Getting a new computer

Well, we (my family and I) are getting a new computer. Not a new PC in the sense of Dell or HP (which are now the better PC brands), but rather in the sense of a self-assembly kit.

The kit includes:

• A corporate steel ATX Mid-Tower case with 7 expansion slots and 600 watt power supply
• A powerful motherboard with:

NVIDIA nForce and NVIDIA GeForce chipset

A 1333 MHz front side bus

4 SATA ports (3.0 Gbps) and on-board RAID

Gigabit LAN interface

HDMI — great for my 24″ widescreen monitor which supports 1920×1200

8-channel high definition audio

PCIExpress

• An amazing Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600) processor

Each core: 2.4 GHz

A 1066 MHz front side bus

An 8 MB cache

Support for EM64T (x64)

Support for Intel Virtualization (perfect for running virtual machines)

Stuff like Smart Memory Access, Advanced Smart Cache, Advanced Digital Media Boost, etc.

• 2 GB of DDR2 memory  at 667 MHz — not amazing or great, but good for our needs; besides, DDR2 is insanely cheap to add.

No monitor, hard drive, optical drive, or operating system. That’s okay, because we have all of the above. It also doesn’t come with a fan/heatsink, so we had to buy one with the kit.

This computer is going to be an excellent improvement over the current Intel Pentium D (2.66 GHz) that I use everyday. Do you know how hard it is to do all of the things I do on 512 MB of shared memory (DDR1, no less — expensive to upgrade) and bad integrated graphics that won’t let me make full use of the 1920×1200 monitor? Memory is the most crippling limitation of my current computer; I can’t multitask very well, and running Firefox and Word side-by-side is sluggish.

Yes, I know. At some point in the past, people lived on 286’s and 4 MB of RAM.

With this new machine, the video compression that I do will be blazing fast — on 4 cores. And I do believe that setting up virtual machines on the computer (perhaps a Linux server and a virtual 32-bit XP installation) will be the best way to suit all of our needs — my father’s compute-intensive scientific research, my own Web development and multimedia work, as well as for running all of the miscellaneous items that won’t run well on 64-bit Windows. (Yes, I’m going to be installing Windows XP Professional x64 Edition; I’m not quite ready for Vista yet.)

As of right now, the barebones kit isn’t yet sold out, so take a look. It’s only $299.99 after instant rebate and mail-in rebates.

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