Parts

Woo, I just received my order of an nVidia 8800 GTS video card, the second-fastest card you can get right now (the 8800 GTX is faster, but it’s a hell of a lot more expensive). New cards are due out soon, but nVidia’s new ones will mostly be cheaper mid-range ones that won’t be as fast, and ATI’s is delayed and reportedly quite hot and power-hungry.

Now I just need a system to put it in…

I finally ordered all of the parts I need for a new system, but I split up the order between two different stores due to some fairly large price differences, and the other shipment is still waiting on some backordered items. Still on the way are:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600

My last couple of CPUs were AMD since they were much more bang for the buck at the time, as Intel chips were hideously expensive. Intel has the upper hand at the moment though, and although AMD is working to catch up, I’m not waiting any longer. A lot of people opt for the cheaper E6300 and overclock it, but I’m hoping that the extra cache on the E6600 will help down the road when this system inevitably becomes another overworked Linux server.

It’s strange to think that this chip is only 20% faster in clock rate than my current four-year-old CPU (2.0 GHz vs. 2.4 GHz), but will be around at least twice as fast in CPU-bound processing. You just can’t hike the clock rate for an easy performance boost anymore, as Intel recently discovered.

Motherboard: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe

Perhaps an odd choice, as it supports ATI’s method and not nVidia’s for running video cards in SLI mode, but I don’t intend to do so anyway. This one is primarily for Linux compatibility (again, the server down the road thing), as it sticks mostly with standard Intel chips that are already supported in Linux. nForce boards need special binary-only drivers, and a lot of other boards use weirdo third-party chipsets that could be problematic for things like IDE/SATA or historically unreliable vendors like VIA.

(Though this board has its fair share of weirdness as well. Two other different IDE/SATA chipsets in addition to the native one, for a potential total of 11 internal drives?)

Memory: 2GB of some OCZ DDR2-800

Memory isn’t usually notable, except in that we’re rapidly approaching the 4GB barrier. A lot of motherboards support more than 4GB, but not all OSes will. In particular, the versions of Windows that you’d actually use at home won’t see any more than 4GB (only the business/enterprise versions do). But even then, around 1GB of that will be ‘hidden’ by device mappings, so you can only really use 3GB. You could just put 3GB in, but then you have to fill all four DIMM slots, and most motherboards then make you run with slightly slower timings when they’re all full. And then you still can’t use more than 2GB in a single process anyway. The 64-bit versions of Windows don’t have some of these limits, but they’re still plagued by incomplete drivers.

So, for now, 2GB is still the sweet spot for memory. Hopefully, by the time we actually need 4GB or more, 64-bit adoption will be much further along.

Disk: Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA

Damn, disk is cheap nowadays. I’m tempted to get two more of these and increase my server’s RAID-5 array from 240GB to a full terabyte (Edit: And I did!). As it is though, this drive will become the new ‘scratch’ disk for MythTV recordings and backups from the other systems.