Sunday, March 05, 2006

Lean, Mean, Geeking Machine

What I Bought: Dell Precision desktop for my office
Cost: $3115
Suck or Not: How could something this fine possibly suck? Not!

Details: One of the best things that your lab head can say to you as a grad student is "I want you to spend at least $3000 on your computer so we don't have to pay overhead on it." Following that statement, one of the best things that your lab's admin assitant can say to you is "make sure you use the special login for our school when you buy it so that you get the 40% discount." Yup, that's right, I got myself a wicked-ass computer for extreme geeking out! Here are the details, and I apologize if it makes you drool...

Pentium D, dual-core 3.2GHz
4 GB of DDR2 dual-channel SDRAM at 533MHz access speed
256MB Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX PCIe video card
Dual 250GB SATA hard drives operating in a RAID-1 array
16x DVD-ROM and 16x dual-layer DVD-RW
Creative Soundblaster X-Fi audio card
Wireless keyboard and mouse
...and the best part...20" widescreen digital flat panel AND a 19" standard digital flat panel!

This computer actually makes me want to go to work in the mornings. Plus the two huge monitors almost make it feel like I've got a window office!

The sad thing is that the way I write code (ie, inefficiently), I'll still suck up all the RAM. And the video card will probably still be insufficient for the massive amounts of 3D rendering I need to do!