New PC tentative plans:
- AMD Phenom II x6 1055T (I’ll wait for the 95w version, not interested in a 125w space heater)
- Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 motherboard (880G chipset)
- 4 gigs of ECC RAM
- Intel X25-M 80-gig SSD boot drive
- A couple big Seagate spinning disks for data
My current desktop machine is 7 years old; I’m pretty well due for an upgrade. Any input from my geek friends? Sounds like a reasonable setup?
That’s basically the arrangement I went with. The SSD helps for running three EVE clients at once, and all other games benefit greatly from the faster random access speed. My only nitpick is the RAM… with a processor like that and a fast storage system, there’s not much reason not to have 8 gigabytes of RAM.
I think I pulled mine current together in 03 too.
Are you doing RAID? Don’t they say to use different brands of disks if you do?
Just get a Mac. You know you want one.
Why ECC for a desktop? Also, unlike Whitebread, I would (and did) go for the 8 gigs. There’s a noticable difference in gaming with 8 gigs vs. 4 gigs on some games (Fallout 3 and similar games with very large worlds, mostly).
Yeah why ECC? I remember the old 940 pin AMD 64s that first came out only being compatible with ECC RAM, but I don’t see any reason to use it in a desktop rig anymore.
SM – No RAID plans. I’ve heard that advice too, the logic being that you’re less likely to get wiped out by a bad batch of identical disks. Not sure I really buy that rationale.
Alan – This machine will be replacing my last Mac.
Eseell and Gudis – I’m willing to pay the small premium for ECC, given that I routinely recompile my entire system and that gives the memory a pretty good thrashing. It’ll add like $15 to the price of the box, which is totally worth it.
did you pick a video card yet?
No video card. The integrated ATI graphics on the mobo have good X.org support along with DVI and HDMI outputs, and I’m not a gamer, so there’s no real need for a discrete graphics card.