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Putting together three systems for the office - one for me, one for Lahey, and one for either the new intern or employee coming into Station Four. While I love geeking out and putting systems together, I haven’t had a whole lot of lead time (intern and employee starting soon). These are my thoughts so far.

My System

Obviously needs to be the best of the three… for work related stuffs, sure. Anyway, mostly going to be loading up Photoshop CS4, Visual Studio, and about a trillion other programs that I’m jumping between whilst playing Portal and Minesweeper with my third 12″ monitor that sits on my lap.

CPU/Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 - 2.83GHz 12MB L2 Cache (link): Seems to be best price/performance point for the range I’m looking at

ASUS P5Q Premium (link): Part that I really wish I had more time to do research on. Mobo on my current system is an Asus P5B Deluxe Wi-fi and it’s pretty decent.

Bundle cost: $339.98 - $30 (mail-in rebate) = $309.98

Memory

Corsair XMS 2×2GB DDR2 800. Been buying this stuff for years. Prices have skyrockets from around $20 to $50 after a $25 mail-in rebate. Have an extra 2GB stick laying around so I can throw 6GB in the new system.

$75 - $25 = $50

Hard Drive

Western Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA (link): Should probably get two and throw them in a RAID0 but I’m pushing budget as is anyway and can always do it later.

$69.99

Video Card

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4770 512MB (link): As the only computer that is likely to play any games I got a little more powerful card.

DVD-RW

SAMSUNG DVD+R+RW-R-ROM-WHOCARES: throw a dart, all around the same price and features.

$30

Case

Undecided, though this will probably be the only system that I’ll get the case and power supply separately. Likely get something from Antec.

~$100

OS

Windows Vista 64-bit Business w/ upgrade to Windows 7: Finally getting rid of the 4GB (or ~3.2GB really) cap by going with 64-bit, allowing to take advantage of the quad-core.

$150

Total

Coming out to around $814. I’ll use the stock fans/heatsinks to start, upgrade when I decide to overclock more than a little.

The Other Systems

Little scaled back, but still a whole lot of power for the price.

CPU/Motherboard

Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz 6MB L2 Cache (link): Step down from the 9550 but still has more than 1MB of L2 per core that the models below it have.

ASUS P5Q Premium. Same board as above. Was looking at the P5E this morning, highly reviewed, but apparently newegg deactivated the product in the last few hours. Was hoping for more cost saving on the CPU/MB might have to revisit this.

Bundle cost: $309.98 - $30 (mail-in rebate) = $279.98

Memory

Corsair XMS 2×2GB DDR2 800: Same, probably have a few 1GB cards laying around even so we could upgrade later.

$75 - $25 = $50

Hard Drive

Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA : slightly smaller drive with 16MB cache because Lahey says “Why do we need all that space when we put everything on the server”… porn Lahey.. secret secret porn.

$56

Video Card

GIGABYTE Radeon HD 4350 512MB 64-bit (link : Bit less powerful than the 4770 but these aren’t gaming machines and this should be more than enough and are super cheap with the mail-in rebate.

$34.00 - $15.00 = $19.99

DVD-RW

SAMSUNG DVD+R+RW-R-ROM-WHOCARES: Same thing, who cares.

$30

Case

Undecided, probably have them pick a case/PSU under $100 with ~400 watts+

~$100

OS

Windows Vista 64-bit Business w/ upgrade to Windows 7: Same.

$150

Total

Coming in at around $686, which is an awesome price for a beast of a workplace system.