Archive for category PC Upgrade

My First 64bit PC

Posted by RyanG in PC Upgrade, Worklogs on October 23, 2008

Time for the second installment of my worklog for my PC Upgrade.

Well, I actually received all the bits from UPS Monday (is it Thursday already? sheesh). I actually assembled the thing Monday afternoon/evening, and have been slowly installing software and getting it up to speed.

For the curious, and so I can brag a bit heres the parts list.

Now, this isn’t quite bleeding edge stuff but it certainly brings me up to date and I’m quite happy. Because I wanted just a ROCK SOLID setup and wasn’t intending to overclock, I went with an Intel motherboard. I didn’t want to regret not getting enough memory, so I maxxed it out with 8GB. I don’t really game so the video card is nothing special, but I did want enough horsepower to drive my big monitor and take advantage of Vista’s Aero theme and some of the cool linux eye candy that’s in KDE4 etc. I am NOT disappointed!

So far I’ve gotten Gentoo linux installed on the system. The speed of compiling is admirable though not mind blowing. One of the first things I installed though was Cinelerra and I loaded up some of my HDV source material. While I should have expected as much I was able to play, edit, and render the HD in realtime! WOO HOO!

I’m quite impressed with Gentoo, no hardware headaches, everything more-or-less worked out of the box. I haven’t quite got all my favorite apps installed and running but I trust it will be uneventful.

I’m in the process of moving my drives/data over from my old system. I had a software RAID1 setup using mdadm which I’ve been able to bring back up on the new box. Going to play with a RAID5 since I now have enough disks, and maybe simulate a failure to test recovery. This should get my confidence up for building a linux software based RAID5 NAS box which is the next project.

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The upgrade begins

Posted by RyanG in PC Upgrade, Worklogs on September 5, 2008

I just placed the first of two orders for the components to my new desktop machine!

This upgrade is sorely overdue, the last time I got a “new” machine was about 3 years ago and it was antiquated then. So I’m going from my 2.4GHZ P4 with 1GB RAM and an assortment of various drives to this new beast I’m building.

This first order was for a 24″ Widescreen LCD, Ergo keyboard, speakers, and a gigabit switch. I also ordered a power supply and some fans for an different project entirely. The total cost shipped was $631.53 with about $50 representing stuff not associated with this upgrade.

The rest of the parts will consist of a 2.4GHZ Intel Core Quad Processor, 8GB RAM, a 500GB drive, Vista Ultimate 64, and a fairly run of the mill 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT.

Sadly, still not “bleeding edge” but certainly a big step up from what I’ve got. I’m hoping to enjoy it’s speed when doing stuff like non linear video editing of HDV from my camcorder using Cinelerra. I’m sure I won’t be disappointed, and I’ll be sure to post results here, so stay tuned for more!

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