Got a New Computer!

…and it’s a screamer! I can’t believe I lived with my other one for this long. The new one is so much faster it’s not even funny. I’ll be keep­ing the old one as a backup so I got a Belkin swicth to use the same key­board, mouse and mon­i­tor with both and plugged them into a router. That way I’ll always have a backup. Now I just have to fig­ure out how to net­work them together..

If you’re inter­ested, here are the key com­po­nents I chose to build my new power machine.

First, I went with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Dual Core proces­sor. I fig­ure the only rea­son my old 2001 era 1 GHz machine remained work­able for this long (it even runs all the CS3 apps very well except for start time) is the AMD Athlon chip in it. The new Dual core chip is another beast altogheter though. I can’t wait to install CS3 and my other cre­ative and pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware but mostly I can’t wait to see how my music soft­ware will run on it.

To run the Athlon 64 X2 chip, the sales rep at the store that built my machine rec­om­mended the ASUS Crosshair moth­er­board. Hard to get excited about a mobo you’ll say but this one is a thing of beauty. Things have evolved quite a bit in the last 6 years since I was in the mar­ket for a new com­puter. If I had more desk space, I think I’d run that machine on top of it with the side panel removed just to look at the beau­ti­ful lights on that board…

This moth­er­board is also a tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel with an LCD at the back that gives you error mes­sages and codes as well as the sta­tus of the PC in human read­able form. It’s also a tweaker’s and overclocker’s delight. If you are in the mar­ket for a new machine and you thought of get­ting an AMD proces­sor, take a hard look at that moth­er­board. The reviews I have read were all over­whelm­ingly positive. Follow the link above and look at the specs. You’ll want one too. To com­ple­ment the moth­er­board and proces­sor, I had them put 4 Gb of Kingston 800MHz DDR2 Ram on it. No more prob­lems run­ning Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Studiometry, Skype and other apps at the same time… And my music soft­ware will run so much smoother.

Storage is han­dled by two Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 hard drives, the sys­tem one is a 250 Gb NCQ and the other is a 500 Gb (media, backup, data, etc).

Next and fol­low­ing a dicus­sion of my needs with the rep, he rec­om­mended the NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640 Mb video card. I actu­ally got the EVGA ver­sion but it’s the same card. I haven’t run any graph­ics heavy app or game on the machine yet but the dis­play is absolutely beau­ti­ful. I don’t play that many games but I’m a huge fan of two series: the Legacy of Kain /​Soul Reaver series but espe­cially the Thief series. THose are the most immer­sive game “worlds” I have expe­ri­enced and the Thief 1 and II Looking Glass Studios legacy lives on through a large com­mu­nity of fan mis­sion mak­ers and play­ers. My old machine could han­dle Thief I and II no prob­lem but I really didn’t have the specs to run the much newer Thief III Deadly Shadows. Not an issue any­more so I ordered Deadly Shadows this morn­ing…

Last in the major com­po­nents, I chose the SoundBlaster X-​Fi Élite Pro from Creative. If I only did music I would have bought a ded­i­cated music cre­ation sound card like an M-​Audio but since I’ll also be gam­ing and using the PC to watch DVDs for exam­ple, I decided on the SoundBlaster. The X-​Fi Élite Pro has Digital Analog Converters that are very high qual­ity which rival those in medium range ded­i­cated audio cards, and the break out box is very use­ful to plug my dif­fer­ent instru­ments into and to con­trol the card itself. I just hope the low latency ASIO dri­ver works well with my music record­ing and author­ing app­pli­ca­tion (Sony Acid Pro 6).

But the bot­tom line is, get­ting a new pow­er­ful com­puter is so much fun!