15 Aug
2008

My New Home Developer Rig

I finally got my new desktop up-and-running and fully installed. Last weekend, me and my dear colleague Sven Erkens (kudos!) assembled the different parts to what became a lean, mean development machine. Here are the specs:

Case Antec Midi Tower Sonata III Life Style ATX 500W
Motherboard MSI P45 Platinum iP45, SATA2 RAID, GLAN, Crossfire
CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66GHz FSB1333 Box
Memory Kingston 2x2GB DDR2 SDRAM PC6400 CL5.0 (x 2)
HD Samsung 640GB SATA300 16MB, HD642JJ (x 2)
CPU Cooler Zalman Processor Cooler CNPS9700 LED AMD & Intel
VGA MSI PCI-e GeForce 9600GT 512MB 2xDVI/HDMI

The 8Gb’s of RAM are really VM friendly. The guest operating systems are really flying now. I’m running Windows Vista x64 and to me it feels much better than the 32 bit variant (I don’t know why, but the 8Gb RAM has probably got something to do with it).

One small catastrophe happened the very next morning: the motherboard of my old PC died on me. Talking about bad luck, huh? I spent quite some time transferring data from the old disks to my new rig. Of course, needless to say that I didn’t have any back-ups so this took me reasonable amount of time.

One more major bummer was the fact that I couldn’t find a 64 bit driver for my WinTV PVR 350 card. I sent an e-mail to Hauppauge support asking for, … well, … support! Some douche bag answered me that they didn’t have a 64 bit driver and that they don’t have any plans for providing one in the near future either. Come on! I mean, this TV-card isn’t even that old. I bought it last year fresh from the store.

Besides some quirks, running a 64 bit system is great although I noticed that there isn’t much 64 bit software available just yet. I hope that this will improve in the next decade or so?

Anyway, I’m leaving the country tomorrow to enjoy a week of peace, rest and happiness in one of the most beautiful countries in the world named Italy. Hopefully I will catch up with some reading. Till next week.

Jan, the tourist

2 thoughts on “My New Home Developer Rig

  1. Congrats on the new rig.

    You may run into some interesting little quirks when running .NET code compiled as AnyCPU, especially if you use PInvokes and the like.

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