BEST Value PC Challenge - Scrapyard Wars Season 3 - Episode 3
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,963 words · ~14 min read
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scrapyard
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War this episode of scrapyard Wars was brought to you by
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dbrand all right so it is the beginning of day two and the very first thing we
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need to do is check email someone who emailed ahead of you has confirmed he is coming to buy at first thing in the
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morning so don't come out before phone me around 1100 to make sure it's still available this is Luke I know it it is
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absolutely Luke oh man we're not going to have enough time dude this guy what
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the guy with the 7950 is replied back so wait we can get the
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7950 oh no we don't have time for this right now we have to we have to go right
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now oh this is for the case it the guy's
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local so it should not be that far ah 25 minutes away day two of scrapyard
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Wars so we are going to get that
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graphics card that I talked about yesterday the r9290 uh Gigabyte wind
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Force and then I have bad
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news the motherboard CPU and cooler platform guy responded
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saying that he had a lot of 2 GB 6 of
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RAM which is good news and
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then also told me that he forgot to
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bring it to work with him today and that he might not be able to tomorrow so I
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was distracted trying to uh have Brandon email motherboard
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guy uh so I went the wrong way on the
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highway so I'm going to pick up the graphics card we're at BCIT he's waiting
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I'm late I'm going to go I actually heard back from a fair
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number of my lowball graphics card offers so it's a good thing I did this
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before running out and picking up that $20 video card that I arranged yesterday
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cuz if I can find something better I'm going just bail on that guy so first up
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we've got a GTX 460 for 30 bucks the guy
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came down from or up from my offer of 20 GTX 550 TI nah sorry this card is too
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good for $35 LOL 7870 $40 firm for a
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broken card what an idiot a freaking tool this guy didn't reply to any of my
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questions are you really the line of Sebastian from
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NC okay so no useful leads whatsoever
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let's get down to business so I decided I'm going to go for the one
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shot you know home run swing right off
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the bat here I'm going to load literally
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all of this Hardware up and I'm going to
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see if it boots and if it does then I am in really good shape for the rest of the
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day and if it doesn't and we got nothing a I knew this
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motherboard wasn't going to work why did I even let myself think it might
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balls give it another shot here with a
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proper power supply and see if maybe that's the issue the display on the back
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it actually has a post read up back here but I can bar no
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way we
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got an ASUS Rog board 4 gigs of working
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ddr2 a
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q6600 and a broken power supply which I'm totally okay with
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for 60
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bucks so I know what we're doing today
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we need to obtain a new power supply
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okay I'm okay with that we need to obtain a case and what's great about
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that is it's really easy to find a case power supply combos so we need to go out
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and get a case power supply combo we still need to potentially find a
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graphics card but I'm going to find out about that in a minute here maybe we
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should spend some of our time obtaining a better cooler cuz the q6600 can run
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pretty hot when you overclock it so having a really beefy cooler on there
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could be the ace up Our Sleeve we got to go we might just lose
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the motherboard right now do we bail on this guy and try to get a different case
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Okay so it is 10:09 and everything is
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already going completely wrong um I'm pretty sure Luke is getting our mother
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board right now and I just realized the guy who has the case who's supposedly
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local is actually 25 minutes away and this guy's expecting us to like show
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up in like 5 minutes we might be a little screwed here the good thing that
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might save us is that we have leads on both a 6990 and a pair of 7950 both of
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which should be doable so I think what we're going to do is we're going to go
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to this guy's house pick up the case and the power supply and then what we're
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going to do is we're going to go and grab um see what kind of stuff we can
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get at the computer shop because that's uh we don't have any other
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appointments I don't think we might
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um yeah we'll go to the computer shop and see what we can find if the guy has
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a good motherboard then we should be able to either pull off the 7950 or the
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6990 but it's going to be tricky so I
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have bad news and great news the bad news is motherboard system guy still
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hasn't messaged me back good news is I got the graphics card for $180 I saved
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20 bucks how did I do that well I
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checked out the card before he gave it to me it's a 290 everything's fine but
