Life remains hectic as all hell, and it’s only really in the last week that I’ve found time to finish building and setting up the new PC I began in… June? Damn, life really HAS been hectic.
So since I’m not exactly brimming with blogfodder, and since all this stuff is still fresh in my mind, and since a few friends have been curious about the new rig, here goes…
The Hardware
I went AMD for this build; they give you a lot more for your money at the low- and mid-range, because both processors and motherboards are significantly cheaper than Intel’s offerings. Yes, Intel is king if you must have the absolute fastest system in town, but you pay a pretty steep premium. AMD’s also vastly less asshat-ish when it comes to playing market segmentation games with CPU features. And they support ECC on their desktop processors, where Intel forces you to dump mega-bux on a Xeon rig if you want ECC.
I ended up with an Asus AMD 880G motherboard with SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 support on the board. This is really just a bit of future-proofing; you have to spend cubic dollars to get a drive that actually *needs* SATA 3.0′s transfer speeds, and USB 3.0 peripherals still aren’t exactly commonplace. Still, they should come in handy a year or two down the road.
CPU is an Athlon II X4, giving me performance along the lines of a Core i5 at half the price. It’s sitting under a big, all-copper Zalman cooler, which does its job quite nicely; CPU idles at 33 C, motherboard at 36 C. No overclocking; it’s plenty fast enough at stock speeds, and I like low power consumption and cool running.
Next to the CPU are two 2-gig sticks of ECC DDR3 RAM, running in Chip Kill mode. That level of error correction might seem excessive, but… well, I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, and my computers basically run 24/7, only getting reboots after periodically recompiling the whole system. So yeah, memory integrity is important to me.
The onboard video is disabled in favor of an ATI Radeon HD 4350, which gamers will note was the bottom rung of the last generation of ATI cards. Why use one in a brand-new system? As a non-gamer, I couldn’t care less about frame rates in Crysis. I wanted dual digital outputs (DVI and HDMI), solid open-source driver support, and low heat and power consumption. The 4350 easily drives a pair of HD displays, has near-perfect driver support in X, and draws about 10 watts. It’s perfect for my needs. Dirt-cheap these days, too.
Plugged into the card are a pair of 23″, 1920×1080 LED-LCD monitors, which look gorgeous and use about as much power as a pair of night lights. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but 25 watts per display is pretty good. And having 4 million pixels in front of me is DAMN good. Ah, the wonders of technology.
The machine boots from an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, which is just astonishingly quick. Also hellaciously expensive, but… oh my, it’s worth it. So, so worth it. Basically, if you don’t mind paying a 60-fold price premium, per-gigabyte, relative to spinning disks, you get a machine that responds like it’s fucking TELEPATHIC. I think it actually slips up once in a while and runs a command before I finish typing it.
Of course, I’d have to eat dog food to afford an all-SSD system, so there’s also a Seagate 1.5 TB drive crammed full of porn various media files and documents. I have room inside the case for a couple more drives, though I’ll probably just replace this one with a newer, bigger drive when the time comes.
Optical drive is an Asus Blu-Ray reader, along with an external USB DVD burner that I’m carrying over from an old system. The Blu-Ray is, at this point, just future-proofing. I’m in no hurry to start buying my movies all over again. Hell, it might not ever really get used; optical drives are practically legacy technology already. I occasionally burn a DVD for a friend, but that’s really about it.
I put words into the box via my Unicomp Endurapro, which I absolutely love and blogged about earlier. Truly the One True Keyboard. There’s also a Logitech laser mouse on the desk, but it really only gets used for the occasional photo editing session or other task that requires really fine mouse control. Everything else is done via the Trackpoint in the keyboard or keyboard shortcuts. It’s really nice not having to move my hand back and forth from keyboard to mouse all the time.
All told it’s maybe a $1200 system, which is a good step above your typical Best Buy Special but still way below the crazy dollars that enthusiasts often shell out. For what I spent, the performance is just spectacular, mostly because of the very fast SSD. I’ll never go back to spinning disks, at least not for the OS.
And it’s getting late, I guess I’ll break out the software into a separate post…
You’re sorely tempting me to move my boot drive off this velociraptor and onto an SSD. My mother is using one as the boot for the new system
I’m“she’s” building, so I’ll hold out and get a feel for how it shakes out, but man… essentially 0ms random access? > 200mb reads & writes? I thought picking petals off flowers was supposed to be “she loves me, she loves me not,” not “sandforce, indilinx.”