NEW PC!!

Change of pace here, seeing as how Ubuntu has been a miserable experience and I'm utterly sick and tired of it. Subject for today: new computer!

Yes, I'm currently at that terribly exciting "waiting for the postman" stage, waiting for the following:

Phenom II 940
ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe Motherboard
2 x 2GB PC6400 Corsair Twinx
AMD 4850X2 2GB
Western Digital 640GB Black
Sony Bluray drive
Corsair 550W PSU
27" (!) Dell 2709W monitor

I'm particularly excited about the monitor, but also just the fact that it's been a few years since I assembled a PC. Bluray seems to be getting to the point that it's worthwhile, but burners are still outrageous at over €150.

The 4850X2 is an exciting prospect, in that it's two pretty fast cores for the price of one fast one, and accordingly offers great value except, of course, when driver support is shite. Which it seemingly often is. Anandtech were gushing about it though, and that's enough for me. I'll keep the updates coming on that one.

It's a relief to be able to buy an AMD CPU without feeling like a complete sucker (which, let's face it, you almost certainly were if you bought a Phenom). Anyway, the Phenom II is wonderfully price competitive, performance competitive, and generally pretty good across the board. Certainly up there with anything Intel offer at the price.

And then the monitor. Oh, the monitor... I take great pleasure in listing off the input/outputs on the monitor, so here goes - 2 x DVI-D (not entirely sure why), VGA, HDMI, Displayport, component, 5.1 audio out, 4xUSB, 9-in-2 card reader... Epic. There are some suggestions that there may be minor input lag issues, but all monitors seem to have some criticisims levelled at them, so we'll see what happens.

Stay tuned, I'll report back soon...