Mmm, well I guess it's high time I posted again. Many apologies for my month's absence... Real Life has been impinging a little just recently, but it does have a very positive edge in that I can now build my new killer computer. So far I have all the component bar the cube case, which will arrive sometime early next week. For some reason cube cases are a rarity in the UK, and I had precisely two to choose from: an iCute offering at a fairly reasonable £45, and an Antec offering at twice that. I went for the iCute as I know it's a good case, has plenty of room in it, and is double decked so it keeps things nice and clear so there are no air flow problems for when things get a little heated. It comes with a nice big 12cm fan, though no PSU which is just as well as I need a 650 watt beastie for my new computer. I've been using an iCute case identical to the one that I've just bought for about eighteen months now, and can say that I'm impressed with it, the fan is not really that noisy, and it has a useful LCD display on the front panel so temperature monitoring is easy. The only gripe I have about it is that it has about the brightest blue LED I've ever seen – it lights up the whole room!
Apart from the case, described above, the list of components are as follows:
Asus M4A88T-M/USB3 Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Processor (six core)
8GB of Corsair DDR3 1333 RAM
Samsung DVD writer
Zotac GeForce GTS 450 1GB DDR5 Graphics Card
CiT 650 W PSU
Seagate Barracuda 500GB HDD
I'm going to be using my present monitor, a Hanns-G HW191D which has done me proud for the past two years, though I think it may gain a twin very soon as I am increasingly using GIMP and am getting fed up of moving docks around the desktop, plus I'm very tempted to start doing a little video editing for which two screens will be a boon.
I'm also in the throes of building a new desk to fit all the above into, thus creating something approaching an ideal workspace, it'll all fit into a convenient alcove I have in my living room. I plan wall mounting the monitors, and to make things really ergonomic the scanner will live in a well under the main worktop of the desk under a lift up lid. The keyboard will be on pull out drawer under the desk top, which will also be wide enough to take my Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet and the mouse. So that I don't get back strain and so I remain comfortable for all the hours I tend to spend in front of the computer, I'm buying myself a Markus swivel chair from Ikea – I know they are good, I sit on one at work.
About all I'll need after all this is a half decent broadband connection. Currently the UK stands either 31st or 25th in ranking in a list of 66 countries that supplied information to a survey done worldwide last year. This wouldn't be so bad if the UK were surpassed by places like the USA, but when places like Romania and Bulgaria blows you into the weeds, and the likelyhood that other places not even on the radar yet could easily leapfrog the UK in terms of broadband speed, it gives pause for thought. The UK government has stated that it is their policy that all UK subjects will have access to 'fast' broadband by 2012... fast being 2 mb/s. The South Korean government has promised its citizens connection speeds of 1 Gb/s by 2012, which kind of puts things in perspective, but then the South Korean government doesn't still live under the illusion that it's a world power, and absolutely needs to have a replacement for its ageing fleet of Trident nuclear capable submarines at a cost of £20 billion, (well, that's what they tell us, I suspect that's a very conservative figure). Yes, it would be expensive to bring the UK up to speed, something like £27 billion, which is a lot of money, but given the amounts wasted on illegal wars, not to mention the lives, it would seem to me a much more worthwhile investment in the future that armaments. The rate things are going, the UK will in the new Third World as we find ourselves being surpassed by China and Africa. All that said, I'll continue to manage on a connection speed of around 3.3 mb/s of a potential 8 mb/s because I live so far from the exchange, (copper wires you see!) and pray that my local exchange is soon in line for an upgrade so that I can get something more like what my supplier offers new accounts, which is 'up to' 24 mb/s. But then, maybe, they'll decide to forgo that and go straight to fibre-optic :)
I'll post again in a few days once I've got my new killer machine up and running... Are you all green with envy yet?
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