Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Desktop Specs

15November2005 [directLink] [wishlist]

After making lists of suitable desktop Beasts, I’ve gone back and reduced to a set of minimum specs. For now they’re very basic as I haven’t quite got my head around all the details; this also means the specs could be met by an Apple, a Dell or a homebrew machine…

Update: with further research I’ve tied down a few specifics, all of which are Beige; White’s only hope now is similarly priced equivalents

As explained in White vs Beige Round 1, my decision will really come down to hardware - if I go White, the software will be all Apple; if I go Beige, I’ll continue to dual-boot Win and Linux. And my list of tasks is short, but important: I have to be able to day-to-day multitask, and I have to be able to render video at an acceptable speed. So, what it comes down to, is how can I get a quality machine that meets the following specs for the least cost:

• Some sort of next-gen dual-core processor; currently favouring an AMD64 X2 (Update: 3800+ X2 or 4200+ X2)
• Motherboard is dependant on the processor; must support Serial-ATA, preferably PCI Express; Gigabit networking and Firewire (1394b) would both be useful (Update: based on an nForce4 Ultra chipset)
• HDD: a SATA RAID1 setup, with at least (2x)160GB, 250GB looks a good balance before becoming too expensive
• RAM: at least 1GB, preferably 2GB (Update: having tied down the cpu, I’m aiming for Dual-/DDR400)
• Video: probably a 256MB minimum; must support dual-monitor plus TV-out so I can expand to a decent editing setup; probably involves moving to DVI LCDs
• And a decent-sized monitor; I want a min 1600x1200 resolution, but getting an LCD native that supports that is expensive, might be looking at min 20” (Update2: Looks like I might go old-school with a CRT or two; they’re far cheaper and short of spending over a thousand on an LCD the video quality just won’t come close)

I’ve still got to work out the power requirements on my beast too. And there are a couple places I could take ‘shortcuts’ until I get the cash to get things better: eg, get a mobo with integrated graphics and a cheap (but large) CRT at first, then upgrade with a graphics card and LCD later… And I could just get one HDD instead of 2 upfront, but the difference in cost for effort (of converting to RAID later) doesn’t seem worth it.