For the record, I’ve become a complete hardware geek.

It started out last December when I built my first gaming rig and it culminated last week with overclocking and liquid nitrogen.

Think you need a quad-core CPU for an extreme gaming PC with impressive 3DMark Vantage numbers and gaming performance?  See for yourself by watching the video of how I overclocked and hyper-cooled an SLI® gaming rig using two of our latest and greatest GPUs—GeForce® GTX 280—an nForce® 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, and a sub-$200 CPU. Since I don’t have solid copper coldplates and liquid nitrogen underneath my kitchen sink—and I’m sure you don’t either!—I made an ultra-fun trip to the NVIDIA® labs for the hard-to-come-by but necessary ingredients and safety gear.

Since I’m sure you’ll ask what was in the system, here are the need-to-know specs:

• 2× NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards running in SLI
• nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU
• 4 GB SLI-ready Corsair DDR3 memory
• PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 1200W power supply
• Windows Vista 32-bit operating system

The standard clocks on a GeForce GTX 280 are 601 MHz core and 1,296 MHz shader, but I pushed them to 727 MHz and 1,458 MHz, respectively.  I also managed to get the GPUs cooled to a chilly -102.5 °C!

My results may not be as high as the Kingpin’s world-records, but they’re not too shabby!  Given that I had a lot of extra help and equipment, I will leave the record-breaking to the FutureMark Hall of Fame professionals.

Have you ever wanted a SLI powered motorcylce?  Me too :)

Take a look at this TopMods.net thread of some pretty innovative PC MODs coming out of Russia.

Think you can top it?  Post a link to your case in the comments.

Oh, how I wish I had more time to both game and blog.  Based on the poll, I started COD4 a couple weekends ago, but got side-tracked by a few things - work, travel, life, and most detrimental to my progress in COD4 - Guitar Hero III on my Wii.  For some reason, once that plastic guitar is slung over my shoulder, my addictive personality kicks in and I can’t seem to put it down.  While I managed to beat Lou and moved onto medium on Wii this weekend, I’m still plodding along in COD4. 

While you FPS pros conquer COD4 in a couple hours, it’s taking me much, much longer.  As a matter of fact, I thought I was reaching the end of the game last night when I found Al-Asad and watched him get shot (!), only to morph into Price in his pre-Captain years in the next sequence. So I decided it was time to check out the IGN Game Guide and realized I’m only a third of the way through the game!  Now here I am maneuvering through Chernobyl radiation in my woolly mammoth suit, getting mutilated by dogs at every corner.  Awesome!

Touchdown!  With slightly less grace than Plaxico the previous week, late Sunday night with Red Nectar and Hot Pocket in hand I finally finished Crysis.  Now I’m looking for my next FPS (help me decide by participating in the poll!), but I’ll give you a brief run-down of my Crysis experience.

First part of the game – loved it!   The one-on-one, person-to-person combat was great.  I even enjoyed The Core, and I found the graphics in this soupy world amazing. 

While challenging to get past the floating aliens (my shooting skills are still so immature I had to cloak invisible, wait till the aliens got close, and then pummel them with my fists.  Fun!), the graphics in here were impressive enough that I would often travel right up to walls to look at the details.

After playing Crysis (my first FPS) at GeForce LAN 4 last November, I was hooked on the game and, frankly, the gaming experience in general.  But when I tried to play Crysis on an ancient desktop with an Athlon 64, the game took 10 minutes to load and stuttered with every step and shot I took.  I decided it was time to join ranks with my fellow NVIDIANs and build my own SLI system.

I've upgraded graphics cards, audio cards, and power supplies before, but had never built a system from the ground up.  My first step was to watch Phil and Tony's awesome How-To Guide on SLI Zone to learn the basics and know exactly what components I needed.  Here's what I started with after about five different trips to Fry's:

- 2 GeForce 8800 GT graphics cards in SLI
- nForce 680i motherboard
- 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Quad 6600
- Zalman CNPS8000 CPU fan
- 2 GB SLI-ready Corsair XMS DDR2 memory
- 500 GB SATA Maxtor HD
- Thermaltake 700W PSU
- 22" Samsung WXVGA flat panel monitor
- Logitech gaming G15 keyboard and G5 mouse
- Yamaha speakers and sub-woofer
- Antec Nine Hundred case

I cleared the kitchen table, booted up the old PC so I could continuously watch the SLI video, and referenced several manuals at once – motherboard, chassis, HD, and CPU cooler.  (In all, the CPU fan took me almost 2 hours by itself, but in the end, an instructional Flash video on the Zalman site really helped me out.) 

I decided to build my rig without SLI on the first go-round, just to make sure that everything else was working properly.  24 hours, one false start, a fitful night's sleep (dreaming about whether if I connected everything properly), several calls to Phil and Sam, and a few beers later, I heard the whirl of the fans and watched the BIOS appear on screen.