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.

• FSP Group SAGA+ 450R 450W ATX12V Power Supply
• COOLER MASTER Centurion 534 RC-534-KKN2-GP Black Aluminum & Mesh bezel / SECC Chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
• Intel BOXDP35DPM LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Quad-Core Processor
• 4 x 2GB = 8GB Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
• EVGA 512-P3-N954-TR GeForce 9500 GT 512MB
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM

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.