Need new Computer
My main computer system has slowly begun to fall apart. It started about 4 months ago, when the on-board gigabit ethernet died on the motherboard. I popped a spare 100Mb PCI card in, and have been limping it by, but I've had all sorts of strange DNS errors (even a new install of Windows Vista RC1 had problems, so I don't think it is a software issue). Now, recently, I've begun to get some really nasty screen corruption (I assume this is in the ATI Radeon video card), mostly when I'm doing POVRay renders and the CPU really heats up the system. It doesn't help that I've had my computer cranking 100% non-stop for about a week now, doing Lego Renders.

I love the Intel P4 that I have in there, and the simulated dual cores with dual channel DDR400 memory performs better than anything I've ever had, but it is getting a little dated. I'm really in the market for one of the new Intel Core Duo 2 CPU's, espeically, given that they crank out far less heat than this beast I have (it is like a radiator next to my leg...of course I do have 4 250GB HDD in there and 10 fans). But, the cpu's are still pretty expensive, and first gen on the motherboards. Plus, I REALLY want to only install a new Windows once, so I would like to wait for Windows Vista. If that is the case, I'll probably just buy a Dell system with a good PCIE card, gigabit ethernet, Intel Core Duo 2 and get a network attached storage device that can do RAID rather than keep loading up my main system.



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- posted by Jeff @ 8:28 PM | 0 comments