New Machine!
I just confirmed the order for RUBY's replacement. The new machine (as yet unnamed) will finally displace EMERALD as the most powerful laptop, and in fact most powerful machine period, that I've ever owned. The core is an Intel i7-3632QM processor, most notable in that it will finally give me the hardware virtualization support I've been dying for since I got RUBY. The four hyperthreaded cores will also give me a solid test platform for some of the parallel code I develop for work.
This machine also represents my first excursion into SSD technology on a laptop, starting with a 512GB drive. I'm told they make a shocking difference in terms of image activation time, so I'm looking forward to seeing it go.
For memory I'm pulling 16GB of DDR3 1600Mhz RAM, which I am told may well be my bottleneck on many applications, which I admit tickles me a bit. This will also be my first 16GB personal machine, so I'm excited to have that much main memory to play with. Between that and the SSD, it opens up all kinds of new options for operating on large datasets in reasonable (read: overnight) amounts of time.
The new sound card is nothing to write home about, but the graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce 640M, with 2GB of GDDR5, so I suspect this will also be able to hold its own if I decide to carry the latest video games into the field with me, or do any heavy-duty XNA or Unity development.
Finally, there are two more items I'm varying degrees of excited about. This will be my first machine with a Blu-ray reader, and my first machine with an anodized alumninum case, something I've been wanting since case destruction is generally what kills my laptops.
Overall, I'm very excited to be getting the new kit, and I hope it lasts me another three years.
This machine also represents my first excursion into SSD technology on a laptop, starting with a 512GB drive. I'm told they make a shocking difference in terms of image activation time, so I'm looking forward to seeing it go.
For memory I'm pulling 16GB of DDR3 1600Mhz RAM, which I am told may well be my bottleneck on many applications, which I admit tickles me a bit. This will also be my first 16GB personal machine, so I'm excited to have that much main memory to play with. Between that and the SSD, it opens up all kinds of new options for operating on large datasets in reasonable (read: overnight) amounts of time.
The new sound card is nothing to write home about, but the graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce 640M, with 2GB of GDDR5, so I suspect this will also be able to hold its own if I decide to carry the latest video games into the field with me, or do any heavy-duty XNA or Unity development.
Finally, there are two more items I'm varying degrees of excited about. This will be my first machine with a Blu-ray reader, and my first machine with an anodized alumninum case, something I've been wanting since case destruction is generally what kills my laptops.
Overall, I'm very excited to be getting the new kit, and I hope it lasts me another three years.