Happy New Year from us here at Kapsoft and DeanOnSoftware. All the best.

The start of the year should bring in new exciting things. Forget resolutions. I’m just too old for them. I’m just trying to live life in the fullest way.

So when my old trusted Flower PC lost its RAID controller I started looking at possible replacements. Flower is over 5 years old and I think that’s a really good life span for a PC. Especially one for a Software Engineer or someone involved in software development. I spec’ed Flower and had a local company build it. It really served me well, but when something goes I learned from the past that the end must be near for the old girl. She’s just being nice giving me a warning shot. The old girl:

So what to get now?

I’ve yet to go to multiple screens so there needs to be an upgrade there for sure. Flower is very noisy, so I’d like to cut back on that if possible. I can hear Flower from a long way away. She likes to yak.  Programmers need something very close to a gaming PC – at least I think so. Fast, tons of memory, fast drives, and maybe upgradeable. I find in the past I never monkeyed with the PC’s after purchase, but I’m keeping an eye possibly being able to change this PC with future tech improvements.

After surfing the Web endlessly I finally configured a few systems possible systems at both ibuypower.com and pugetsystems.com. I have never purchased anything yet from either, but from all reports they look like great PC builders. PugetSystems seems to have the silent PC thing down very well and offer a best of breed parts list that’s very good. iBuyPower specializes in gaming PC’s.

So what did I order? Well I’m in to having really cutting edge PC cases. (This wouldn’t be that interesting if I didn’t). A few months ago this case was released by Themaltake. The Level 10 Case:

Extravagant maybe. This case should be fun to look it and be totally future proof. The nice part is that ibuypower has an exclusive on this case and they are building it for me as I write. It is a very big case and the pictures probably do not give one the real story how big and heavy this thing (Monster) really is. BMW has some hand in the design – so maybe this will satiate my desire for a car of that namesake. iBuyPower will not ship this via UPS or FedEx. They say its too heavy and they are worried about damage. They will only ship by a Freight company. A little bit of a bummer since that costs more also.

Before I list the components let me say I had to comprimise on a few things. I didn’t get the highest end ATI video card available, but 5770 is a good one for sure and will support multiple screens via EyeAffinity. I did get a really beefy 850 Watt PSU that should let me change to any video cards in the future. The Corsair PSU is pretty good on the silent part too. iBuyPower doesn’t tell you what hard drive they use. I wish they did. Caviar Black would be my choice. The motherboard has USB 3.0 and SATA 3. It is also ready for the next generation of Intel Processors. I did not get a Blueray reader/writer. I will add that in near future. I will add more ram also in the future and bring it up to 12 meg. Maybe I’ll add a Creative sound card soon also. Windows 7 Ultimate is the OS, but maybe a Linux partition in near future.

Here are the components I specified for the insides of the beast. Enjoy and I will have an unboxing and complete review upon delivery:

Case Thermaltake Level 10 Gaming Tower Case – Black Processor Intel® Core™ i7 920 Processor (4x 2.66GHz/8MB L3 Cache) Processor Cooling CoolerMaster V8 CPU Cooling Fan System Memory 6 GB [2 GB X3] DDR3-1333 Triple Memory Module – Corsair or Major Brand ** Free Upgrade to DDR3-1600 ** Video Card ATI Radeon HD 5770 – 1GB – Single Card Motherboard ASUS P6X58D Premium — Intel X58 Chipset CrossFire and SLI Supported w/ 7.1 Sound, GbLan, S-ATA III, USB 3.0, PCI-E MB Power Supply 850 Watt — Corsair CMPSU-850TX Power Supply – SLI Ready Primary Hard Drive 1 TB HARD DRIVE — 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s – Single Drive Optical Drive 22X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive – Black Sound Card 3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard Network Card Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10/100) Operating System

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate