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So I have three more components for my gaming rig that I previously talked about here on the dear old blarg. We bought a case, a power supply, and a video card.

The Case

I’ve never built a gaming rig before, so I decided to take the cheeseball route and get a case that screams, “1 4m 133t. jo w1ll ph33r my b0xen”. Sure, I could have gone with the sleekness of an expensive lian li case, but why not ham it up a bit with a case that looks like its trying to copy Alienware’s style? With that in mind, we chose the Viper case from XGBox.com (click for a bigger image):

The Power Supply

Eventually we plan on running two video cards using ATI’s version of SLI, Crossfire. So to support that a power supply capable of running two high-end video cards is needed. I also need something to support lots of SATA drives in a RAID configuration, so we decided on the CoolerMaster Real Power 550W SLI power supply not to be confused with real ultimate power:

It’s kind of neat because it has a 3.5″ display to show the total power consumption.

The Video Card

One component I didn’t want to skimp on was the video card. The video card is by far the most important piece of hardware for a gaming rig. I chose to go the ATI route mainly due to product loyalty and plus the fact that my ABIT AT8 32x mainboard supports it natively made it a lot easier for me to stick with it.

The currently most powerful ATI gaming video card is the Radeon X1900 XTX. I chose to go one step down and get the Radeon X1900 XT, which according to multiple reviews online is only a little bit slower, showing around 3-4 frames per second difference in most games. The XTX is basically the same card as the XT, but it is overclocked by the factory and certified to be able to run at the slightly faster speeds. In other words, the XTX cards are the creap of the crop of the XT cards. But they also cost about $100 more, so it is a better economical choice to chose the XT card.

I chose the ASUS version of the card and got it from Newegg due to plenty of positive reviews, plus it comes with a ton of bundled games. Here is a picture:

The thing is a beast! It is about as thick as two normal cards, and requires its own connection to the power supply. It should be a good card for quite some time. The box it came in was huge, too, at about twice the size of a normal video card box. w00t!

Next round I’ll be getting the hard drives, RAM, and some sort of optical drive. Then we’ll be able to start the system up and get some benchmarks and in-game screenshots to show off how cool World of Warcraft looks. (BJ, you know you MUST play WoW. You have no choice in this matter!).