The beast is built and running!

I finished building the new system last week (Thursday). I ran into a few issues:

1. The mainboard was apparently dead out-of-the-box, as none of the IDE channels appeared to work. I tried various configurations and various drives that were confirmed as working. I was unable to get anything to work, yet I could boot a Linux Live CD.

2. The power cables on the power supply had weird endings that initially looked like they wouldn't fit on the motherboard's sockets. I then looked closely and found that the cable sockets could be split (at least the 24-pin and 8-pin could).

3. I've been trying to determine what to put on this beast as an OS. Right now I have WinXP so that I could evaluate the high-end games that I have (BF 2142 and such) and would love to be able to run an OS that will detect and utilize both of the CPU's cores. [Note: WinXP Pro does this, and I'm also using that version.]

The case is very nice and has a see-through side. The hardware runs really good. I bumped up the eye-candy in BF 2142 so I could get a decent evaluation of how hot the CPU would get (I haven't even tried to see how many framerates per second the vidcard may do. Idle, I get around 40-45F. During gaming with eye-candy maxxed out (in BF 2142), I get 54F max. This isn't bad but I've heard of people getting even lower temps than 54F. This tells me that I may need a few case fans (I've none, so far) and maybe need to hide cabling. I've a very thin coating of Arctic Silver on the CPU, and I'm sure that's helping. What I haven't done is check to see if anyone has posted temps using the same CPU and case. I'll search for that info soon.

I'm very happy with the set up and will most likely mess with RAID next (I'll require another hard disk), after getting more case fans and possibly more RAM.