I recently upgraded my desktop with a new cpu, motherboard, and ram. I originally built the computer in August ‘05 with top of the line parts, which have become woefully obsolete in the past 4 years, or so I was surprised to discover a couple weeks ago. I had an AMD Athlon 64 3000 with a gig of pc3200 ram and an Abit FATAL1TY motherboard (yes, it is spelled like that). Recently I’ve become very interested in image processing and rendering, and the stuff I’m doing is very cpu and ram intensive.. My macbook pro can *kinda* handle it with its core 2 duo, but I wanted a separate machine to run the data crunching on so as not to kill my main computer every time I’m processing new data. The result:

• CPU: Intel Core i7 920, Quad core @2.66ghz
• Motherboard: MSI X58M (intel X58 chipset) with 6 ram slots (up to 24 Gigs of ram supported)
• 12 GB of 1600Mhz DDR3 (6×2GB)

I never ever though I’d need such a powerful computer, but then again that’s what everyone always thinks until some new bleeding edge application is discovered for the ever-increasing storage capacity and power of hard drives/ram/cpus, etc.

Furthermore, I’m setting up Gentoo linux on it.  I’ve been using various flavors of Unix for about a decade now, including FreeBSD and several linux distros.. For a while, Gentoo was my top dog, but then about 3 years ago I switched to Ubuntu for ease and simplicity’s sake.  Haven’t touched Gentoo since then, but today I decided to try it again, partly just for fun, but also because I will see significant performance increases thanks to everything I install on the system being optimized specifically for my hardware.  It sure is taking a while to install though.. oh well, it’ll be worth it.  More on this later I’m sure.