Look for this wicked system to show up at our Burnaby store. It was built by yours truly as a show piece to demonstrate the kind of wicked gaming PC you can build with all parts from NCIX.com.

With the Mountain Mods H2G0 case it only took about 2 hours to do this build. Here are some shots of the hardware used.

One of the first steps for me is always to install the CPU block and mount the radiator. I used a Danger Den MC-TDX for this build on account of the flashy look of the block. For the radiator I took a far more practical approach and went with a Thermochill PA120.2. This thing is a monster performer and the H2G0 is designed to be used with it, so the spacing is just right. At least it’s supposed to be just right. Even using 3/8″ barbs, there was HARDLY enough room to fit the tubing through the pre-cut holes

I opted to use a full cover EK nickel plated water block on the 3870 graphics card. Here you can see the card with the stock cooler stripped off and the second picture shows the EK block installed in the system.

Hard drive installation was pretty straightforward if you’ve worked in a Mountain Mods case, but the optical drive was kinda challenging. The pictures below show the hard drive installed in the bottom, rear 120mm fan mount, as well as a couple views of how the 5.25″ devices get installed. You must have at least one full size 5.25″ device (such as an optical drive) installed in order for this system to work.

Here are a couple shots showing cable management in the bottom. The modular Corsair power supply really makes cable management a snap. I only have 3 modular cables plugged into it. One for SATA, one for molex, and one for PCIe.

And here are the shots showing the system completed with the lights all aglow. So sexy. Be sure to check it out in the Burnaby store if you’re down there. If you’re interested in building a system like this for yourself, send an email to PC@ncix.com and we’ll get you set up.

Thanks for reading

These suckers are HUGE! I was actually the original builder of this PC, so when I got a call from the owner that it needed work my first thought was “Oh great… A failed GPU or something that will take forever to remove”. Actually it was even better than that. He wanted an upgrade.

So we threw a new 790i FTW, 4GB of DDR3, and 3 GTX 280 SuperClocked cards into his rig. Here’s some glam shots that I took while I was working on it. The whole thing took more than 6 hours.

Here’s a gallery with some great shots of this system including a night shot. It doesn’t include the actual “final” picture with all the tip ties cut short and the panels closed up, but it gives you a pretty good idea

I’ve got this thing on RFD and the guy wants to see some pictures. I guess I’ll call it a modding/water cooling post. I basically really wanted to do a mATX water cooled build, so I had an E6850, P5E-VM HDMI, and Radeon 3870 in here with an MCP350 pump, Enzotech (never again) chipset block, D-TEK FuZion GFX GPU block, Swiftech MCRES-MICRO, MCR320, and Primochill 3/8″ ID 5/8″ OD tubing.

It was a very nice little build and ended up not even taking up any extra bays so the expansion capabilities of the case were not impacted.

Ran into some problems with GRID when I first installed it on my secondary machine and thought I’d share the fix. System specs are below:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ @ 2.35GHz
eVGA mATX nForce4 SLI
2×1GB Corsair Value Select
2x eVGA 8800GTS 640MB SSC
OCZ GameXStream 600W
Seagate 320GB 7200.10 SATA
Samsung DVD Writer
Silverstone SG01B-W

All of this usually has no problems powering a 1680×1050 21″ display, but GRID would periodically (usually within about 10 seconds of starting a race) start to stutter in a way that looked a lot like hard drive buffering, but lasted for too long (5-30 seconds) and then it would go away for another 10 second. Very annoying.

The problem, it turns out, is mostly isolated to SLI systems running Vista without Service Pack 1. Driver updates and other standard fixes didn’t do anything, but an update to Service Pack 1 took care of it right away.

Quite honestly this is one thing I really never thought would be an occupational hazard of working at a computer store….

Mike, if you’re reading this, no I do not frequent California, USA…

You know, I have to wonder if gamers are going to migrate to consoles for all their gaming just to escape inconveniences like registration and copy protection. I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth that I bought a good few years back. Now, I confess to being a moron and losing the CD case, but at the time I had the CD key written down and wasn’t worried about it. Fast-forward 3 or so years and now I can’t read the CD key because it’s so smudged.

I don’t think I ever actually created an EA online account because all of my aliases including my real name were already taken with numbers on the end of them reaching into the hundreds (I’m exaggerating, but you catch my drift), so now for the first time I want to play it online. I was asked by a couple of the guys I met at Fragapalooza to play some BFME and not having my key I decided to buy a key second hand (let’s face it, how many copies of this game is EA producing these days…) for $10. I entered it and it won’t work online because it’s alrady been registered.

Now I can understand if it was like Blizzard where two people cannot use the same key at the same time, or I had basically gotten scammed because the key he sold me was banned or something, but this is just a case of EA making the game hard to play even when you’ve gone out of your way to have a legit copy.

Well, I’ve linked the EA support staff to this post and I’ll be interested to see if they’re willing to do anything. Wish me luck.

edit: it looks like I can send in the disc with $10 and they will send me a replacement product key. Yay.

Well I decided to take my birthday off of work and go to the PNE. For those who don’t live in Vancouver, the PNE or Pacific National Exhibition is like a big homeshow, livestock show, flea market, and amusement park all rolled into one with live entertainment such as SuperDogs, street performers, pig races, and musicians.

This is the Peking Acrobats. They did quite a few stunts, but I thought this was one of the most impressive ones. Note that the bottom chair is balanced on pots, NOT sitting on its 4 legs

Here’s me racing my little brother around a race course made of bales of hay. These are little tricycle style tractors. I don’t think it was built for my weight, but oh well :p

Over the course of the day I got a variety of stuff for free by telling people it was my birthday. I got cotton candy, kettle corn, face painting (pictured above), free rides for my mom (too cheap to buy a ride pass and hasn’t been on a coaster in 30 years. It was hilarious!), and a sno cone. I was actually asked for ID to prove it was my birthday by the girls in the sno cone concession stand. Haha.

And for no particular reason at all…. An alpaca.

If you were thinking “Predator”, you weren’t too far off the mark. Acer has their product page up for the Aspire Predator, a gaming machine that they want to use to compete with the boutique builders.

It’s liquid cooled, SLI ready, features 8GB of RAM, and one of the funkiest cases I’ve seen in a long time. All of that said, who wrote the marketing materials?

NCIX will of course be carrying these machines, once they’re released, but if you want more information now, you can get Faster, Deeper, Harder, and Further here

The user Schnoops over at www.overclock.net put together a fantastic reservoir side panel for the Antec Nine Hundred (900) case. It reminds me of the old aquarium side panel that Lian Li came out with years ago.

You can check out the original thread here. Very cool work

Microsoft has a handy error message that pops up on Windows Home Server if you press anything other than Ctrl+Alt+Delete before you log in.

Thanks for the instructions, guys!