albertareef

Hey Siskiou, did you pick up that cube tank and stand at SWF up in Portland today? I was in the store at the time but didn't realize.... if that was you that is. Hope so as that looked like a tank that could be really sweet if it found a good home.

Hmmm... I like both the pop-out and two-sided ideas but I guess the latter is off the table. If you have the space and the tank dimensions work out, you could extend it out into the room say a foot or so and get a nice partial 3 sided viewing - just box in the stand and "canopy" to make the wall surfaces smooth. I little extra carpentry but could be a cool effect and get you the extra room. Of course... you could just let James build you one...

Well... as it is a logo, I can see the desire to keep it simple but I am partial to images that lean toward realism and capture some of the natural beauty of the organisms we keep... be they fish or coral. Andy came up with a pretty nice one on the other thread but how about something along those lines with a coral specimen and wrasse? Since it sounds like the banner will be represented on the back of the shirts so it's perhaps less of a big deal to have a representational logo but still.... it's hard to beat the beauty of what we keep in our tanks! I also like designs where the natural lines of the elements help generate part of the "frame" or shape of the overall piece (e.g. the shape of the coral combined with the curve of a fish swimming generating an overall oval). Sorry... I'm probably not putting this into words well but thought I should at least try... Thanks for giving it a shot.

Thanks Jay! Nice job on your design Andy. Reefgeek, are you going to have time to add some? Rspring, will you be able to finish some of your other ideas? Good luck and thanks to all!

Hey Geek - I have a large, no name, DIY unit you are welcome to if you are interested. The return is on the bottom so you would need to keep it above water level though. You can see it inside the stand on this classified thread http://www.pnwmas.org/forums/showthread.php?t=4499 I was using in on my 90 and I am sure it would be fine on yours if you can get it set up. Let me know....

Hey Bob, tank is looking good! That is a nice rose... guess you got tired of waiting for the old one to split;) Looks like that rabbit is doing a nice job keeping the tank clean as well. Good to see some pics again - thanks for sharing!

rspring - all excellent points and yes, it is extremely hard to design for a) diverse user group and b) without any ongoing feedback, so cudos to you for taking a crack at it. As far as personal tastes go (since this is largely subjective) I do prefer the less "cartoonish" images and also agree that clownfish are somewhat overused (albeit really cute and easily identifiable) so therefore lean toward the logo with the rabbitfish (although I haven't voted). Simple can be good, however, given the fact that PNWMAS isn't an obvious acronym, I can see value to some form of additional text spelling it out (perhaps in a smaller font than the PNWMAS.org). It would be nice to at least include a fish and coral to try and reflect a little more of the diversity of the hobby - I think this is probably where much of the attachement to the banner comes from (and I like that a lot myself). Just my 2-cents. If I had any actual current skills in this area I would take a crack at it but I don't have the time to relearn Illustrator right now. Good luck and thanks again for working at it.

Ok... I know I'm lame because I didn't actually spend any time trying to contribute a piece but.... I am with Geek and Michael on this. I don't know that any of these capture the club ideally. Perhaps, if Brandon were willing and he could be given a little more time, we could get some additional options??? No disrespect meant to those that contributed...

Forgive me, but I am highly skeptical about this part!

Arrgghh.... you're killing me Brandon! I want to buy this just because it such a screaming deal but I still have an unused stand sitting in my living room and I would be shot if I brought this home! Hope this works for ya.

Hey Ryan - you might want to PM him if you're interested... I don't think he checks the board much these days.

Looks like it has it's own thread.... and looks like a heck of a deal! "AquaPod 24 w/70W HQI Sunpod and Biocube stand"

I will bring you piece next time I make it out there - might be able to come by Sunday if you will be around. If it's not white enough for you it can go in the frag tank;) I think it is the variant you are looking for however...

Congratulations! Awesome job on the tanks and the write-up. I have seen a few pics of your tanks before and always loved them. It's a nice change of pace from the warm water specimens and extremely impressive. Very cool...(rock2)

Wow... this does look like a great deal. If I hadn't already bought Lowman's system I would be all over this. Unfortunately, no more room (or time) for another one. Good luck!

