But a change has come and now all is quiet and still. The process has always been the purpose - differential diagnoses, research, budget, purchase, construction and satisfaction - but the journey inevitably comes to an end, and it has - for the time being - led to a box of loot that does its job very well indeed.
The paper specs currently read well enough. Its no supercomputer, but each component has a story behind it. In an age of minitureisation, I bought an oversized monolith of a case - not my smartest move ever but I wanted space for a HDD enclosure, DVD drive and 3.5" external slot - that culled a lot of options. I wanted holes for water pipes, too.
The HDD Enclosure is loot in itself, almost silencing the WD Green drive inside - again an extra 1.5TB of loot. The DVDRW drive has been replaced with a Blu Ray drive. The external 3.5" is a card reader, not floppy drive. In this way, every component has come along one more step that its 'default' configuration.
My solid blue-veined throbbing tower is a Zamlan Reserator, replacing a Domino ALC watercooling kit in a lootier-than-thou upgrade to cool the GPU and I'm considering a Northbridge block because the now fanless-and-silent case has quite low airflow.
Corsair provided 8GB of RAM, although I have yet to fit the optional cooling fins they shipped with. 8GB isn't that looty in this day an age, but at the time or purchase it was quite respectable and is going to be more than enough for a while yet.
While the extra RAM is to reduce paging, a pair of 180GB OCZ SSDs speed up /swap no end. Despite its finite write cycles, SSD makes great swap because of the fast access and zero seek time. When paging to disk, the computer becomes throttled by the HDD seek time not the bus bandwidth so the <0.1ms seek time equivilent SSD beats the >9ms average HDD seek and is a hundred times faster. Actually its a hundred times not-as-slow, which isn't the same as a hundred times faster but still pretty good going.
A third lone Crucial SSD serves as a Boot drive. While OS boot isn't as performance critical or capacity limited as /swap it's worth noting that even a single SSD is bigger and faster than I need for boot so I'm quite happy with it.
The zero-noise build policy has informed a number of decisions, so its a reduced power rig not a super computer. Four Cores and 8GB isn't a monster in this day and age, but the machine is built for shiny things and loot rather than for brute force high-performance and its more than fast enough with no shortage of RAM and fast disk access. Its cost a few extra quid here and there to put the computer together but its been spread over a few months and you start noticing the improvements straight away.
Overall if you are building a rig or just tinkering with upgrades, consider RAM and SSD Raid to make it less slow which is just as important as making it faster. Buy loot because its shiny, because you want it and because you are worth it.
The weird thing about having 'finished' construction, was realising that it was the constructing that was fun. That was the driving force, not the end result. Now I've got an end result, I just don't know what to do with it - its the end of the chase, once you've won there is no more "looking forward to winning" feeling. But on the plus side... winnzies for me!
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