Finally, sick of running low end machines incapable of handling the latest and greatest, on the weekend I bought and built a new machine; a workstation.
It’s been some time since I last built a machine by hand (aside from years of reworking old Dell parts into working laptops), so this was quite an adventure – did I mention it’s been a while? Admittedly, I put together a partially built AMD system in 2006 (my first time using Serial ATA drives) so it’s not entirely foreign territory.
The Specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad – 2.5GHz
Motherboard: An awesome ASUS P5Q-E with ATI CrossFireX
Memory: Corsair 4x2GB DDR2 (1066MHz)
Video: NVIDIA GE 9800 512 MB
HDD: 4×250 GB Seagate 7200 RPM/24-7 in a RAID 5 Array
The Case:
Chosen more for size and heat management (those many, may fans – thy Quad core CPU runs very hot) I have the case below:
Case is an Antec "Nine Hundred" which has four different fans inside – it’s a REALLY quiet running machine (ironic, given my Dell XPS sounds like a 747 during takeoff). You have to see the motherboard’s cooling configuration, quite simply amazing. Also, it comes powerless so I got a Toughpower 750w "Cable Management" supply which has an amazing assortment of cables for all sorts of internal devices.
My Other Machines:
Motion Computing Tablet – Purchased Dec 2006, died June 2010 (R.I.P)
Dell Inspiron XPS (Gen 1) a.k.a ‘The Noisy B*stard’ – Purchased Nov 2004 and still functioning!
