It's on the way!

[susandennis]

I just got tracking nums from my brother. They aren't live yet but he's thinking Wednesday.  He sent me the ingredients.

• CPU Intel Pentium Core Duo E6600 2.46GHZ FSB1066MHZ
• Intel LGA 775 Motherboard BOXDG965OTMKR FSB1066MHz 4DDR2
• Silver Case 68.75 68.75
• (2) 2GB DDR2 667MHZ PC5000 RAM
• (2) 80GB Hard drive
• CD/CDRW DVD ROM
• DVD R/RW
• Rosewill RP600V2-S-SL 600W SLI Ready-ATX 12V V2.01 Power Supply
• XFX GeForce 8800GTS PCI-E x16 640MB GDDR3 Dual-DVI HDTV/S
• Memory Card reader with 2 USB ports
• USB PCI Card
• (2) LED Silent Fans
• Ultra dual Lights

He also put on something he's calling the AVG Security Package. ARUGH! Ok. All I gotta say is that it had better behave itself or it is asta lavista baby.  (I just got a note from him that this package includes:  anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam and a firewall.  Honestly, given the option, I probably would have said 'no thank you' but what the heck. It will likely be fine.)

His note included some basic instructions...  I love this bit:

The green lights above and below are controllable.  On the back of the pc you can see a black switch and a knob.  On/Off and sound responsive.  If you put it on the sound responsive setting you can change the knob setting so that it is more sensitive or less sensitive to sound.  The play the music and the pc will jam with you.

He said the only problem he had with it was letting it go.  I can't wait.

Comments

[geordie.livejournal.com]

Aargh, that triggers my competitive urges. I was going to go for a lower spec CPU and GPU than yours... and hopefully I will. But it's hard.

Very nice machine.

[susandennis]

Well, I'm a girl. I need the extra.

To be honest, I am so not a hardware person (I still have to stop and think which does which on an i/o swtich). I know him well enough to know he would do me good, it's nice to have the verification from someone who actually know what all that alphbet soup means. Thanks.

[geordie.livejournal.com]

As luck would have it our resident games player had just been telling me the 8800 was the best right now. To be honest I haven't been following hardware and I just started checking all the specs over the last few weeks so that I don't make an expensive mistake. That processor is at the high end of the reasonable alternatives too. Your brother is obviously good at what he does.

[susandennis]

Your brother is obviously good at what he does.

Thanks for that. It's a wonderful thing to hear about your baby brother.

[howeird]

You went frugal in a couple of areas where you probably could have afforded more. 120GB hard drives are sometimes as cheap as 80's. I hope you got SATA's, because this motherboard has that built in, and you can RAID them. I'd also have gone with a 3 GHz CPU to take better advantage of the fast FSB.

And if I read that right, 4GB of RAM total? You'll need Vista in order to use that (XP has a 3GB limit). Nice motherboard, but the SLI-ready power supply is the wrong one - this motherboard doesn't have SLI. Did you really need the USB card? The motherboard has 6 USB slots built-in. All together you have 12 USB ports. What are you using for speakers? This motherboard has killer audio, it can even plug into the optical digital audio port on a home theater receiver.

You're right about AVG - remove it as soon as you fire the thing up. It's freeware... Invest in a subscription to McAfee - just the virus scan, you don't need or want the firewall. You don't need or want the built-in OS firewall either, unless you're directly connected to corpnet.

It's a nice package, though. Have fun with it!

[susandennis]

Clearly you know way more than I do but a couple of points. Neither the AVG installed (nor the one that I have had trouble with on my desktop or the one on my little laptop) are freeware. I pay Grisoft good money. I don't whine about freeware figuring you get what you pay for.

The point of this machine is for running Vista.

On my current machine I have 12 USB ports plus 1 4 port USB hub and 4 USB ports on the monitor and they are all full. I have a couple of thumb drives that I have to unplug something to use. The new monitor will give me an additional 4 so the new system will have 24 if I don't use the spare hub and that will probably be enough.

I don't really understand the rest of your note except the last line which, I hope trumps the rest (i.e. the wrong SLI whatever).

Thanks.

[howeird]

The last line definitely trumps the rest.

Ah yes, I seem to remember you saying you were the queen of USB. USB hubs don't relay all the signals they need to for some devices, and USB drives have been known to scramble data when another drive is removed without using the taskbar thingie for "Safely remove hardware". As long as everything works for you, though, fine.

SLI is a new kind of slot for a video card, similar to AGP. PCI-e (PCI express) is a super duper version of PCI which is also great for video cards. Your power supply is listed as SLI-ready, which means it has some connector which you will never use.

I'll be watching for your reports on the Vista learning/frustration curve. I had to remove it from my desktop at work because some of my internal Microsoft apps do not work under Vista, and it scrambles permissions on some shared network drives. But I will be putting it on my home PC for the extra memory and 64-bit support. And probably on my laptop too, because it has a spiffy network handler which is smart enough to know the difference between my various wireless connections. But I'll probably wait for SP1.

[susandennis]

Interesting to hear about your experiences with hubs. I've been very lucky. I've hubs quit - like the one in the monitor - but a cold reboot brought it back. I rarely 'safely remove'. I forget. I need to remember.

The only time I've even seen Vista is on a lobby demo machine at the Redmond campus before the launch. It should be very interesting. Like you, the critical Microsoft internal aps I need to do my job won't work on Vista and don't even like Office 2007 so my work laptop will stay in the dark ages for a while at least. I do have a little Fujitsu Lifebook and a spare Vista so we may try that out at some point.

The beauty of my deal is that this new desktop is my play machine and I have backup machines if I get into trouble so I can kind play with impunity and I think that will cut down on any frustration. But, I will be sharing all the details, of course!