Vdsat.com

I have this itch to buy a new computer. My computer is now four years old. I have the following…

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 1.8GHz Socket 939 Single-Core Processor
RAM: 1 GB (2 x 512 MB)
Video: ATI Radeon HD 4350 (The $40 card I got 3 months ago)
HDD: 160 GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA100 (Yep, it ain’t even SATA)
Sound card: Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic
Monitors: Two 19 inch 5:4 aspect ratio LCDs (Got the second one also 3 months ago)

Since the only game I play is Tribes 2, this setup has served me well in most cases. During the last few months, I was kind of sad that Tribes 2 seemed to be completely dead because the official authentication server went down permanently, but a few days ago I discovered TribesNext which patches your Tribes 2 installation so that you can connect to a different authentication server. After playing the last few nights, I realized how pointless it is to play Tribes 2 because everyone now just hacks. I hate to say it, but I think I am done with gaming.

However, what’s been pissing me off about my computer recently is how slow it is. 1 GB of RAM is just not enough. Although the CPU is only four years old, it was not top of the line when I got it, and a comparable CPU could have been purchased seven years ago.

I could go out and blow $1,000 on a new computer, but it wouldn’t change anything. People somehow manage to use up the new computing power. The problem is that I need the following on my main computer…

A webcam
A scanner
A nifty sound card
A dedicated video card
And a whole mess of random stupid software

All of this stupid crap slows the system down.

Any extra hardware that you add complicates stuff. Any extra software complicates stuff. The more crap you add to your computer, the slower it gets. It does not matter if you tweak Windows like crazy, or disable pointless background processes, or remove any trojans that shouldn’t be there in the first place, the more crap you add, the slower your computer becomes because Windows is just a piece of trash. Sure, you could reformat your drive and start over, but either you have a fully-featured software set on a slow computer, or you have almost nothing on a very fast computer.

My office computer is nice and fast and boots in 30 seconds. Why? Because I don’t add crap too it and all the hardware is integrated. Yes, when I was a pimple faced teenager who fragged monsters on my monitor, I laughed at integrated video and audio, but now the integrated solutions are actually quite decent and if you actually get a discrete video or audio solution and enable all the fancy features that the hardware has to offer, you’re actually screwing yourself over because the extra driver complexity takes up RAM. Skim off that extra software stuff, and you’re left wishing for some features you wish you had.

For example, my sound card has a feature called smart volume management. This feature limits the dynamic range of the sound and is useful when you are listening to music and then all of a sudden someone sends you a message and the alert sound is 10x louder than your music. Without SVM, your ears would get blown out and you’d jump out of your chair. I heard that Windows Vista has this sort of feature, but who wants to use Vista?

Another example is that if I want to play games, sometimes I would like to change the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings in my video card to tradeoff between quality and speed. However, if I want to do that, I have to install some retarded software package that is bloatware.

So what’s my plan? Get a cheap computer, put Linux on it, only install thinkorswim software and nothing else and use that to trade. Am I going to install Pidgin or Skype? No, I don’t want people talking to me when I trade. Anything that does not come with the Linux distro other than thinkorswim, I will not add.

This computer must:

1. Be cheap because as discussed above I don’t need anything fancy and because I am a cheapskate.
2. Have loads of RAM.
3. Be quiet because I hate noise.
4. Consume little power because I am still going to be running my slow main computer at the same time.
5. Boot quickly because I want to trade right after I wake up.
6. Be small because I am going to stack it on top of my existing computer.
7. Have two monitor outputs because I have two monitors.

Here’s what I’ve come up with.

1. It is cheap. $399.94 before rebates, $369.94 after rebates. Shipping is $25.55 so the total would come out to be $395.49.
2. 4 GB of RAM is plenty.
3. The case is quiet.
4. The CPU has a TDP of 45 W. The power supply in the case is also 80 PLUS certified.
5. The HDD is a 16 GB SSD drive and has a blazingly fast sequential read and low latency for reads. It’ll boot in a jiffy. Sure, it’s only 16 GB, but I am only installing Linux and thinkorswim. In accordance with the principle of memory hierarchy, if the storage is to be fast, it has to be small. I’m willing to trade capacity for speed. If I can get thinkorswim to load 10 seconds faster, that’d be awesome.
6. The case is small.
7. The motherboard has two monitor outputs, one DVI and one VGA. I can live with VGA.

I haven’t purchased it yet and I’ll probably think about it for the next few days.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS