I'm a bit like the cobbler who had no time to make shoes for his children as he was too busy making money. I talk about computing for a living and am pretty current on hardware and software, but have a dog for a personal desktop. In fact, I have three dogs: an old Thinkpad I use for Ubuntu, an IBM ThinkCenter mini-tower I use for my A/V needs, and the minitower I'm on right now. (I also have a server I haven't used in a while but it has some nice RAID drives I might use.) The desktop I'm using now is the newest of the lot so let me describe. This is a machine that I put together do long ago I can't remember. It has an Intel Pentium III running at 1.11 Ghz with 1 core, 512 Kb of L2 cache, and a 100 Mhz FSB. Intel made the PIII from 2/26/99 when it was introduced to sometime in 2003. The box has 512--repeat, 512--Mb of RAM. There are four drives: 20, 6, 6, and 12 Gb for a total of 44 Gb. I have a DVD-RAM and a DVD-RW which were added later. The video card, another clue to age, is a Diamond Radeon X1550. I checked the Passmark benchmarks for video and found the current range to be from 350 (the best) to 131. The score for the X115 was near the bottom at 153.
What do I need--a whole new setup. I'm thinking of virtualizing my operation so I can run a server (probably MS 2008), Ubuntu, and Windows 7 (and 8 when it is released). In addition to my office productivity tools, I do want some high-end A/V capture, editing, and presentation capabilities. I do some graphics and computational stuff so I need to consider those requirements as well.
Given that my gear is 10+ years old I'm thinking that I should go leading edge. This might give me a 5-6 year window before I need to consider replacement. (My current setup might have been good for 5 years.)
I mentioned this to my systems analysis and design student during spring semester 2012 and challenged them to design a system for me. I offered to name the computer I assembled after the students who provided the winning configuration. Well, only two students responded--and I didn't use many of their suggestions, but I want to honor them anyway. Thus the Hilliard-Giacchi Viper.
In the next post I'll tell you what I bought and how I thought about each component.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment