What, did your mom buy you a ‘puter for Christmas?

So, after 7 years or so, I figured it was finally time to get a new machine. My old one technically still worked fine, but parts of the motherboard had melted/burnt, which kept causing video cards to fry, and I always had streaks across the screen, had to keep the case open as all the fans were crap, blah blah. So, I figured now was the time! And, I figured if I was going to do it, I might as well get some nice stuff. Not the best possible computer in the world, but it’s a pretty nice one.

First I spec’d out cases and went wite Apevia’s X-Qpack2 with aluminum trim. Its a nice micro-atx case with clear sides and LED fans. The clear case and fans were just for fun, but I really wanted a small case. I used to be into mega enormous cases, but these days I’m sick of huge amounts of equipment and crap all over the place. I just wanted a small but functional case. This one was small but also had 2 5 1/4 drive bays, 1 3 1/2 and 2 internals, plus a 500 watt power supply, room for 4 full-sized expansion slots, and temperature read outs on the front.

Next I got a Gigabyte motherboard with AM2 socket with basic on board ethernet/video/sound, I didn’t need anything fancy there. I’m getting a new video card and dont care about anything better than basic sound and 100 meg ethernet, though it supports 6.1 surround. I have a lot of applications I run on this machine, a lot of services and whatnot, so I wanted something fast – I went with an AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+, that’s two 64-bit 2.6 ghz cores, and got 2 gigs of crucial 800mhz RAM. The thing smokkkesss under Debian. I got a nice DVD multirecorder and a 3.5 floppy/SD/CF/SM reader. I kept my preexisting 300 gig SATA-2 drive and Hauppauge PVR-350, and the G15 keyboard Ryan gave me (see previous post).
Oh, and my favorite part, the new Samsung 22″ widescreen. I can’t say how much I love this screen.

So it’s all been together for a couple weeks, all my software is finally configured and running. Here are some pictures.

The screen looks fuzzy and dark here, but it is just the angle and the camera, its amazingly bright and crisp. I have the old 17″ on the side for my second monitor.

When the lights go out!

Its hard to get an idea of the size of the screen without backing up a bit. It takes up about half the desk, width wise. Depth wise its nothing!

And finally a shot of the side in the dark again, close up!

So as I said, its running Debian in native 64 bits, and when I say that, I mean everything. One of the great advantages of open source is packages compiled for 64 bits. I have the PVR up and running recording shows, the G15 keyboard working with stats on the LCD (as can be seen), the latest NVidia drivers with the monitor running at 1680×1050, OpenGL hardware enabled. I have my external USB2 500 gig harddrive (for backup purposes) hooked up with auto-power down enabled so it will stop spinning after 10 minutes. I also have it working well with my Brother multifunction unit, it both prints and scans, over the network, with no issues.

Also nice, I cut all my other machines out (except my laptop, I have it on a docking station now when not on the go to use it via remote desktop for programming). But I was sick of my big-ass server taking up room just to have a file server and IIS box with SQL/ASP for development. I figure why do that when I have a speedy machine and vmware-server is free? So I installed a virtual Win 2003 box on this box, the thing boots in 6 seconds, its absolutely insane. But I have Jormungand (My physical Debian box) doing all the server stuff now apart from IIS/SQL/ASP. I have it hosting samba windows shares for my laptop to use if necessary, and also shares out its network connection to my laser printer.

And a really nice surprise, and something that made me order a new video card today – I’ve been playing around more with Wine lately which I haven’t for a long time as its always tended to let me down. Well, pretty much everything I’ve thrown at it its been able to run without too many problems. After a few tweaks I have it running Steam (Half Life 2/DM, Counter Strike, etc), World of Warcraft and WarCraft III. I’m going to be installed Civ IV soon. The built in video is good, but now that I know this thing can play games and I don’t need a separate Windows box, I ordered a BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 with 384 megs of RAM. I was going to get more RAM, but the price isn’t worth it considering I won’t be doing any HD with it. The thing is going to rock though, I can’t wait. I was recording a show, transcoding an episode of Doctor Who, listening to music and playing Half Life 2: Death Match with no issues, it was insane.

It’s pretty exciting for me, since I’ve never really had a nice machine before. I have to enjoy it while it lasts!