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there's one little Oddity when I went to
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go take it out of the bag I noticed this there's no
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screws right there there's one screw
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holding the plate on here but there it's missing a screw here and it's missing
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two screws here and two screws here so I
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was like that's kind of weird started complaining and he gave me 20 bucks off
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so I got a 290 aftermarket cooled card
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for $180 which is pretty sick sck I just
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need to make sure that I have a computer to put it
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in it is time to call free geek and see
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how much they can save my ass hopefully
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entirely scrapyard Wars will be right back after these messages this episode
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of scrapyard Wars is brought to you by dbrand makers of the Precision Cut vinyl
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skins that you'll see on the phones and notebooks of our contestants they offer
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a wide variety of styles and colors and support for the coolest devices
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including the PlayStation 4 Galaxy Note 5 and iPhone 6s protect the body of your
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devices and make them look great at dbrand.com scrapyard Wars one thing we
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do have going for us is that uh Luke lonus and I we all had a chat this
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morning and basically the idea is is that we're all going to try to have all
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of our parts by the end of the day but if we don't have everything today we're
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going to have until noon tomorrow so basic we'll have 2 hours tomorrow to go
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and get any last minute parts we need so
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we should be able to get everything today and we'll do the build off tomorrow so we don't have to worry about
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putting together the systems although I know Lucas already got started on his
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sounded like that anyway okay so we're here we're about to pick up the case um
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hopefully we don't get murdered this is the first time we've actually used Craigslist for this little trip so let's
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get some money and hopefully have a case
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hey hi how's it going Austin thank you appreciate
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it I don't said we make sure everything well before you take it okay thank you
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appreciate it it is officially begun we have our case and I've got to say say it's actually way more beefy than I
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thought it was so see
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here oh it's got a lock on it there we
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go that's actually pretty solid and he showed me the power supply does work we
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have a 120 fan in the back actually is that one in the front no still though oh
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we even have a s cable front panel all
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right I think we're in business it's a little beat up but it'll totally do for
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25 bucks it's good start so the guy with
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the saber teeth motherboard replied he'll let me know if it's sold or not he
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got multiple replies and I have the first who first responded the first
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chance he should be here shortly and if he doesn't show up it'll be yours it's
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not about getting more money but more of a promise to keep it'll be yours for the
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same price if other guys doesn't show up so 7950 guy just replied basically we're
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kind of out of luck on this too he doesn't get home till 7:00 he could do
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it tomorrow but that would eat up the little bit of time we would have and
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we'd have to drive like an hour out out of the way so there is a $69.90 it's
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$180 so we're going to meet him at 2:00
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so I just got the $200 r9290 for 180
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bucks because it was missing a couple screws on the io plate which while
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they're nice to have the card will run without it um and I'm hoping that there
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might be some spare ones for that in the in the spare screw bin at work
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um the motherboard and S system guy
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still has not messaged me back he's at work I can't be mad but this guy is
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getting a little frustrating to deal with he's never I gave him my phone
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number he keeps on saying he's going to text me and he has not um and that would
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be a lot easier to communicate with him over text messages uh he said he was
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going to check for RAM last night he did uh I also told him to bring the stuff to
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work so that I could pick it up from him at work and he did not because he
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apparently forgot or didn't read that email or something kind of think he just
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forgot so I've got a graphics card and I've got a line on a power supply which
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I'm going to pick up later today other than that it's unknown and the free geek
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stock is really starting to freak me out so my new plan is I'm going to go to
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free geek figure out what they have if they have everything I need which is very unlikely but if they do I'll just
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pick it all up if they don't I will just kind of post up probably near free geek
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in the car do as much research as I can online try to plan all the appointments
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I can for the stuff that I can and then fill out the holes that I can't find
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with stuff at free geek hopefully that will work um I had a lot of backup plans
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last night and most of them are gone now
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but there's still a few that seem to be on the fence of guys that have 6600s and
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other various quad cores so in 600 I
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know might not be screwed just really
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depends on what's at free geek
