Blue LEDs
On Friday I decided that even if there was nothing wrong with the old system but the power supply I was going to get a new system anyway. I've wanted something to run modern games at awesome frame rates for a while, and, as I pointed out to Blake, I'll have plenty of time to enjoy a new system here pretty soon. I also decided that given that I tend to hang on to systems for a long time, I would go all out and get something pretty nice and leave room for upgrades. Here's the total breakdown of what I ended up getting, along with its before tax, before rebate cost:
So even with my generous initial specifications and estimates I ended up spending about $500 more in pre-tax dollars than planned. At least some of that cost is due to going to Fry's instead of painstakingly seeking out all the best deals online and then risking an RMA. The rest is mostly because I hadn't expected to get 800 MHz RAM, the 150GB Raptor (planned on 76), or pretty much the highest end video card in the store. They were out of the video card that I wanted because it was on sale. Assuming I get all the rebates back I have $135 off that total, but still. I shipped the monitor to my parent's house because I don't trust the open door policy the shipping room in the office has here... and to make my dad envious with it's awesome 24" glory. He recently bought a Dell XPS for some reason, but is still using his dusty, color-faded, 17" CRT monitor with it. It's pretty funny to look at really.
Then immediately after buying all this stuff I went back and played poker for like 6 hours instead of putting everything together. I thought I might be able to pull off a second win in a row since I had the most chips all game, but I fumbled my lead against Blake in head's up at the end. This marks the first time that Craig was not in the final heads up round.
Afterward I spent the longest time ever assembling the new box. There are way more cables in there than ever before. I found out that even though I have 5 3.5" bays, I can only use 4 ever since the lowest one is too close to the video card. By the way, this card weighs like 3 pounds or something. There is so much copper on this thing I feel like it should have more support than the one cantilevered mount point on one end and the PCI-E slot. Also of note: CPUs are much easier to install these days. The integrated die thing that Intel's doing makes cracking the die almost impossible without like a hammer or something. Additionally, the fan mounts to the motherboard in a manner that does not require applying like 40 pounds of force with a screw driver on a tiny, slippery piece of metal. As someone that has fucked up multiple CPUs during the install process, I was very happy with all these changes.
I took most of Sunday dicking around with settings and getting Windows installed. Something that hadn't really occurred to me until I finally booted Windows was the fact that Win32 can't address more than about 3GB of RAM (even though it should theoretically be able to address all 4). Oops. I got this expensive 4GB of RAM and I can't even use all of it. So I have to get a 64-bit version of Windows to make use of that. I thought about trying to get Vista to see how well I could run that, but I was reminded that currently all video card drivers for Vista and DX10 suck balls and drain the performance out of your games. Looking at the XP 64 bit solutions it turns out that the process for getting a legal copy is extremely difficult and I might not even be able to do it. Thanks Microsoft. You might as well put a label on it that says "steal this version!"
Anyway, the reason this post is "Blue LEDs" is because all the indicator lights on my new computer (boringly named TOMDESKTOP) are blue. The motherboard even has a blue LED, though my case is opaque so you can only tell by the blue light coming from the 120mm fan opening. Another component that assumes the case will be transparent is this power supply (which I needed because 380W isn't nearly enough for all this shit). It's got a damn mirror finish on there, to reflect blue LEDs I guess.
Last thing, I finally figured out what that funny beeping was today. I thought that it was the motherboard going mad with the PC speaker, but it turns out that "bweeeeoooop" is the sound of a HDD drive motor attempting to spin up and failing. The culprit was my ancient 40GB 5400 RPM drive. I believe that I first got it to upgrade my 90 MHz Pentium from the 14GB drive (which still works as far as I know, but has been out of service for many years now), like 10 years ago. Goodbye "OLDSCHOOL", my last drive formatted with FAT32.
