Ok well here's uber-boring the story... (Pics to follow soon!!!)

My desktop was recently relegated to file server in Feburary as I got a laptop with the healp of my university that was more powerful. It was a 3ghz P4 Northwood with 1gig of DDR400 (only running at half its rated speed), a crap motherboard and a 6600GT GFX card. I had inherited it with 1gb ram and a naff case in a constantly BSOD'ing condition from my grandfather. I had had this machine for nearly 4 years and in that time all I had done is change the case to the one you will see soon, add 512mb more ram and add a 250gb drive to the very old 120gb one it had.

When I relegated it I added a cheap SATA card and 3 500gb hard drives giving it 1.75TB (and I ditched the 120gb one).

Recently I've wanted to play some games and had to overclock the 8600GS graphics in my laptop to do so (which I was not happy about, and couldent afford to replace the laptop if this killed it)...

SO, when someone at work offered me £80 for the internals (aka mb, cpu, gfx and ram) of the desktop, I, despite being poor, decided I wanted to upgrade it! I broke out the credit card and decided that armed with £80+70=£150, I would 'upgrade' :-)

Well this is what I have ended up with (albeit £28 over budjet - so £170 (but I did get extras and sell a 256mb ddr laptop mem module for an extra £10 - so effectively went £18 over ;-) )

This is my first real venture into overclocking and I'm pretty chuffed for a budget build...


E2180 @ 3.15Ghz Stable (9x multi) - 1.475v Bios - 1.440v windows idle 1.420v windows load
Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Motherboard set @ 350FSB (1400), +0.1v FSB +0.1v MCH
2GB OCZ SLI Ready PC2-8500 (1066mhz) 2.1v Ram @ only 840mhz 2.0v (due to issues with instability - crappy damn ram lol)
XFX 8600GTS 256mb GDDR3 - up from 675 Core / 2000 Mem to 760 Core / 2200 Mem
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7
And a 20x LG DVD Writer (as I needed a SATA one)

Not ran any Benchies yet but finally after 4 nights of messing about I have managed to get it rock solid stable...

I cant wait to run 3DMark06 - I know its a crappy card etc and I dont have high expectations... But my mate who is well into £1800+ systems sold his old Pentiom D 955 EE system that got only 6009 marks for either £500 or £750 or something, definately £500 at least anyway and I had bet him that I could put together a MB/CPU/RAM and GFX card for £150 that could beat it... And with out the dvd drive and AC7, I think I've managed. There is no money on it but he HAS to lose!

Anyway, do you think I've done alright? Do u think I'll win my bet?