU)

The watercooling system really does its job nicely! CPU as well as GPU temperature won’t go above 40°C and tend to be around 30°C most of the time. That’s the good part… but it’s really annoying if you like to change your hardware a lot.

I found the XFX video card more or less accidentally as I never heard of that company before. The video card is very well manufactured and solid. It has a bar added on top of it which stabilizes the board and allowed me to attach the watercooling heatsink a lot easier compared to my former Gigabyte board. I think, if it’s time for a new video card I’ll take a look at XFX first. I always prefer nVIDIA boards over ATI, because the Linux support concerning the installation of their drivers is a lot better with nVIDIA.

The Asus board was a bit of a disappointment at the beginning, because the chip fan broke after two weeks. Looking at some forums I found out that this was a “normal” behavior of this chip fan. That’s not Asus-worthy!!! So I had to disassemble my computer (and of course the watercooling system got in my way…) and change that chip fan. As the nForce4 northbridge needs good cooling, I bought a bigger heatsink and attached a small (but more quiet) fan to it. Work’s like charm! That was about the only thing I could complain of.