fdisk Geek: Preface

Like crack, once I get hooked on technology, there’s no turning back to simple cigarette butts. After 1 months of planning, 2 months of bidding on different sites for the cheapest parts and 4 days of painfully rebooting and rebooting, my final system is up and running.

I had tears in my eyes because it felt so free when I played around with the new system. It confirmed my suspicion that my capabilities are hindered by the hardwares I use. Multitasking no longer involves waiting indefinitely for the ram to swap to the hard drive and gaming… oh gaming.

I proceeded to play every game that I used to play and noticed so many bad habits that I have picked up to compensate for the machine. Small things such as predicting the movement of my target due to cpu delay, a few milliseconds delay after I acquired the target to wait for the graphic lag to catch up and a play style that’s focused mainly on dodging instead of accuracy that facilitate survival under extreme lags.

I can now truly appreciate a well made virtual sunrise and wonder in awe at how much effort is put into making it so beautiful. Although I don’t have the skill to create such beauty right now, I can at least see them as a possibility.

This is a system based on tom’s hardware guide’s Pentium D815 overclocking. I choose another motherboard and cpu so I don’t have to spend that extra on liquid cooling. The only thing I did not cheap out on is the RAM since it’s essential to stable overclocking. These figures are with shipping costs included.
– 600 Watt Power supply $52.78

– LG DVD RAM $46

– ATI radeon X800 $87.19

– Intel Pentium D 915 $131.95

– ASRock CONROEXFIRE-ESATA2 ATX LGA775 $136.45

– Corsair Value Select PC2-5300 1GB 2X512MB DDR2-667 $170.21

– Hitachi 160GB Sata HDD x2: $90

– Plastic rubber maid tub: $6
Total value: $720.58

Of course, because I am bidding on ebay, some shit happens and I end up wasting money over it. But overall, it’s still a better system than any one of those you can buy in store at the price of around $700.

– Bid on the wrong item and begged to cancel it: $10

– Bid on the wrong motherboard received it and tested it to find out it’s the wrong motherboard and having to sell it myself: $30

Total value after extra costs: $760.58

All figures in Canadian dollar.
I’ve ran several tests and burn-in program to test system stability and they checked out without problem with dual core 2.8Ghz with 1GB of ram, 256MB of video ram and 320 GB of HDD space. Then I tweaked the OS setup for the best performance possible.
The next step is to bring over clocking into play so I can increase performance by 30%. In theory, the cpu can be overclocked to 3.5Ghz with just a fan and maybe 4Ghz if I push it. The RAM at 6300 instead of 5300. I think there should be someone called “Hardware optimization engineer” in the future to help you tweak the system for the best performance. It took me 3 years working in the industries to understand why disks should be formatted in a certain way and why getting the highest clock rate out of your cpu might impede performance instead. Not for the weak hearted.