This was news I meant to post here months ago so, it’s kind of stale but, to keep a personal site fresh you gotta start somewhere.
So several months ago, towards the beginning of a summer, I saved up the money and bought a bunch of new hardware to assemble into two new desktop boxes. Aside from my System76 Darter laptop, this was the first new hardware I bought in more than nine years. The purpose of these new machines was, in order of importance, to game, to giving my non-technical friends something familiar to compute with, to store, share and burn files, to run applications that have no Linux analogs and, perhaps, to do a little ASP.Net development.
I didn’t select top of the line hardware because I read a few benchmark tests and knew that most games, even something like Crysis and other DirectX 10 games, wouldn’t really require it. The criteria I chose select hardware by was energy efficiency and silence. For example, my video cards are passively cooled and I spend good money on high quality power supplies that were highly efficient and very, very quiet. My gamin’ boxes run in near total silence and never use more than 240 watts. They average around 90 to 110 watts when I’m just editing text, listening to music or browsing the Web. Plus these new LCD monitors gave me back a ton of deskspace.
So now I’ve got the hardware to do a lot of things I’ve been planning to do for many years now. Rip all my CDs to ogg vorbis, burn a bunch of archived files to optical disk and so on.
Oh yeah, and game a lot. I plan to buy Spore and Medieval Total War II, maybe the computer version of Mass Effect or Half-life 2? I don’t know. Any recommendations?