2006-06-13 #1

Configuration Fiddling

Asked Jody for his opinion/pricing on:

• Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz 940 LGA 775
• Asus P5LD2-VM mainboard
• 2x 1GB RAM (2GB total)
• 2x Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA-II
• ATI ASUS Radeon X300 SE-X 128M PCI Express
• some kind of DVD burner
• an appropriate power supply (400W? 500W?)
• some kind of case (nothing fancy, this will live in the basement)
• any other fans or stuff that the case might need

The pricing seems about right at Lu (today this rig comes to $895, although the memory is allegedly on deal). The price to go from a Pentium 840 (which does not have the virtualization mode) to a 940 (which does) is only $17; the step up to the 960 is $115, which probably isn't worth it at this point. And the Extreme Edition processors are almost $1000 more (plus the necessary mainboard upgrade) so there is no way we are going that far upscale.