Liquid HeliumThis will be a computer technical post filled with "Hertz," "Megabytes," exact models of computer components, and "Rocket Science" with quote fingers. It'll be a good read though. Just giving you a heads up.

So I was examining my hard drive(because the bar that tells me how much disk space I have, in Computer, was red) and I noticed I had 20 GBs left of about 300 GB. Joy. High definition videos are large. So I put all my Videos onto my 1 TB external in hope that would give me more space. I got down to 70 GB left before it was full... crap. That didn't work out.

So I used a program called WinDirStat to tell me where all my disk space was going. I was shocked. I expected my home user folder to be the biggest contender, considering that's where my music, videos, pictures, etc preside. I was surprised to see Program Files to be the winner of hogging the most space.

I just formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows, so I didn't even have unneccessary programs installed. Well maybe a few but that's because I have troubles throwing away things. A pack rat if you will. But they were small. Turns out a whopping 50 GB worth of programs are installed on my computer. The big 3 are Steam, Unreal Anthology, and Unreal Tournament 3, in that order. My user's home folder takes second, and then I've told you the crap Windows does. On top of that there's a 50 GB file that's used as a restore point. Kinda glad I had that because an update during Windows update screwed up, and had to access that file.

I told you that story to tell you this one. I went to Newegg to look for a larget hard drive. I found a nice 750 GB Western Digital harddrive for 80 bucks so I went for it. I like WD, and it got good reviews. I wanted one of these, a Raptor that is a 10000 RPM hard drive (faster then an average desktop hard drive), but between the price and having to buy two, it would be expensive. So I went with the $80 one. It has a good cache so I was happy with it. I ordered that yesterday.

I told you both of the above stories to tell you this one. Being drawn to Newegg, I got to expirmenting with a new PC build.

AMD had released new Phenon II X4 processors last month, so I took a look. They work faster with AM3 motherboards and DDR3 RAM. See I told you this would get technical. I checked them out, and read reviews and was pleased with what I saw. So I slept on it and bought a new processor, motherboard, and memory.

I knew the processor I wanted. I like to call it the Beast. AMD and everyone else likes to call it the AMD Phenom II X4 955. 3.2 GHz quadcore goodness. It's been overclocked with liquid helium at 8.0 GHz, and 6.0 GHz with liquid nitrogen. It overclocks just fine up to 3.7 GHz without any problems. I won't be overclocking this thing, but the knowledge of knowing you can is enough. It's comparible to the Intel i7 at $1000, but this baby is only $250. I love AMD. Making high quality processors for a fraction of the cost. On a side note, at the Gigabyte overclocking compitition, they overclocked the i7 at only 5.7 GHz with liquid nitrogen. So :P to Intel.

The second thing I needed was a new AM3 motherboard. I found an Asus, that looks very nice. Has all the slots I need. Great price, I would say anyways. Asus is a good name. I usually buy Gigabyte, but I was a little shakey on this one. I always have sound problems with Gigabyte boards, even when I had a sound card to it. Plus this Asus is cheaper, getting better reviews, and has a built in video card, which is good if my dedicated video card dies or I buy a new one and it turns out to be DOA. So I'm keeping a positive attitude with this board. Plus a Gigabit port for ethernet. I have a Gigabit router so that could be useful.

A strange thing happened when I went to look at Memory. In the 6 GB - 8 GB guided search on Newegg for DDR3 RAM, there was no 8 GB combo. Just combination of 3 2GB sticks. Buying a 2 GB buy itself for DDR3 is almost the same price of buying all three 2GB sticks. So I went with this combo: OCZ 6GB DDR3. Got a free 8 GB flash drive with it. It had the best CAS latency in its class, and one of the best prices. Not to mention the fantastic reviews. I've never heard of OCZ, but I'm willing to give them a try for $100 for 6 GB of RAM.

I wanted a video card, but I can't make up my mind. I like NVidia, but they are expensive. But they are reliable. But they are behind ATI in technology and price. ATI is cheaper and the processors are faster and they use the new GDDR5 memory. So I've been leaning towards ATI Radeon HD 4890. For off, AMD processors and ATI graphic cards play better with each other. AMD owns ATI. It's expected. I was looking at the X2 versions of this card, but they are running hot, and sounds like people are having problems so yeah. Like I said, I'm leaning towards that card.

But there's the Linux factor. ATI has gotten better at making Linux drivers for their cards, but it's not 100% yet. Not to mention I heard Ubuntu 9.04 is having some upgrading issues with ATI drivers. So NVidia would be a better choice with the Linux factor. But a lot better processor speed with ATI. And cheaper. 260 bucks is better than $550 especially for a superior card. I think I will go with the ATI. I'll wait on it though.

After I get my new stuffs, I'll test to make sure everything works and then I'll be giddy. Then I'll transplant my old stuff into my server that's been sitting in the corner. It wants a motherboard that works. Then I have to decide how I want to do this. CentOS makes a great server operating system, and I enjoy having it on my test server. But the server sits next to my T.V. and sometimes I want to watch some video files on my computer on my TV. Plus my friends computer that I have been using to hook up to my TV will be gone in the fall. Plus an extra computer for LAN parties would be nice, plus it would be able to hook up to my TV. Which is sweet. So I might want Vista on their too, alongside CentOS. I could dual boot, but I would have to figure out how to do the hard drive space. I heard CentOS doesn't play well with NTFS, but I haven't tested it myself. I filled up my test server pretty easily with a 75 GB hard drive and I will have a 500 GB hard drive in my actual server. I will need to perform backups to that server from my main computer which is getting a 750 GB hard drive upgrade. I'll run with just CentOS to see how that roles. Starcraft and Unreal 2K4 are the big ones for LAN parties and they'd be able to run in VirtualBox easily.

I think that's enough of that. I'll let you know how everything works out once I recieve my stuff. E3 is coming at the beginning of June, so I'll be posting about that. I'll hopefully get caught up on a few games now that school is over with. Reading is always something I enjoyed in the Summer months so I'll probably post about some books.

So yeah.

- Beauty is only GPU circuitry deep