In what was supposed to be a “small” upgrade, I decided to bump up my home machine.

It has been almost five years since my last upgrade. Been jones’n for some more oomph. Finally said “why not?” Steve said get a Mac. I said “when they have a relatively cheap PC with some power and no monitor, I’d consider it.” Right now, you can’t turn off the monitor of an iMac and still use it remotely: that’s a deal breaker. Also, I don’t know that I want to drop $1500 on a machine that isn’t meant to run the OS I plan to run. The Power Mac would be good, but that’s way over priced at $2500.

I wanted Core 2 Duo, 2GB, decent video card, under $500 – the image over there is the “before” picture.

I went a different way and bought an entirely new set of parts. I’m keeping my XP box running for the time being, and taking the slow road to the migration happy land: rather than spending an entire day of installing, tweaking, modifying, and stuff, I’m moving stuff over a piece at a time. Besides, I think the only thing I could have salvaged from the old kit was the case, the DVD drive, the CD drive, and the floppy.

Steve kicked in an old case and power supply – I said WHOO! Then I did some looking around… it had a 350w power supply and I figured I’d need some more power.

POWER!

And so the under $500 project grew to twice it’s size. Yet it was still relatively cheap, compared to what I see from Dell, Apple, and the like. $1000, sure… but look in the picture. That’s a Core 2 Duo E6420. 2GB RAM at PC6400. 500GB SATA-II drive. An 18x DVD+-RW SATA drive. Asus motherboard with the new P35 chipset from Intel. 500W power supply from Antec. Also a new case with lots of fans from Antec. ATI x1650XT PCI-X card. That’s a whole hell of a lot of PC. And what’s more is that if I want to go DirectX 10, the motherboard can handle it… my old PC has a AGP 4x slot.

I put it together last night. Hardware took about 2 hours, with it being a new case and all. Slight problem where one wire doesn’t reach a plug on the motherboard – gotta see about getting an extension for that. I’m in lust with the motherboard. True, I have no need for the two Gigabit LAN cables or the WiFi access point, but I’ve got a shitload of USB ports now. And MAN did I need them. The fans are so powerful that I got cold sitting behing the thing last night.

After installing Vista, what’s my rating? 5.1. Five Point One. And that’s the processor capping that: everything else is at least 5.4 or higher.

Next is to get some other stuff on there and make sure the box runs without crashing over a 24 hour period… I don’t know of any other way to make sure the memory isn’t shitty… I mean I could get some diagnostic apps or something, but either way, it’s a valid stress test.

I guess I know what I’m doing with my weekend! *g*