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yeah interested in q600 interested in a board that it can go in and a fairly low
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capacity hard drive what do we have so
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our options right now this is actually way better than I expected this place is
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super cool is um $30 for an Intel DG 43
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GT did she say 35 and not 55 so I've got
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an ASUS p5q motherboard a q6600 a 20 160
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I don't remember Gigabyte hard drive spinning at uh 7200 RPM and it was a
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little vague but I think 8 gigs of RAM
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all for 100 bucks I'm a little bit worried that this thing isn't going to
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work at all as you guys saw there there was like Tim in the CPU socket and she
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rubbed the pins on the board and did the
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the but anyways I think it'll I think this will be good okay so I'm throwing
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my Windows 7 test build on here to find out what exactly this graphics card is I
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cannot believe we
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C can't believe that board
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works all right I do have to say one
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cool thing about the MacBook Air is that I forgot to charge it used it a bunch
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yesterday it's at like 65% battery it's cray cray
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oh wow it's a sound driver AIO dosis was what caused the
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problem interesting does this
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even oh oh wow um we might have to go back to
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our buddy there and get a sound
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card this motherboard doesn't have onboard sound
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so today's going well so far I have determined that my motherboard by some
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freaking Miracle Works uh the RAM is all
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correctly detected the CPU is correctly detected it even has drivers for up to
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Windows 8.1 so we're going to be able to run all of our benchmarks I have
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arranged to go out and pick up the graphics card that we figured out
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yesterday and I've reached out to back
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alley crackpipe computer owner guy about
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going and getting a sound card because that is the thing that probably had that
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motherboard in the scrap Heap I don't have a sound card for it so if we hear
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back from him maybe we can get a case while we're there which leaves us with
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the optional step of obtaining a power
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supply because I could use the one from the computer inside and that is about it
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we're in really good shape it is time to Boogie so I'm just going to cover up my
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progress so far and head out all right so we are
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here at the computer store and hopefully we can get a lot of what
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we need because we need um roughly
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everything right now so let's give it a
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try hey so basically we were able to get
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a lot of what we needed so we're able to get a Core i7 2600 not overclockable as
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well as the motherboard so it will support crossfires so we're good with
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the 6990 um but the most important thing is
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we've got a seriously powerful CPU have a seriously powerful graphics card we
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have a 160 gig hard drive because 15
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bucks and we just need it to run benchmarks it's not really going to make a difference and we have our second
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power supply so this is actually a pretty beefy Supply it actually has an 8
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pin and a six pin so basically right now
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I think we're in pretty good shape I think once we' Like Glue this or tap
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this up to the top of the case we're going to be set so let's going do it
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okay so they had a problem mounting the stock heat sink um but the price is good
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so I really want to make sure works so they let me back into their testing area
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which is awesome they're letting us film which is awesome free geek is awesome I
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need to mount this thing though yeah it's I think the heat sink
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has a problem that really sucks cuz something
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that I do know doesn't work is this top
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slot but they say that this one works I
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want to make sure it works before I leave uh the the ARM is broken off
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that's why it won't sit yeah that explains a lot I hate these freaking
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stock heat sinks man that's one side in
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so the whole right side went in no problem at all the whole right side's in
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the left side on the other hand is
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just not working out for me very well
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I'm having second thoughts about my video card Matrix strategy what I
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realized is I'm calculating FPS per
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dollar as a function of only the cost of
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the graphics card I have not factored in the rest of the
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computer so if a graphics card costs $10
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more that doesn't mean that if I'm
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spending $20 I'm spending 50% more I better get 50% more
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FPS that means that compared
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to the rest of the cost of the system I might be spending 10% more I only have
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to get 10% more FPS so basically the more expensive
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graphics cards might be totally worthwhile even if they don't score as
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many FPS per dollar compared to a low-end one next time on scrapyard Wars
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Dennis nearly gets deported