new computer

[Snowreap]

the case is very quiet. 3 120mm fans, all running at a fairly low 1500RPM or so. at least, I *think* it's quiet. I certainly can't hear it over the racket the air purifier makes.

everything fits, although routing all the power supply cabling through the cable-management channels takes a while. actually channels is probably not the right word. more like "holes". still, it's effective at keeping cables out of the way when you're done. I'll try to take a picture later tonight.

all told, it cost maybe $1700 or so. I'm sure I could have done better, but I was in a hurry so I just picked a bunch of stuff on Newegg, sent Mona the links and said "order this". I didn't even take the time to check ZipZoomFly.

I've only tried one "legacy app" with Vista 64 so far -- Warhammer Online. maybe I'll install WoW on it and see how that goes. I do plan on installing Office 2007 Pro, does that count as a legacy app?

since this machine has 6GB RAM and a 1GB video card, use of a 64-bit operating system is important. with a 32-bit desktop OS, I'd probably end up only being able to use about 2.6GB of RAM, since 32-bit "consumer" versions of Windows are locked at 4GB of physical address space (primarily due to device driver writers who blithely assume that the existence of a 32-bit virtual address space means that all physical memory can be addressed in 32 bits as well). I don't want to use a 32-bit "server" version of Windows that will recognize more than 4GB of physical address space either, since some software (like DirectX and Media Player) can be a bit quirky on server platforms.

my own machine, by the way, is an AMD64 and it works just fine (using 64-bit XP). a bit slow by current standards (2.21GHz Athlon 64 X2 4400+), and only 2GB RAM, but basically reliable as long as I minimize use of the audio card to ventrilo only (and that's probably Creative Labs' fault, not AMD's).

you should never give up on AMD, even if Intel is selling a better product today. that would be like giving up on Intel back when the Athlon 64 first came out -- if you had done that you would have missed out on Core 2 and Core i7!

-ken