Vista/Gaming Box, Part 1

myDigitechnician has received "Part 1" of the Vista/Gaming computer it is building; the Seagate 320 GB hard drive showed up courtesy of FedEx!

myDigitechnician is building the Vista/Gaming box to be able to work with its clients who buy or upgrade to Vista in 2007 and to have a full-featured "portable" computer for gaming and other higher end uses.

The currently planned components of this computer are:

• AMD processor, Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2 GHz HT 2 x 512 KB L2 cache Socket AM2 Dual Core
• Asus Motherboard, M2NPV-VM Socket AM2 nVIDIA GeForce 6150 Micro ATX
• mushkin RAM, Enhanced Performance 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Unbuffered DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel kit System
• nVIDIA Video Card, 3D Fuzion 3DFR76256GTSINE Geforce 7600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
• Seagate HD, Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
• Aspire Case, X-QPACK-NW-BK/420 Black Aluminum 1.0 w/ ABS plastic front panel MicroATX Desktop Computer Case ATX 420W Power Supply
• Pioneer DVD burner, 16X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 16X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 16X DVD-ROM 5X DVD-RAM DVD-ROM 40X CD-R 32X CD-RW 40X CD-ROM 2M Cache ATAPI 16X DVD±R DVD Burner With 5X DVD-RAM Read (Wow! Is that a lot of numbers, or what? They should put a model number on that...)

The Seagate 320 GB HD was on sale for $95, with no rebates, so that had to be ordered. Prices for the other components will be monitored over the next few weeks, as well as prices for alternate parts that are acceptable. The remainder of the parts will likely be purchased prior to BarCampMilwaukee, since it would be nice to either build the system at BarCampMilwaukee as one of the sessions, or have the completed system at the event to game, to demo Second Life and to run Vista.

If you'd recommend any alternate parts, please submit a comment or email us. We're always looking for good ideas!

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