Respect Sakura

So normally, I’d be waiting until the second quarter to make purchasing plans for my next system. Admittedly, I did want to buy myself a small Intel based Mac system now, and save until August for a Conroe based system.. but several factors have changed this.

I could blame it on the fact that despite the move to Intel, there’s still no universal support from the apps that really matter, or the fact that Microsoft still won’t support EFI, but really.. it’s about hard drives.

Something is crook in AMD/Shuttle land, and I can’t figure it out. One of my 300GB drives has died, and the 200GB that’s taken its place in physical location AND the data it stores is doing the same thing. There’s other niggling little things about the system that I’m not too happy with, but fuck it. I’ve always valued stability and reliability over performance, and the fact I rarely play games or attend LANs anymore should pretty much make my decision for me. I’m buying a PC again, and this time it won’t be AMD or nForce based. It’s going to be Intel all the way, baby.

It’s a little too soon for my liking - especially when Conroe will be kicking our asses around August or so.. but I have over 600GB of data that’s… precious to me. Getting a reliable system now is paramount, of which I’ll build myself a good RAID 5 configuration of 4 250GB’s later. That gives me only 750GB of protected storage, but that’ll do for the important stuff, it offers the best speed to price to size ratio, and also means that in the event of something horrible, I can replace the drive quickly and painlessly.

I’ve also opted to spare no expense on the stuff that matters. I’ve gone for the best damn board on the market - the ASUS based “Bad Axe” board - partially for the possibility that it’ll support the Conroes in future (neither confirmed or denied by Intel yet, but current prototypes do run on 975X boards), but also due to the fact that it pretty much meets everything I need the board for and isn’t too far outside of my price range.

So.. that’s the plan so far. What’s it going to be?

• Processor: Intel Pentium D 920 (Presler Core, dual 2.8GHz)
• Motherboard: ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (Intel 975X “Bad Axe” Chipset)
• Memory: 2x 1GB PC6400 Corsair (DDR2 800)
• Case & PSU: Antec TITAN550 Fileserver Case & 550W TruePower PSU
• The Rest: 7800 GTX, hard drives, other assorted crap from Apollo (the Shuttle)

I’ll most likely turn the Shuttle into a living room based HTPC, or do something else with it. It’s got 2GB of RAM, and I’ll be throwing a cheap and nasty GeForce 6500 into it as well, so at least the thing will serve some use.

As of yet, I’m still undecided as to what OS to run on the Behemoth until Vista comes along. I am in the beta program, but Vista just isn’t stable enough to run as a fulltime OS just yet. My Media Center license is tied to my Shuttle PC (lol OEM lol), and the only two Windows licenses I legally own are for Windows XP x64 - which in case you haven’t heard, has a pretty shitty track record for compatibility and no real benefit whatsoever. Sure, I could take the Senor Juarez way out, but I’m trying to slowly eliminate all the reasons for the Feds to raid my place.

Now.. about the hardware itself. You’ll notice that while everything else about the system is kick ass, the processor is a bit of a letdown. There’s three reasons behind this: The primary one is budget constraints. It’s the cheapest Presler core CPU that money could buy, and I hope to make use of the virtualization technologies that it supports. The second is that there’s a chance my board will support the Conroes in future, and if that’s the case, I’ll most likely be upgrading to one.

The third? It’s a little well known fact that the 920 can overclock “like buttah”. From 2.8 to 3.6 without fiddling a great deal, and if you want to tweak with memory timings and voltages, 4GHz isn’t unreachable - and that’s with stock cooling, running quite stable. I have an aversion to overclocking, but it at least gives me the option in future if things don’t wind up the way I’d like.

So.. that’s the box out of the way. What do we name a Behemoth like this? Well, I figured I’d continue with my “mythological” naming scheme and name the sucker: Heracles.

The last time I built myself a new system, I proclaimed it to be my last PC. I have similar aspirations for this thing, because I *really* *really* want Apple to release a Conroe based PowerMac that’ll take PC video cards, at least 4 hard drives, processor upgrades, and have the capability to run both Windows Vista and Mac OS X - if the virtualization technology allows me to run both OS’s at the same time this would make it even more awesome, but I’d settle with having to reboot in order to switch between them.

From what’s been happening lately at Microsoft and Apple, getting all of those things seems somewhat unlikely. I’ll still be saving for the new hotness in August, but for now it seems like I’ll be continuing my dual system ways. However, between Heracles and the new PowerMac, I think both should serve me for a good amount of time.