Friday, January 08, 2010
"Credit"
Today I didn't really accomplish what I would have liked to have accomplished. I did go to fry's to look and see if I could find a replacement back plane. I looked but they only had one back plane, the same brand that I have now and only big enough to support three rather than four hard drives.
Well obviously I want a back plane that will fit four drives and I think I want to try a different brand since the one I have seems to be working so poorly right now. I would just as easily take this current back plane apart and see if I can spot an loose or stripped wires or something but I don't know if I could really figure out how to repair or how to put it back together for that matter.
I did go for a walk but it was very abbreviated since I was distracted by a little something else.
Namely that I was finally getting some parts together for a new PC at long last. Course I may as have just done this on black friday if I was going to build a new PC anyway. Then I would have saved a lot more money probably. Little late for that though.
Wasn't it just last night I was fantasizing about what a new PC would look like? Yes, yes it was. Well I did it. And I put it on the credit card too.
I did eventually figure out I actually had to call the credit card company to let them know by the way I'm making a big purchase you can let go through.
Once I did that (and fretted about the purchase a while longer) I finally hit submit and completed the purchase.
So the purchase was a Biostar motherboard, a brand I have never purchased before along with a Core i7 CPU. The CPU was rather highly rated on New Egg. I couldn't even tell you which i7 I got, since any i7 is waaaaaay faster than my current desktop's CPU and I wanted to save money via a combo on new egg so as long as it works and it's an i7 I don't think it matters that much.
For the memory I actually got 6 gigabytes instead of eight because the price of eight seemed rather steep. A little more steep than I really felt like paying at the moment.
I also bought a combo of power supply/case. Maybe I should have spent more time agonizing over the case but the one I got was the combo with a highly rated PSU and the case itself is fairly highly reviewed so I'm not really that worried about it.
Lastly is the graphics card. There's a chance, however slight, I may have over done it a wee bit on the graphics card. But damn it I really don't want to be horribly horribly obsolete in 18 months if I can help it. So I bought possibly the most expensive graphics card I've ever purchased, an ATI 5870 HD, a "Sapphire brand". I actually have never heard of Sapphire as a brand of video cards but the buyer reviews of new egg couldn't wrong, could they? And this is the highest rated of all the 5870s at least. Didn't even browse the nVidias actually. Every thing I keep hearing is that the 58xx series from ATI is the best ever and blows nVidia's offerings out of the water apparently.
Now, at the time I am writing this particular blog entry on January 8th, 2010, the card I linked to above is $410.00US. No rebates or what-have-you. Now if you're reading this some time in the future, January 18th for instance, and it's only $300 feel free to mock me for over-paying. Whatever. At least I have the card.
Now, maybe, at long last, I won't have to worry about being obsolete. Or maybe just feeling obsolete.
Oh and and I'm swimming in hard drives so that really wasn't an issue. I have at least three hard drives that just aren't being used period right now. None lower capacity that 300 or so gigs. As for the optical drive I realized at some point I very rarely used it. So there was no reason to have one in my system always plugged in and taking some amount of power if i so rarely used it, right? I had stuck my existing DVD-RW drives in USB external enclosers a long time ago anyway. So if I need a drive to install something or whatever it's just a matter of plugging in the USB drive to a port and off I go.
Actually for a long time I would use a DVD-RW until something went wrong with it like it apparently stopped burning or whatever at which point I would either stick it in another system or throw it out or throw it in a closet as a spare for a relative or a backup.
Then I started sticking the old one in the enclosure while the newest, obtained quickly for $30 to $40 from fry's (the cheapest they have most typically) and I'd be good. Then eventually the realization about not ever using them came along and now I have no less than two DVD-RW drives in two separate enclosures.
Well I'm sure in the unlikely hood anybody ever actually reads this all that was oh-so-much interesting (but not really). I think I'll stop now.
