Computer Techie Toolbox Round-Up:

Computer Techie Toolbox Round-Up:

After about a couple of years with little work to do, I've built and refurbished a few computers in the past few months.

Again, better than MacGyver's

Dispensable spare parts
For instance, I used a Pentium 3 to boot a Phenom with a broken pin

1. Scissors
2. Wide plyer/wirestripper
3. Pointed plyer
4. Wide Philips/flat screwdrivers
5. Magnifying glass
6. Multitool pocketknife
7. The screwdriver that comes with Noctua SE fans
8. Multi-bit screwdriver

Mini screwdriver set for repairing and cleaning laptops.

Assortment of parts: (Label the boxes!)

1. Screws, sorted!
2. Pins
3. USB sticks (I like to keep special purpose USB sticks separate and labeled)
4. Flash RAM
5. Small cables (CrossFire/SLI,molex adapters)
6. Stickers
7. Misc++

Toolbox:

1. Pens
2. CPU cooling paste
3. Glue
4. Tape
5. Antistatic wristband
6. Q-tips
7. Other tools!

A straight fan can improve RPM

Keep your rescue and OS disks sorted!

1. Retail Diagnostic CD's
2. Retail Driver CD's
3. Your own accumulated custom driver compilations
4. Windows/Linux OS CD's
5. Live distros
6. Rescue distros
7. Forensic distros

Super AMD Spider platform achieved!

AMD Spider Components:

• K9A2 Platinum
• Phenom II X4 960T factory core overclocked to of 3.4Ghz and all four cores run at 3 Ghz.
• 2x Sapphire Radeon 6770 in CrossFire
• 4x1 GB Kingston HyperX PC8500 gives me 1066 DRAM speed too!
  
  
• 1x Intel 320 SSD at 80 GB
• 2x Samsung 160GB in SATA/Windows striped RAID 0
• 2x Maxtor 320GB in SATA RAID on independent PCI controller!
• 1x Corsair TX 750 Watt
• 1x Noctua  double fanned coppercoil hybrid cooler fan

Sapphire cards are somewhat unstable at overclocking, even factory overclocked ones.   None of the 10-12 temperature sensors stays between 25 and 50!

I did a FULL overclock of both CPU and GPU (max settings CPU at 3600, GPU at 900 etc but I got artifacts in Crysis! Going to slowly overclock bit by bit until i have a stable rig!

Oh yeah did i mention i paid under $2000 (10000 NOK) for this self build project!