A New Computer

It's probably been 10 years since I've bought a new computer. I feel like it's a good habit to develop on older, less advanced hardware- it makes you write tighter code (256MB of memory anyone). But the house computer died, and it was time to build a new media center. Since this is a once a decade purchase- I got the signoff from the boss lady to do it "my way".

So I went with a true media center.
I got a 902 Euni Case off ebay, with the board, CPU and Fan off eBay for 700$.





This is the setup (to start)

MSI Platinum 975x Power Up Edition MotherBoard
Intel Dual Core E6600 @ 2.4Ghz
HD Tuner Card
On Board 5.1 Sound

Now to tune this up I put in dual OCZ 64GB SSD Drives. These drives are rates 155/90 MBs Read/Write. I put them in Raid 0. Then some more memory, OCZ 4GB DDR800 (29$ ?!? I remember when 4GB of memory was 1k!).
Then Off to the OS. I went with Vista... my first experience. I chose the 32bit version for ompatibility (nobody writes 64bit drivers yet, and it is a family computer). After the intense install, and the absurd driver dectective work... Vista was up. After 5 hours of registry hacks, service disabling, process removal, etc... Vista was usable.

Let me be the first to say, SSD drives are amazing. The applications load instantly, the OS boots from cold in 20 seconds (be sure to enable the boot manager to use both cores... why this isn't enabled by default is beyond me). I threw in a 7900GT graphics card, because honestly it's good enough and I'm not a gamer. HD picture is perfect, video's are clear and crisp. Just a wonderful little machine. Ans those SSD drives? See below


Read Rates


File ReaD and Write Rates (SSD write is not up to par just yet, but still absurdly quick).


Access time..... nuff said












A little h2benchw (from the German mag C't) sums it up nicely
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Interface transfer rate w/ block size 128 sectors at 0.0% of capacity:
Sequential read rate medium (w/out delay): 273626 KByte/s
Sequential transfer rate w/ read-ahead (delay: 0.26 ms): 1201217 KByte/s
Repetitive sequential read ("core test"): 1757337 KByte/s

Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors):
Reading: average 270946.7, min 147388.7, max 279534.2 [KByte/s]

Random access read: average 0.22, min 0.17, max 0.38 [ms]
Random access read (<504 MByte): average 0.23, min 0.03, max 0.55 [ms]

Application profile `swapping': 64632.6 KByte/s
Application profile `installing': 32218.5 KByte/s
Application profile `Word': 99457.5 KByte/s
Application profile `Photoshop': 91775.7 KByte/s
Application profile `copying': 220664.1 KByte/s