Stress testing the new box
With all of this overclocking and cutting-edge hardware with brand-spanking-new drivers, I'd pretty much expect to run into some problems. One can always test to make sure that a system's stable at a basic level, though, so that's what I did. Here's a screenshot I took during my over-the-top, uber-stability stress test.

I have running here two instances of Prime95's torture test, with the CPU affinity for the two instances tied to the X2's two cores. (Prime95 is a great CPU stress test, and will let you know if it encounters a single computational error.) The high-dynamic-range graphics demo in the corner does a nice job of exercising the GPU, and Winamp is playing some music to get the audio subsystem into the mix. Also running are two instances of the Windows Explorer, one of which is copying a few gigs of data over the network, while the other copies files to a 2GB USB key drive. Meanwhile, my usual mix of background apps is running, including Outlook Express, Trillian, Skype, DynDNS updater, Avast! Antivirus, POPFile, the HP printer/fax/scanner monitor, and Steam. CPU-Z shows that the CPU is running at 2.4GHz, as expected, and Task Manager confirms that CPU utilization is pegged. Up in the top left-hand corner is nTune, monitoring CPU, system, and GPU temperatures, voltages, and clock speeds.

I let the system run like this for at least 18 hours, just to make sure that it could handle it. I would have let it run longer, but temperatures were stable and there were zero problems, so I called it good.

Since then, in over a week constant use, I have had one system crash, a blue screen of death caused by nvtcp.sys. At the time, I was using NVIDIA Ethernet port with ActiveArmor TCP acceleration, but the crash confirmed my fears about the robustness of NVIDIA's Ethernet implementation. (I'm all for ActiveArmor, but not for ActiveHarmer.) I would recommend looking for a motherboard with a good auxiliary PCI-E NIC onboard for this very reason. I've now switched over to this DFI board's other onboard GigE NIC, driven by a Marvell chip. I'm willing to bet that I won't have similar problems with this NIC.

Conclusions
Overall, I'd call this build a success, provided that the system doesn't go up in smoke any time soon. Subjectively, I can tell the difference between this box and my old one in a number of ways. Yes, first and foremost, it's much smoother in daily use thanks to the presence of a second processor core. I've spent a lot of time with SMP over the years, and I didn't expect anything less. However, I've already run into problems with games not doing well on an SMP system, and in that sense, it feels like we haven't come very far from the dually Celeron days. Surely these problems will be less common as dual-core processors become more prevalent.

This system is also a little bit louder than my previous box, and that's why I'm considering moving it into a Sonata II case. In fact, I'd already have pulled the trigger on one of these purty Zalman coolers if I weren't worried about it fitting inside the Sonata II's ducting. Then again, better cooling won't fix one source of noise that I somehow failed to anticipate fully: the RAID 1 mirror. Turns out that running two drives in tandem tends to make twice as much noise as a single drive. Who knew? If you have a good, regular backup solution, you may want to avoid RAID 1. That said, I am enjoying the benefits of 250GB of redundant storage.

Also, as fast as this system is—and it's very quick indeed—my experiences with it so far have only reinforced the degree to which hard disk drive performance is the primary bottleneck in everyday PC use. I can't help but start dreaming of a 15K-RPM SCSI drive while fiddling during a long reboot or application launch. I suspect the additional noise from the RAID 1 mirror has made me more aware of disk I/O and its delays, but the point is valid, nonetheless. I'd probably pony up for some exotic SCSI drives before going for, say, a second graphics card for SLI or the fastest possible FX or Extreme Edition CPU.