They used to say, with regard to Moore's Law, that a top of the line computer would typically cost around $4000, and that with each doubling of the power of computers, the top of the line computer would still cost around $4000.

Well, I think they did hit some limit based on the scale they can make IC traces, so now the prices are coming down.  WAY down. For $1030 before tax ($1128 after) I think I got an amazing deal. I probably could have spent more on  higher end video card, but even this one is an order of magnitude faster than my old one. (Wish I'd had access to this video card rating site someone showed me afterwards, for a little more the next variant of my new card is significantly better, I suppose I could return it and trade up, but it's 45 minutes each way.). In any case, while I suppose there were a couple of small areas where I could have been a little more top end, I'm well up there, and I was able to get a much better computer, and hopefully solve all my problems.

Alas, that remains to be seen. Some of my computer issues are yet to be resolved.

So today's foray to Fry's to build a machine from the ground up resulted in me bringing home:

An 8 core, 4 GHz, Socket AM3+ AMD processor (an unlocked version that my MB can supposedly automatically figure out how far it can overclock and even possibly free up any unused cores),

An MSI motherboard that could support it (and a few features I wanted that distinguished it from the others, like optical digital audio out that connects directly to my Amp.),

16 Gig of memory (1600 speed, could have been faster, but at $99 for the pair, a great deal),

A 750 Watt Corsair power supply with modular cabling,

A very nice "Soprano" case,

Another 2 TB drive - which turned out to be a wise investment, although it would have been better if they hadn't been sold out of the Seagate Barracuda that was cheaper and the same model as the one I've got.  This one's a Hitachi.

A new Asus nVidia GTX 650 video card, and

A SATA DVD/CD drive.

And on the way out I remembered to snag an HDMI cable, since my old video card did 1080P via component video. Alas, the days of taking advantage of the component video switching in my Amp will have to change, and I'll have to use the TV remote to switch between the computer and the video gear, and switch the amp for the audio.

Not one item on the list was over $200.  Most were under $150, and the DVD drive blew the curve by being $12. The HDMI cable, which I picked up on the way out (fortunately) was a very reasonable $8 for a 6 footer, half what they used to cost.

There were also about $40 worth or rebates among those components. And the laptop has one too I need to send in for.

So I carefully began the process of building the machine, routing the wires though the rubber grommets in the frame of the case, installing drives in the slide out trays (This case even has a space in the top where you can basically jam in any bare SATA drive into this socket for hot swapping backups.) Once everything was in, and the TV was switched to HDMI, I crossed my fingers and fired it up.  It worked!

The world of BIOS has improved to the point where you can use the mouse with it. Alas, while booting up with my original drive, I got about the farthest I was able to before the old machine really began dying.  The mouse would freeze during the post-desktop loading process, right about the time the SysConfig dialog would come up.  Plus Windows wanted to re-validate, but couldn't connect to the internet for some reason.  Safe Mode launches would lock up (Probably missing some critical files for the new config). Fortunately, I got that second drive.  As I write, it's in the process of formatting, and I'm going to install an OS on it.  Then we shall see if I can successfully copy all my important stuff off it before trying to fix my original drive's OS.

Why not stick with the OS on the new drive?  It's a slower RPM, and there's so much stuff to re-install and re-update. The new drive is meant for backups. (Also, the CD that came with the new drive seems to be less bootable than they indicated, so my XP Pro disk is doing the formatting.  It's taking a while to format the raw drive.)

I'll keep you fascinated people updated.

Update 1: I guess I really do need Windows 7 or better.  XP can only access 3 Gig of memory. But I still don't want 8.

Update 2: Amazon told me that Win 7 wouldn't arrive until Wednesday, so I didn't check my mail until now (3 AM Sunday) but it arrived Saturday at Noon. It's going to take some messing around to get my drives right. One can't change the drive letter of the boot volume, I still want my system on one half of my faster Seagate drive hooked up as drive 0. Fortunately I installed XP on Both drives, so I renamed the Hitachi drive to H: will boot from that and get C and D back to their proper places (instead of E and F.) Wondering about repartitioning, so I'm backing up all the torrents from D. Reorganizing is always such a pain.

But I DID discover that on 4/20/13 they released a new CCCP.  Yeee!

Posted by: Mauser at 01:35 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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