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My New Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Based Computer

I recently decided it was time to upgrade to a new computer so I thought I’d provide some details.

I’m quite the technology fanatic and that holds true with computers. I hadn’t had much of a reason to upgrade my (now several years old) Dell 8400 which has been doing a great job. And I’m almost embarrassed to say that the primary reason I wanted to upgrade was for PC gaming. Sure I also do video editing and encoding which is another reason to upgrade. In fact you can now encode video faster than real-time with the CPU I chose. But this is not as necessary a reason to upgrade as the latest gaming requirements are.

The planets have lined up just right for the release of a slew of amazing games (links below) for the PC platform that haven’t been matched in recent history. One of the compelling aspects of these games is their video quality. This is largely due to the new graphics technology built into Windows Vista in the form of Direct X 10.

My last 2 computers have been Dell’s but because I decided to go with some bleeding edge tech this time, and Dell hadn’t yet built systems around what I wanted. So it was back to building a machine on my own this time around. In Doing so, it was time to choose from a menu of components to provide the exact recipe for my needs. Here’s the highlights of the system I ended up with:

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz (Best price/performance choice right now)
Motherboard - Intel DP35DPM (1333 FSB)
Case - Antec Sonata III (Amazingly quiet!)
Hard Drive(s) - 2 Western Digital WD5000ABYS 500Gb in RAID 1 Configuration + Another WD5000AAKS 500Gb for additional storage & backup
Video Card - eVGA Nvidia 8800 GTS 320Mb (mid-range DX10 card)
Memory - 4Gb of PC-6400 800MHz RAM
OS - Windows Vista Business 32bit (almost went 64bit)

I’ve had the system for about a month now and it’s awesome. I’m amazed by how quiet the system is. Everything is also soooo much faster. Of course I’m not using any of the fancy Vista stuff. In fact one of the first things I did was revert to the Windows Classic Theme and use a Classic Start Menu. I’m not a fan of all the fancy look and feel crap…I like it old school and simple.

I’ll post more details on some of the Vista setup quirks I came across and methods to get around them as well as my current software suite. But for now, here’s the amazing slew of games that prompted me to upgrade.

(In order of anticipation)

Crysis, Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, and Medal of Honor Airborne

…and this doesn’t include being able to run my current favorite game Battlefield 2 maxed out.

My Memory Upgrade - Just Because it was too Cheap not to

I’m running a Dell 8400 3.2GHz system with 1Gb of RAM and didn’t have a real need for more memory until recently. I’ve been contemplating getting VMWare up and running to play with Vista and Linux in an isolated environment. I was working on a friends system and while doing so decided to temporarily borrow some of his ram and drop it into my system. It was nice to have the extra memory and I decided to look around at RAM prices which I hadn’t followed to see were prices were.

I was pretty amazed when after doing a little searching around on dealnews, techbargains, and fatwallet I was able to find a 2GB Kit (2 x 1GB dual channel kit) of DDR2 memory for only $70 with free shipping at one of my favorite online merchants newegg.com so I decided they were too cheap not to buy them. I could then easily get about $30 for the 1GB dual channel kit I already had in the system making the upgrade net at only $40, but I decided to be nice and put the memory in my son’s computer.

As I went to the page to provide you with the link I come to find out that they dropped the price another $5 to only $65…amazing…Here’s the Link

My Experience Building a Raid 5 Server

I recently built my first RAID server. I’ve been the victim of 2 hard drive crashes where I lost data. I have a large media collection that includes tons of digital pictures, family videos of over 30 DV tapes I’ve captured, and countless other irreplaceable data. Concerned with the possibility of losing all of this I finally decided to dive into the world of data redundancy. I wrote “Guide to Protect Your Digital Camera Photos with Automated Backups” if you’re interested in protecting your digital media as well with Offsite backups being a very important part of the equation which I will write about soon.

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My adventure in considering to upgrade to a gigabit switch

So I recently built a RAID 5 system to be used primarily as a media file server. I transfer large home video files over my network to this machine on a continual basis. Since both my server and personal machine have gigabit nic cards in them I thought it might be a good idea to get a gigabit switch now that they’ve come down to reasonable price points.

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