FredMcD.com

A great motivation

Foreword: I am now enjoying the fruits of my labor.At this very moment, I am sitting on my bed connected to the Internet with all my media on hand. Joy! I was having some problems with video’s stuttering which I have subsequently fixed by instructing SMPlayer to cache at least a megabyte before playing, this seems to smooth out the playback problems.

And so, the topic at hand. This started a few nights back when I was bored and looking for something to do, having gone to sleep in the day (I know, I need to get on top of it but, hey.) and I just started looking through my notes on various equipment I would like to buy, one thing lead to another, and I had managed to piece together my system of the future which came to a grand total of £912 which also includes the monitor (£200~ Dell 20″ Widescreen Ultrasharp).

Before I get on to talking about parts of interest I have to day that having something to set your mind on buying focuses your desire to make money wonderfully. I have already got the paper for the fliers next set of fliers from the stationary shop down at the main street (they were even kind enough to cut it for me) and have the design finalized and looking better than ever. I am set on just cranking out a few hundred to deliver on Monday and then try and deliver between two and three hundred daily for the next three weeks (In case you were wondering 300x5x3=4500 or 3000 at minimum.).
I’m finding that explaining things to myself in terms of numbers makes the next step of anything seem much smaller.

Picking the parts

Well that’s that out of the way; Now onto talking about the machines I plan on making. I have put the idea of an oil cooled, super silent rig to one side as now I have my silent server, noise when I’m actually using my computer is less of an issue provided it isn’t too loud.
I’ve gone for the Intel C2 Duo E8900 with 3GHz clock for my CPU as it fits my price bracket quite nicely and the advantage of giving a whole core over to a single important program (Re-encoding, Dwarf fortress, games in general) without having it slowed down by system processes is a big draw.

Whereas I had previously sworn that I would get an Nvidia card for my next build due to ATI’s abysmal drivers (I still get artifacts even now), Nvidia really doesn’t have anything I want. I will research carefully (and post up on this blog, so I don’t just say I will) whether or not people are having luck with the ATI 4000 series in linux as Nvidia’s cards are bulky, power hungry and outstripped in benchmarks by ATI.  I am also thinking about establishing a trading buddy in America to take advantage of the drastic difference in price. Should I be successful I will probably opt for a 512mb 4870 as it costs as much there as the 4850 costs here, troubling.
I have heard that the stock cooler on the 48xx cards are a tad noisy so I’ll probably be investing in a Zalman VGA cooler too. The motherboard (an MSI Zilent P45) is passively cooled which should help keep things nice and quiet and comes with a Zalman CPU cooler as well so I don’t need to use the stock one. With that, I’ll probably have 2GB of ram to start with and fill up the other two slots as needed. I’m still not decided on the PSU as I still need to do some number crunching on power consumption. Hard drives will probably just be a single 500GB affair, nothing fancy.

Moving on; I found that, while there are a wide range of ATX cases available, very few of them seem to fit my tastes all that well, one that stood out, however, was the Sharkoon Rebel 9 which has fits my tastes for having stylish yet understated (read: “no damn LEDs!!”) looks and that nice big fan in the side for quiet operation. The nine bays at the front will probably take a DVD drive (maybe two) and a memory card reader in the top two and then put some fans in the other seven. I am also considering getting a mobile rack that takes hard drives without a caddy so I can use it to DBAN old hard drives as part of my computer biz.

I am thinking of investing in a tablet but, as it is going to take me a while to amass the amount I need and the monitor is going to be wide screen (as opposed to the standard size of my current laptop), I will probably get the A6 Wacom Bamboo One to fill the gap, even though it is a bit small, and after getting my proper system, pay the £200 £300 [Though only £200 if I buy in America..] for a wide A5 Intuos which should last me a good few years.

In other news:I was beginning to worry about the price of said desktop when I listened to “Richard and Alison’s Barkley’s Super Happy Fun Time” when I was reminded that a grand won’t even buy a decent sized Mac Book; I worked out my system as being about as powerful as the top of the range Mac Book Pro but having the advantage of a much bigger screen and hard drive at the cost of portability. The funny thing happend when I posted my finding on the FRC forums to discover that I, like many people from the UK, am getting absolutely ripped off when it comes to buying computer parts and, was I living in the US, I could buy roughly the same thing for in the range of £500 instead of £900.. Damn, I shall begin enquiries as to finding someone in America who I can order things to and have them test and send them on to me as the savings, as stated with the tablet, should be well worth it.

Signing off,
Fred

Banner image by William Hook

Post script:

Yoshhaa! ATI 4870/50 it is then!

Preliminary research indicates that the ATI 4870/50 cards work well enough under Ubuntu using the Catalyst 8.7 drivers which can be installed using Envy. If I can get steam working under when then things will be all good.

One Response to “A new computer, a great motivation.”