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Lamsey's PCs

It is often said that one can tell much about a geek by inspecting the hardware he chooses as his own. OK, I just made that up, but there's maybe a grain of truth in there somewhere. Here's a look at my own machines with some reasons as to why I chose the hardware I've gotten. Hopefully it can give you a few ideas.

Desktop

My main desktop PC is important to me - I spend a lot of time in front of it and I use it heavily for multimedia, including watching movies, music and tv shows. It also needs to have the performance to run all the latest games. As such, I've spent a reasonable amount of time and money on it.

CPU: AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+ (socket AM2)
Despite the superior overall performance of Intel's Core 2 series of processors, AMD's Athlon64 line is still excellent value for money in the low-to-midrange end of the market. This particular chip was about £40 cheaper than the equivalent Intel part :-) Right enough, I did end up spending £15 on a low-noise aftermarket HSF, since the stock one got a bit loud under load.

Motherboard: Asus M2N-32 SLI Deluxe
With a demanding graphics configuration, I needed an SLI-capable motherboard which would give me the required number of PCIe x16 slots. This board fitted the part nicely, with the decently-featured nVidia nForce 570 chipset. The board's nicely designed and doesn't have any loud chipset fans, which is a bonus.

RAM: 2x 1024MB Corsair DDR2-800 (2GB total)
For the latest games, 2 gigs of RAM is a practical minimum. With this amount of memory at my disposal I hardly ever need to touch my paging file, unless I'm playing something ridiculously demanding like Crysis. Corsair are reliable and tend to offer good value for money, so they've gotten my cash.

GPUs: nVidia GeForce 8600GT PCIe 256MB / GeForce 6600 PCIe 256MB
Three graphics heads means two graphics cards, so my old rig's graphics card makes an appearance here to feed my third head. My primary card is one of nVidia's beastly 8000-series cards and packs a fair punch, though I've opted for a special silent one made by MSI which uses a massive rear-mounted copper heatsink instead of an active fan. Powerful + quiet = win :-)

Sound Card: Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
As a gamer, I like to have a decent sound card to take advantage of EAX's ability to provide much more realistic environmental effects. That means getting a Creative card, and with Windows Vista you need an X-Fi card to get full EAX surround in DirectSound3D games. The XtremeGamer version is reasonably cheap and is optimised for gaming performance (which is the only real reason to get a Creative card).

Hard Drives: 1x 160GB, 1x 200GB @ 7,200rpm
I've got a couple of disks in here, which makes for easier multi-booting with Windows, Linux and Solaris as well as leaving plenty of space for game installations, media files, etc. I think one of them's a Seagate and the other's a Western Digital - I can't remember which way round though, and I can't be buggered cracking open the case to look :-p

Monitors: 2x Samsung 17" TFTs / 1x Iiyama 20" widescreen TFT
I'm a big fan of multi-monitor setups. My three screens give me tons of room to do stuff like programming and web design, while the ability to have several programs onscreen at once makes multitasking completely effortless. The ability to keep an eye on my email inbox, IRC, my PC's performance stats and more, all whilst playing a fullscreen game, is particularly good. The widescreen monitor on the side is great for watching my movies and TV shows too :-)

Speakers: Logitech X-540s (5.1 surround)
These are fun. Along with a decent soundcard, a good pair of speakers makes watching videos and playing games a much more immersive experience. These speakers do the trick nicely, as well as providing excellent bass definition with the downwards-firing subwoofer.

Keyboard: MS Multimedia Natural Keyboard
I'm a big fan of ergonomic split-layout keyboards. It's a much more natural position for your wrists, which makes typing a lot less of a chore. This keyboard's got a good set of extra buttons too - I particularly like having the volume control and sleep buttons easily to hand.

Mouse: MS Comfort Optical Mouse 3000
This is a nice mouse in most respects; it's light, comfortable and has an accurate sensor. The one thing I'd fault it on is the scroll tilt-wheel, which has a bit of a spongy feel to it. I prefer wheels that roll in increments, one per line, but this one just goes round and round, which is particularly annoying in games where you're frantically trying to switch weapons and missing the one you want :-(

Laptop

Acer Aspire 5050
I'm not a massive laptop user; when I'm in the house, I usually use my desktop machine. My laptop's used mainly as a portable device - something to take with me to university or when I'm away from home on a trip. This little Acer is a pretty good choice, with decent enough performance and a cheap price-tag. It also came with both Windows XP and a free Vista upgrade licence, so I've kept XP on the laptop and installed Vista on my desktop :-D

The laptop's specs are as follows:

The only things I can really fault this machine on are a lack of hibernation support under Linux and uninspiring battery life (about three hours maximum on full power-saving settings). Gigabit ethernet would have been nice, too. Other than that, it's a nice-looking, durable machine which does everything I ask of it :-)

Server

My home fileserver is built for low power consumption and noise with good Solaris compatability. It's got the ability to store all of my stuff safely in a redundant RAIDZ configuration with all the ease of management and unique features that ZFS offers, including seamless compression, checksumming and snapshotting.

The server's specs are as follows:

The only problem I have with this machine is that it doesn't currently work with OpenSolaris' PowerNow driver, which means I'm losing out on a bit of energy efficiency. Hopefully that'll get fixed soon enough. Other than that, this is a remarkably useful little machine which provides a lot of convenience and peace of mind with regards to data safety :-)


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