Over the past year I have been pouring over tech magazine, podcasts and blogs to come up with the best possible computer specs to fit my needs. Luckily, I stalled long enough for the release of Intel's Core i7 processor. I have just finished the build and could not be happier. Here is a quick rundown of the specs...
CPU
Intel Core i7 920, 2.66GHz
Motherboard
Asus P6T Deluxe
Memory
6GB (3x2GB) Corsair DDR3
Graphics
Visiontek Radeon 4850, 512MB
Enclosure
NZXT Tempest
Power
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W
Optical
I recycled what I already had. A nice (superfast) Lite-on 52x, IDE DVD-ROM drive and a pretty standard 16x, IDE DVD+/-RW drive. I had used IDE/SATA adapters for the optical drives and everything seems to be working fine so far.
Storage
I also recycled my storage (Two 120GB, 7200RPM, SATA hard drives), but have plans for an upgrade in the next couple of months. I use a D-Link DNS-323 with two 500GB, 7200RPM, SATA hard drives in it as my main storage right now. I am planning on one of two scenarios for the storage upgrade.
- If Seagate can get the kinks worked out of their 1.5TB, 7200RPM, SATA, $130 drives (or a suitable alternative pops up), I would consider grabbing two of them and throwing them into the NAS device. That would free up the two 500GB drives to either stripe or mirror in my main computer.
- Wait for the release of Western Digital's 2TB, 7200RPM, SATA, "green" drives and just throw them in my main computer mirrored. This would allow me to get rid of the NAS device all together.
Operating System
Once the machine was built, I immediately threw Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on there (64-bit to take advantage of the extra RAM). After I get it up and running and assured myself that the hardware configuration was stable, I went straight to Windows 7 Beta! I will admit that I was impressed with a lot of the changes in Windows 7 and look forward to its release (hopefully in 2009), but the Beta was not ready to be my full time OS, so I am back to Vista.