- Dell 2407WFP Ultrasharp - $569
- Asus P5B Deluxe Motherboard - $210
- Antec NSK 4400 Mini-tower Case (with 380W supply) - $84.99
- Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 Box - $243
- Western Digital 150GB Raptor 10000 RPM SATA HDD - $239.99
- 4GB Patriot DDR2 PC6400 800 MHz RAM - $249.99
- Seagate 7200RPM 300GB SATA HSS - $79.99
- Ultra X-Finity 600W power supply - $69.99
- D-Link DWL-G520 PCI b/g 108 wireless card - $54.99
- Diamond x1950 Pro 512MB PCI-E 16x DVI-I Dual Link graphics card - $299.99
- Belkin UPS - $39.99
So even with my generous initial specifications and estimates I ended up spending about $500 more in pre-tax dollars than planned. At least some of that cost is due to going to Fry's instead of painstakingly seeking out all the best deals online and then risking an RMA. The rest is mostly because I hadn't expected to get 800 MHz RAM, the 150GB Raptor (planned on 76), or pretty much the highest end video card in the store. They were out of the video card that I wanted because it was on sale. Assuming I get all the rebates back I have $135 off that total, but still. I shipped the monitor to my parent's house because I don't trust the open door policy the shipping room in the office has here... and to make my dad envious with it's awesome 24" glory. He recently bought a Dell XPS for some reason, but is still using his dusty, color-faded, 17" CRT monitor with it. It's pretty funny to look at really.
Then immediately after buying all this stuff I went back and played poker for like 6 hours instead of putting everything together. I thought I might be able to pull off a second win in a row since I had the most chips all game, but I fumbled my lead against Blake in head's up at the end. This marks the first time that Craig was not in the final heads up round.
Afterward I spent the longest time ever assembling the new box. There are way more cables in there than ever before. I found out that even though I have 5 3.5" bays, I can only use 4 ever since the lowest one is too close to the video card. By the way, this card weighs like 3 pounds or something. There is so much copper on this thing I feel like it should have more support than the one cantilevered mount point on one end and the PCI-E slot. Also of note: CPUs are much easier to install these days. The integrated die thing that Intel's doing makes cracking the die almost impossible without like a hammer or something. Additionally, the fan mounts to the motherboard in a manner that does not require applying like 40 pounds of force with a screw driver on a tiny, slippery piece of metal. As someone that has fucked up multiple CPUs during the install process, I was very happy with all these changes.
I took most of Sunday dicking around with settings and getting Windows installed. Something that hadn't really occurred to me until I finally booted Windows was the fact that Win32 can't address more than about 3GB of RAM (even though it should theoretically be able to address all 4). Oops. I got this expensive 4GB of RAM and I can't even use all of it. So I have to get a 64-bit version of Windows to make use of that. I thought about trying to get Vista to see how well I could run that, but I was reminded that currently all video card drivers for Vista and DX10 suck balls and drain the performance out of your games. Looking at the XP 64 bit solutions it turns out that the process for getting a legal copy is extremely difficult and I might not even be able to do it. Thanks Microsoft. You might as well put a label on it that says "steal this version!"
Anyway, the reason this post is "Blue LEDs" is because all the indicator lights on my new computer (boringly named TOMDESKTOP) are blue. The motherboard even has a blue LED, though my case is opaque so you can only tell by the blue light coming from the 120mm fan opening. Another component that assumes the case will be transparent is this power supply (which I needed because 380W isn't nearly enough for all this shit). It's got a damn mirror finish on there, to reflect blue LEDs I guess.
Last thing, I finally figured out what that funny beeping was today. I thought that it was the motherboard going mad with the PC speaker, but it turns out that "bweeeeoooop" is the sound of a HDD drive motor attempting to spin up and failing. The culprit was my ancient 40GB 5400 RPM drive. I believe that I first got it to upgrade my 90 MHz Pentium from the 14GB drive (which still works as far as I know, but has been out of service for many years now), like 10 years ago. Goodbye "OLDSCHOOL", my last drive formatted with FAT32.