The last desktop computer I bought was in 2007. It was pretty good for the time (or at least as good as I could custom-build for ~$1300 including monitors and peripherals), but it has been showing its age for a while. Sometime in the next year, I plan to build a mega-computer, designed to handle running 4-5 VMs simultaneously and allowing my laptops to connect similar to a vmWare View workstation, so that I don’t use up their scarce resources like I am today. Unfortunately, that computer’s going to be pretty expensive (I have it spec’d out at a bit over $4000).
To get me through the meantime, I decided to try to upgrade my current computer. My plan was that I would buy some more RAM, maybe get a solid state drive, and upgrade Windows to 64-bit. This plan fell apart about ten minutes after I began: the motherboard I had was limited to 4 GB of RAM, and I was at that amount already.
So then I decided to get a new motherboard. But then I’d need to get a new CPU, new RAM, and a new video card (it was 5 years old, too, so although it still worked fine for a lot of stuff, it was beginning to show its age). And I wanted to do this today, so off to the local giant computer chain I went. While there, I also found a great deal on SSDs, so I threw in one of those, too. I figured I could re-use my case, power supply (which I had upgraded to a 650w Antec model), two SATA drives, DVD burner, wireless network card, and sound card.
Sometime after installing the new motherboard, I took a closer look at the thing and realized that it’s not 2008 anymore: there were no PCI legacy slots (goodbye sound card and network card) and no IDE channel (so long, DVD burner), so I had to go out and get a wireless USB stick—cards are apparently passe now—and DVD burner. I only have cheap speakers for this computer, so the onboard sound is acceptable.
The total price for this was about $950, but I now have 16 GB of RAM, a solid state Windows installation, a mid-range processor, a good video card, and have slaked my urge to spend $4K on a computer…for now… Eventually, I’ll donate this machine to the spousal unit and build my mega-computer, but at least I can play The Sims 3 without having it crash and lose hours of micromanaging… Oh, and the 7-second bootup is so nice.
Not bad at all; I haven’t bothered with an SSD, but I’ve thought about it. What exactly is the advantage supposed to be?
Comment by Tony Demchak — February 20, 2013 @ 4:54 am
SSDs allow for random reads, rather than waiting for a spinning disk head to reach the correct sector. That means that reads are much, much faster. The end result is that by putting my Windows installation on an SSD rather than a spinning disk, my boot time is cut to a quarter of what it would be with a regular 7200 RPM disk. The other advantage is that they aren’t mechanical devices, so if you accidentally bump your laptop, you’re not risking drive damage or a head crash.
There are some downsides to SSDs, and they’re a bit too expensive for me to replace all of my disks (still about $1 per GB), but they’re getting less expensive.
Comment by Kevin Feasel — February 20, 2013 @ 3:16 pm