You Have Chosen.Us

Over in my I have a new computer topic I mentioned I’d also ordered a UPS, and you’re about to find out why.

As I previously mentioned, I ordered a Promise SuperTrak EX16350 (16x SATA300 RAID, 128MB PCI-e x8) for my new PC, and I also mentioned the lack of a battery (or even the option to purchase one - that I could find). A simple solution is a UPS - Uninterruptible Power Supply. In simple terms, it’s a battery between your electric net and your device (in this case a PC and monitor). The autonomy is typically short - 10~60 minutes for your average consumer product - but then that’s all you’ll need really. It’s not meant as a device to allow you to game through a 3 day power outtage, just prevent you from losing data, allow you to shutdown your OS and - if you’re lucky (and/or have a more expensive UPS) - even allow you to finish what you were working on.
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That’s right, I could wait no longer. I’ve been looking around for about a month now, dreaming of what I’d do if I had the money, so I just cut the knot and went for it. There’s a few things I kept in mind: it had to be cheap (obviously some parts are expensive, but most of them are the cheapest of their kind and/or middle segment of the market), and it had to last.

So first, I started with hard drives. I ended up picking a Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS, 1TB. It’s the cheapest (along with the Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1TB drive), but unlike it’s Samsung counterpart it’s slower and/but/therefor more power efficient (hence the ‘Green’ marketing term). I’ll be cannibalising 4 320GB drives from my old PC for a 1+0 raid for my system drive, so speed is not an issue, just a lot of storage. I ended up ordering 6 WD drives for a raid 6, so I’ll have something like 3.8TB of storage.
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After much consideration, my perfect ‘next’ PC’s specifications have been decided for quite a while now:

• Quad-core CPU (or Octo-core if they’re decently priced by then)
• 16GB DDR3 memory (as I understand, DDR3 is slightly faster while requiring quite a bit less power - compared to DDR2)
• SSD hard drive (must be affordable, quick, and either ~120GB or more, or very affordable ($100 or so for 500GB))

The rest of the PC doesn’t really matter much… Gigabit onboard LAN is more than plenty, any internal 20x DVD-RW would do (or hell, I might just stick to my external 8x one - not much interest in blu-ray here to be honest), affordable (upgradable) graphics card or even my 8800GT if it’s still got decent performance (doubtful as I bought it to get 1080p (1920×1080 resolution) for current games), and on-board sound or perhaps a Creative X-Fi card for EAX…
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