New Computer

I typically try to think of ideas to post on throughout the week, to give me time to develop them and prevent having to rush one out just to keep up with my (self-imposed) deadline. This past week, however, I was having a bit of trouble. Nothing I came up with really seemed to be of the... caliber that has come to be expected on this blog. But I lucked out as a topic just fell into my lap last Friday morning when I went to turn on my computer: it was dead!

My first thoughts when looking at the black screen were, "Alright! I bet I can turn this into a blog post! Sweet!" And as I spent the next few hours trouble shooting the problem only to find that the problem is either with the video card, motherboard, or CPU, I could barely hold in my jubilation as I began to write the post in my head.

I have decided to go ahead and build a new computer instead of fixing my defective one, as this is not the first major problem that I have had with it. So, Friday night I took my laptop down to a nearby Chick-Fil-A and spent about an hour picking out parts on NewEgg.com. Why Chick-Fil-A? Because the internet in my apartment was out, and you can't really beat the combination of free wi-fi and chicken sandwiches.

Parts in total cost $715, and that's for the case, power supply, processor, motherboard, memory, and hard disks. I'm going to see if the old video card still works before I buy a new one because I would rather wait a year and get a better one for half of what I would pay for a top of the line one today. I can reuse the optical drive, as it is a decent dvd burner, although the IDE cable my be a pain in my new case. (An interesting aside, I found an old newegg wishlist from November 2006 which cost about 700 bucks as well. You can't make a direct comparison since many of the parts are out of stock and my priorities have changed, but I'm looking at roughly 4x RAM, 2.5x HD (only counting one of them), and 2x CPU (well, 2 cores instead of 1))

You see, I decided to go with the micro ATX form factor. These may seem like a really dumb idea for someone who likes to play a lot of games on their computer, but I assure I gave this plenty of though (which I suppose doesn't mean that it's not a stupid idea). I had originally been considering going pico ATX: small, low power consumption, low heat, and little noise. Unfortunately the trade off is in performance. Pico would work for me if I wanted a cheap server running 24/7, but as my main development and game playing rig it just wouldn't have the muscle.

Micro, however, doesn't force you to compromise much more than a few expansion slots that I would never use anyway and only a little in the way of performance. I will share the wish list on NewEgg when they update their public lists, but for now I guess I'll just link to all the components:
Intel Core 2 Duo
ASUS Micro ATX mother board
OCZ 2 x 2GB
Samsung 640GB SATA 3.0G (2 of them)
Athena 470W Micro ATX power supply
Silverstone Aluminum Micro ATX case

Not bad for a computer that will actually fit in my desk. It's not the bleeding edge, but it will get the job done for the next few years. As long as it does what any good collection of hardware should: never bother me. The harder decision here: what OS.

This may seem like an easy question considering the fact that I am working on games in XNA, and XNA means Windows. But windows isn't ideal for me, as I also would like to host files and perhaps an SVN repository. Windows just doesn't have the reliability of a solid Linux distro, and I miss bash (I'm sorry cygwin, but I need the real thing).

Whatever will I do? Find out in next weeks blog (Ha! I knew I could stretch this into two posts)! Will it be Windows? Will it be a Linux distro? Will it be some mixture of the two with the help of some super nifty virtualization software?