New main computer
I got all my stuff in for the new computer. Ordered it from New Egg. They have been pretty good to me before, and while their prices were about 5% higher than MWave, they offered free 3-day shipping, and MWave was $45 for 5-day. And the stuff got here FAST!

Anyway, I bought an Enermax case with a 350W PS, acrylic window (with two blue neon lit glow fans), and it has a front display temp sensor as well as a variable fan control. I went with the Abit IC7-G Max2 i875 based motherboard with dual SATA-150 RAID chips, dual channel DDR400 support, built in AC'97 5.1 surround sound, gigabit ethernet, 8 USB 2.0 ports, and 3 firewire ports. The Intel P4 2.8E (2.8GHz) with 1MB of L2 cache was a great price point, but it sure runs hot. I also sprung for a newer video card and got an ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB card. Also sprung for twin Maxtor 200GB SATA-150 drives (so I now have 600GB of storage in my main system). Finally, to top it all off, I picked up a Linksys EG008W 8-port 10/100/1000Mb/s autosensing switch to improve file transfers.

Benchmarked Data Bandwidth Comparisons

Drive	Size (GB)	Interface	Cache (MB)	Speed (RPM)	Access Time (ms)	Sustained Read (MB/s)	Sustained Write (MB/s)
1000Mb/sec Adapter	-	TCP/IP	-	-	0.3	54	54
100Mb/sec Adapter	-	TCP/IP	-	-	0.3	10	10
Maxtor 6Y200M0	200	SATA-150 RAID-0	8	7200	7	110	107
Maxtor 6Y160M0	160	SATA-150	8	7200	7	39	42
Maxtor 6Y200P0	200	ATA133	8	7200	7	41	38

- posted by Jeff @ 6:58 AM | 0 comments