white noise

The first piece of the great computer build has arrived…the case. Gentlemen, start your drooling:

Now most people probably don’t drain a major part of their budget on a case, but of course I’m not most people (have you seen my basement ceiling). Maybe it was that I needed a little extra bling to help me get past not buying a new sleek laptop. Nah, actually it makes a lot of sense. You see I’m not the type to build a new machine ever year or two – maybe upgrade a component or two sure, but this case will live a long life. With that in mind I wanted something that could be used as a HTPC in the basement in the future. Something rack mountable would be nice since there’ll be a 19″ rack going in down there. Then I got to thinking, “Do I really want to power up the projector just to transfer a file or change some music that’s playing?”. Surely not. Of course I could use remote desktop from a laptop, but that might be a hastle, too.

Enter the Silverstone LC-18. With it’s builtin 7 inch 16 x 9 touchscreen LCD, it’s perfect for the basement rack! With all that said, I haven’t decided how soon it might actually make it’s way down there. There are some gaming issues to work if it were in the rack. But I’m guessing I’ll have a handle on that when the basement actually gets done. In the meantime I’ll keep it upstairs like a standard desktop (with a second tiny monitor).

Purchased from case-mod.com (via ebay).

After months of debating whether my next computer will be a new high-end laptop or a self-built desktop, I’ve finally decided on the later.

And what a hard decision it was! Between the Dell M170 laptop which is branded with my own corporate moniker (XPS) and some sleek new VIAOs rolling out with a graphics toggle to switch between integrated (battery life) and an Nvidia 7 series card (performance), the laptops almost won me over. After all we’ve been a laptop-only household for a few years now.

But ultimately what won me over to the boat-anchor side of the scene was pure graphics performance. Even at the highest ranks there are laptops which support battery melting SLI graphics, but those dual cards still don’t compare to their desktop equivalents. After digging through the Nvidia specs between the desktop 7 series and the GO 7 series equivalents, the choice was clear. Actually I didn’t have to look much further than my $4k+ Dell laptop for work, whose Quatro FX 1000 card is getting outpaced by the latest games (F.E.A.R. is unplayable).

The need here was clearly to get a machine that could take my gaming duties back from my work laptop. The Dell M60 has served me well, but I’m litterly almost out of disk space for actual work files and the games I can play on it are turned way down on the quality scale. Not to mention that taking my bread and butter machine (which I don’t own) to lanwar is a worry I’ll be glad to be rid of.

Gaming isn’t the only goal of the new box. My 1.1GHz VAIO laptop really limps with video work and can even be maxed out with heavy audio processing. I’m still holding on to the old boy. It’s the perfect travel mate – the 12″ screen never saw a airline tray table it didn’t like. But it might be pretty much limited to web work (which is actually why I bought it in the first place – Thanks McDonalds!).

So, a desktop it is; and piecing it together myself seems like a no-brainer. I just like having more control than the OEMs give you. Especially when it comes to selecting ram, hard drives, and such. Heck, I think building your own is worth just getting a clean install of the OS with no extra bloatware.

Watch the saga unfold….this is going to be fun!

Project timeline – I’d like to have it together around April.
Project budget – Since the laptops I was considering would’ve run close to $3k, I’ll be happy if I can keep this close to $2k.