Really nice job on the tank - looks like you are off to a great start. I like the aquascaping as well... Looks like you got one of the nice male Potter's Wrasses from Rose City. They have had several come in lately. Unfortunately, I lost mine to some sort of infection (which I feel really badly about).... glad to see one of his mates doing well. They are beautiful fish.

I looked this up on TigerDirects site and it says "400 watt or greater power supply is recommended" so it sounds like you should be OK. Realistically, since you aren't gaming and not running a lot of other drives off of the power supply it will probably be just fine. As Nyles says, you can always upgrade the PS later if you find yourself adding additional drives or other power sinks later and run into problems.

Hey Ryan - care to share your source? Thanks!

Hey Reefgeek, sounds like a good deal for what you are going to do with it. The video card choices are always tough with many criteria to look at (piplines, fill rates, core clock speed, memory bandwith etc.) but, unless you are going to play high end games, this should be a good workhorse card for you. Powercolor has been around for a long time and Radeon is a pretty solid chipset in general. The only other thing I would check before calling it good is the power requirements for this card. Most high end cards these days have their own cooling fans and require power directly from the power supply (as opposed to just through the card interface on the motherboard). If that's the case, they typically will recommend a minimum wattage capacity to drive the card. You can often get away with less if you aren't running lots of drives but if you end up having problems the card manufacturer will point to that as a possible problem. Also, I would support the suggestion by Nyles to upgrade to a WD drive as I have also had good luck with these and seen a lot of other brands fail in our machines at work. As for the OS question, I think Civicsit is correct on that - make sure you get a full version as opposed to an upgrade version (which is cheaper) as the upgrade requires you to load it on top of an already installed, valid version of the OS. If you don't already have an older version to install before upgrading to XP then make sure you are buying a full version. OK... good luck man. Sorry this is so complicated. Looks like a great deal.

Geek, while I haven't specifically compared the two chips you are thinking about, in general, there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to clock speed and cache per $$ and, for what you are planning on doing, I think the AMD will be more than sufficient with significant room for growth. Honestly, I don't think you would be able to tell the differnce between the two all other things (RAM, video card, hd speed) being equal. Assuming you address the cooling issues that Impur pointed out (which are important) then the extra $200 could probably be better spent upgrading other components. For instance - going to a 10,000 RPM SATA drive (e.g. a WD raptor), going for dual video cards (if the board supports them), adding more RAM. I have used several AMD chips BTW and have been pretty happy with them so I don't necessarily buy into the inherent supperiority of Intel products. One other thing I was curious about.... you might want to double check the specs on your mother board vs. video card as you list the card as AGP and most new boards are PCIexpress - which aren't compatible. I thought the SLI boards (which support dual video cards) were pretty much all PCIexpress. Also, double check the socket compatability of the CPU and mother board (both 959 or other?). Sometimes you can get a better deal as a package on CPU/board as well then you don't have to worry about it. Sorry... if I had a little more time today I would check these out for you but I have a friends G4 laptop I have to crack open and do a HD and optical drive replacement on.... you have never seen so many different sized microscopic screws in your life!

Hi Civicsit, you sure about this bit? If so, it's something new (specific to the dual core chips?). The previous versions of the Athlon 64 series were 64bit capable but did not require a 64bit version of the OS. I am running standard Windows XP on an Athlon 64 as we speak (so to speak). Obviously, you can realize some enhanced performance from the 64 bit OS but then you will run into issues (potentially) with 32 bit applications. Many may run OK in emulation mode but others won't and you probably don't want to have to upgrade Photoshop etc. if you don't have to. I may be completely wrong here since I haven't shopped for a dual core chip recently but I think Reefgeek's proposed setup would work fine. Actually, it's a really good price and makes me itchy to upgrade! My apologies if I am just out of touch....

Hey - congratulations! Our best to the whole family. And you thought keeping a reef tank was a lot of work:D

I could use a couple of these as well if you ever hear back from them... thanks for checking on this.