Cracking open the HP Blackbird 002 DE LCi gaming PC

You're kidding right ? What a ripoff. Stupid money chases stupid"gaming" rig.

I'm pleased with my used m/b, used 9600GT and no-name memory as it works and plays almost any game with settings maxed out and at a very high resolution. Not to mention my xp virtual machine that i use for vpn back to work and running some non-vista compliant dvd ripping software is very stable. I also have an ubuntu vm that runs stable too, although admittedly I just use that for tinkering.

Ram has to be the most finicky part of any custom build and I've noticed Asus in particular seems to be super picky about ram.

Speaking of video editing, nvidia has a new encoder that uses "Cuda" (a c language that basically maps all proccess to the gfx card). I can encode with that process on one program and encode another with my old program and get two movies encoded in the same amount of time without taxing the system too much. But you can pretty much forget about playing any high end games at the same time.

I'm very optimistic too. A last ditch attempt of changing the brand of RAM was a cheaper hit on my now very over budget limit than a new motherboard is/was going to be.

The computer shop asked me if I wanted the standard Muskins at 5,5,5,12 or the performance chips at 5,4,4,12. I said I'd best take the higher performance since I was downgrading from 1066 to 800 mhz sticks and mentioned that the Balistix where killing my system. The guy across the counter nodded, "yeah, I had to get rid of Crucials too after my system kept crashing."

Recognition of the issue at the shop plus Mushkins being used successfully on a few overclocker sites I was checking for specks the last few weeks makes me very optimistic. I just wish it had been within the return limit at the shop where the Crucials came from.

I've got three booted VM and some heavy load on the host OS; so far, uptime is on day two. The only issue was when I hard set the ram voltage and timings. I hit that handy external bios reset button and it's been solid so far. If all is well, it will remain stable until I forget to keep checking for a locked system every time I walk past.