The Old Boss
So now my P2-400 is getting a little long in the tooth. It's got 20 gigs of U2W SCSI disks (I've always had SCSI disks, btw), PCP&C case and p/s, ASUS P2B-S, Matrox G400, DVD, and 220MB of SDRAM. I run Win2K on it. It was a hotrod about two years ago. I paid $2500 for the whole shebang, including the incredible iiyama 19" monitor. It's a sweet machine, the kind of machine you surf the web with a scotch in one hand and a joint in the other.

After playing through a couple of slide shows like CStrike, Deus Ex and NOLF, I've decided it's time to do the upgrade thing again. Ahh, spring is in the air, and I picked a few things up in the after-Christmas sales at Fry's. It's a yearly favorite of the Bay Area geeks, I tell you. I spend much time there.


All Hail Fry's Electronics!
I've been researching this new machine exclusively through the collective consciousness of the web. Here's what I've gleaned from all ya'll. I also steered clear of the online buying this year, except for RAM, simply for return policies and more instant gratification.

CPU: I seem to go back and forth. I really like the FCPGA Pentium III's. It's a nice all-around package: cheap mobo's, great speed, less heat, but it was the Rambus. Yeah, it's just the Rambus. So, I went with a 900Mhz T-bird by AMD. It's got copper interconnects and it really cooks, literally, so I slapped on an Alpha PAL6035 heasink (uh, with a Sunon fan and it's a little weak, 38o- 41o C ;). The P4's look really interesting, but they are way too expensive and still, it's the Rambus. So you know that a Cray X-MP supercomputer (in 1982) could do about 500 megaflops. This $140 chip can do 1.2 gigaflops, more than twice an original Cray X-MP and faster than a Cray-1. In my informal testing of raw performance, the 900Mhz T-bird could crank out a 1280x1024 (8bit color) mandelbrot fractal in about 3 seconds using floating-point math. It took about 6 seconds with my old P2-400, using integer math. BTW, that's really good. In encoding MP3's using bladeenc, the T-bird ripped a 212MB .wav file (Rush - 2112) to a 256Kbps MP3 in a little over 4 minutes. Not too shabby. I think I'll keep it.