RedFlameOut’s Musings

LEDs for Beginners - Instructables Make Cool How To and DIY [category: tech]:

intro LEDs for Beginners
This instructable shows how to wire up one or more LEDs in a in a basic and clear way. Never done any work before with LEDs and don’t know how to use them? Its ok, neither have I.

Planning on upgrading my PC, I have been itching to do some case mods. Searching produced the above article at Instructables.com. I pretty much knew the content but it helped refresh my memory.

My current system consists of:

• Antec Nine Hundred case
• Seasonic S12 600 watt power supply
• ECS ELITEGROUP KN1 SLI Extreme motherboard (mainboard)
• AMD socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 3800+
• 4×512 MB DDR 400 memory (2 GB total) (don’t remember the brand)
• 2 500 GB ATA-100 hard drives (Seagate and Maxtor)
• 1 400 GB SATA II Seagate hard drive
• 1 320 GB SATA II Maxtor hard drive
• Recently purchased Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTS TDH video card (was an ATI X1950XTX until my daughter needed a more powerful card and so I got the new card).
• Lite-On DVD burner (don’t remember the exact model)
• Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit (upgraded from Windows XP Pro earlier this year)

Because of issues I have been having (on board LAN is now dead) and apparent load issues, I had to pull two TV tuners I had installed. I have enough power to run everything and it was working fine for quite some time.

Here are the new parts I plan on purchasing:

• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU
• Tuniq Tower 120 CPU heatsink/fan
• 2 sets of G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ DDR2 (5 5 5 15) memory (2×2GB for 8 GB total) (DDR3 is too expensive to go that direction yet)
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
• PCIe SATA/IDE card for the two 500 GB ATA-100 drives since the motherboard has only one IDE port and my DVD burner has to go there

Video editing, Photoshop, some programming, games — this should be able to do these for me easily. I picked the quad core that I can afford for the video editing and Photoshop work and from the reviews I have been seeing, it overclocks like a dream, which is why I picked the Tuniq Tower for cooling.

More memory will definitely help with video editing and Photoshop work. I may pick up a 750 GB SATA II hard drive for speed and capacity and move the two 500 GB ATA-100 drives to my server.

Alternatively, I may buy an ABIT IP35 Pro motherboard instead of the Gigabyte.