New PC
I ordered a new PC today from www.gamepc.com.
Athlon X2 4600+, 2GB RAM, Raid 0 hard drive configuration.
It’s always fun ordering a new system - perusing the vast options, ekeing out just a bit more performance.
My current PC is about 22 months old. When I bought it, I was still at PopTop, and regarded this PC as basically a games and ‘net browsing machine - so I got a mid-level $700 HP (Athlon 3000+, 1GB RAM, ordinary HD). It wasn’t bought, or decked out, as a primary development machine.
Still, it’s held up surprisingly well, and, in browsing for a new system and looking at benchmarks, I was a bit surprised that the passage of nearly 2 years time and the move from a $700 PC to a $2100 PC (the cost of the new one) will likely only net me a ~60% speed improvement. But that’s sort of speculative - perhaps it’ll be faster than that.
I know that my current PC takes 2.5 - 3 minutes to reboot (the Windows screen appears after 70 seconds, but then the hard drive thrashes for over a minute as secondary stuff loads, and I can’t do anything until the 2.5 minute mark). Slow reboots, slow compiles, sluggishness with multiple apps going - hopefully the new machine will address that. Some of this is likely built-up cruft that accrues on all Windows machines over time. So hopefully, a ‘clean install’ of Windows, plus a ~60% faster machine, will have an outsized performance difference. In any case, if it saves me 10 minutes a day, it’ll pay for itself reasonably quickly.
I’ll post benchmarks when I get it.
November 23rd, 2005 at 4:59 am
I wish you all the luck with RAID 0 - you’re doubling your chances for HD failure.
November 23rd, 2005 at 2:45 pm
I’ve been running raid 0 for 3 years on the same machine and haven’t had a HD failure. If it has quality hard drives, the risk of an out and out failure are still pretty low in the first two to three years of life. I have a dozen machines here, many with multiple hard drives that are several years old. The only hard drive failure I’ve ever experienced was on a five year old machine with a crappy hard drive. A proper backup scheme covers most of effects of the risk, anyway.