Dave,
Would love to see the specs of your Quad, if you're willing to share. Sounds impressive .... :-)
TIA,
Tom

Needless to say, Dave, that I am always in awe of people who CAN build their own. Nice one Mate!!

What are your actual specs on the QUADie?

Grazie

Congratulations Dave - did you need a new table too for the dual 24" ;-)

I just build a quadcore 2 month back, at it is really fast - especially on DVD encoding.

/Ulf

I'll get a picture up of my screens but I got a couple of deals on the computer that helped me out keeping it at the 1K mark.

let's see here

- Case - Antec P180 ($100 from my cousin who resells them)
- MOBO - GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX ($129 Newegg)
- PSU - COOLER MASTER Real Power Pro 550 RS-550-ACAA-A1 ATX12V / EPS12V 550W Power Supply ($99 Newegg)
- Processor - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 ($285 Newegg)
- RAM - CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 ($56 after MIR Newegg)
- Hard Drive - HITACHI Deskstar T7K500 HDT725050VLA360 (0A33437) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM ($109 Newegg)
- Optical Drive - LITE-ON Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL ($29 Newegg)
- Video Card - BFG 8800GT 512MB OC [625mhz instead of 600] ($250 on sale Best Buy)

OK so $1057 is closer to $1,100 than $1,000 but I'll keep pretending that it was $1K for my wife's sake ;)

Existing OS would keep it this price but I decided to take the plunge and dual boot Vista and XP so I paid $45 for Vista Ultimate with my cousins Family pricing from Microsoft. Never the less If you did it with a weak graphics card and used existing OS, you should be able to make the whole system for around $800 and if you can scavenge from your existing Machine rather than doing a ground up build, you would be able to do it for even less (400 or so if you just do the MOBO and the Proc).

Never has it been so possible to attain so much power at such a small price, what a great time to be a nerd :D

Dave

Thanks very much Dave. Sure gives me great starting point to contemplate.
Tom

FrigidNDEditing :

I just picked up one of those 24"Soyo monitors at Office Max, but the display looked absolutely awful as did all the others lined up. The clerk swore it was just their signal being spread over so many monitors and that it would look great at home.

Sounds like that is the case and looks good hooked up to your system?

Looks like the price $250 is good thru Saturday....

Too bad the really cheapSeagate hard drives on sale were all gone by the time I got my lazy rear end up and out the door this morning!

Eileen

Displays look great when hooked up over DVI connection, I think it's hooked up over a VGA and has some signal issues in all their stores (at both stores I went to that was the case).

So, Use the DVI, and get a clean signal, the only thing was that the two monitors were not closely matched so I had to do a little tweaking here and there.

(that and the cheap stand lets one lean a little farther forward than the other identical monitor, so my anal retentive nature starts to come in to play. I'll have to do some fine tuning since the stands are uber cheap.

Dave

"my anal retentive nature starts to come in to play. I'll have to do some fine tuning since the stands are uber cheap"

Dave: thanks for the heads up advice and please don't hurt yourself in the process of fine tuning!.

PICTURES!!!!

I'm dying to see the Real-Estate these 2 monitors are giving you.
On all of my NLE's I run 2 19" monitors @ 1600x1200.

I'm in the process of helping some colleagues that do Audio work set up an AlienWare/Vegas Workstation. Our lead IT guy told them to go with 2 Mac Monitors... after looking into the prices I pointed them to Tiger Direct and we priced out 2 24" for @ $500 less than the 2 of the smaller Mac Monitors. I'm not sure which way they are gonna go... they're currently using a single 17".

lol, i'll have to do some cleaning, but I'll get them up as soon as possible (will edit my original post so you don't have to scroll down to see them either :) )

Dave

My Bummer:
Bought one of the Soyo 24" monitors yesterday and after hours of trying, could not get the thing to light up for more than a moment, then it would break the screen into blocks and disappear to black in about 6 sec.

Went to get another one today and they are all gone and "discontinued".
So I hope you get some good service out of yours!
I'm jealous....that was a great price...

Eileen

The Soyo 24" monitor has had a love/hate situation going on the Internet boards for the past few months. Many people have bought them and loved them, while others have had a rash of early failures.

I've been running one continuously since late August. It is connected just with a VGA analog cable, yet the results are really stunningly crisp. Default color was weird, but some tweaking fixed that.

PROS:

(1) cheap ($289 last August)

(2) very saturated color display

(3) bright

(4) NO BLACK LEVEL SHIFT as you bob your head up and down


CONS:

(1) Perhaps a 1 in 3 chance of getting an early failure unit (cheap electronics?). Mine's been running fine for 3 months now...

(2) Tom's Hardware Guide says the very dark gray shifts towards red. Okay, I've never seen it, but I'll take their word for it. I'm coming from a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT monitor, which is no slouch from a color rendering standpoint. Even so, I'm very impressed by this Soyo 24" display.

I ended up ordering the 24" Westinghouse from Newegg and with the 1 yr replacement came in at just under $500 before the $50 rebate.
Damn, that's a big difference between that and the Soyo...@$250

When I returned the Soyo to Office Max today they now show 300 units in the system according to the clerk, although the website shows nothing!
It may have been a one-shot opportunity from the looks of it and this time I lost out....

Enjoy yours!

Eileen

Dave I've still got you beat: I have SIX 22" monitors and 16gigs of RAM on my dual quad system. :-)

And it's STILL not big enough to show the full size of the frames I'm working on, which is 10577x1050 (stereo 3D to boot).

Fred