This last week I bought a new computer. Actually, I bought all the parts for a new computer and built it myself. After several months of research, I concluded that I could buy all the parts for a new machine and assemble it myself for $800 to $1000 less than it would cost for someone else to do so.
My old computer was, well, old. I bought it just before I started college — 7 1/2 years ago. Of course, three years is a long time in computer technology, and my system was twice that old.
I’ll probably try to post some reviews of the particular components I purchased sometime in the not-too-distant future, but for now, I’ll just list what I had and what I upgraded to. My old computer was a Dell Dimension 8100 series. It had a Pentium 4 1.3 Ghz processor, 384 Mb of RDRAM, a 20 Gb hard drive, a Creative SoundBlaster Live! audio card, and a 16 Mb nVidia graphics card. It also had a DVD player and a separate CD burner — two fairly up-to-date items 7 1/2 years ago. The monitor was a 17″ Trinitron CRT, and I have a set of speakers from Altec Lansing. It was getting slow. Even the Internet was rough, since there is a lot of RAM-intensive content out there now.
My new computer has the following components:
- Intel i7 920 processor — 2.66 Ghz quad-core with QPI
- ECS X58B-A motherboard — includes two gigabit LAN ports, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 6 SATA II, 2 PCIe 2.0, two 1394 ports
- 6 Gb DDR3 RAM from GSkill
- EVGA nVidia 9800 GT graphics card
- 500 Gb Western Digital “green” hard drive
- LG Blu-ray, HD DVD, DVD+/-RW, CD-RW combo drive
- Cooler Master Centurion 5 case
- PC Power and Cooling Silencer 500w power supply
- Asus VH242H 24″ LCD widescreen monitor with HDMI, 1920 x 1080 resolution
I’ve kept the same speakers, at least for now. The motherboard’s onboard audio is very nice, but it takes advantage of some newer technology than my speakers are designed for (optical digital output), so the configuration is a little funny at the moment. It’s working well enough though.
Assembling the components wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be. I’d never done a whole computer before, so things like the processor made me a bit nervous. It seems to have worked out all right though. I suspect that if I did it every day, I’d be much faster, since I’d be able to anticipate potential problems (e.g. the graphics card is so big that you can’t fit the hard drive in around it, and the SATA cables are hard to get to). The instruction manuals were of varying usefulness. The case’s instructions were pointless. The motherboard manual was OK, but the processor’s was terrible. The graphics card was pretty good, but it’s also really easy to install.
I also have dual booted Windows XP Professional (32-bit) and Windows 7 Beta (64-bit). I will certainly plan to review Win 7 sometime fairly soon. For now, I don’t think it is handling the motherboard very well, but that may be because the MB manufacturer has a fairly lightweight BIOS that Win 7 doesn’t know how to use.
So far I’ve really emjoyed being able to multitask on the new machine. I’ve had it only a few days, but it is amazing how much faster everything runs and how well it allows me to multitask. I suppose that’s to be expected, but it made me think about how incredible the rate of change in technology really is. 75 years ago, a calculating machine with this many switches (then they would have been vacuum tubes) would have required a small warehouse to enclose. Now, I have a chip that will fit in the palm of my hand that holds over 780 million transistors.
Pictures of before and after. Please ignore the mess and forgive the poor image quality. It was kind of dark.
