“Blackbox” is my new Windows PC. I ordered the components from newegg and put it together last week. Here’s the breakdown:

• case / power – Antec Solo Black / Seasonic S12 380W
• motherboard - ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA
• cpu / fan – AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (socket 939) / Arctic Alpine 64
• video card – Gigabyte Geforce 7600GS
• ram - 2x 1GB G.SKILL DDR 400
• disk - 2x Samsung SpinPoint 250GB (for RAID 1)

Total cost including tax and shipping ~$850. This is a big upgrade from my old machine, which had a dinky P4 and only 512mb of RAM.

It’s probably not obvious from the above list but this machine is almost totally silent. The Antec Solo case doesn’t have a traditional drive cage. Instead, the drives hang in a nylon mesh to absorb the vibration. The sidewalls of the Solo have a layer of soft acoustic paneling. The Seasonic S12 is an efficient and nearly silent power supply. Diligent readers may recall that my old PC was discarded due to a faulty video card fan. The Gigabyte video card is fanless. Instead of using the stock AMD Athlon cooler, I dropped $12 for the quiet Arctic Alpine. I probably paid a $100 premium to have a quiet PC instead of a noisy one.

Newegg is an amazing store, and I think that they’re quietly blazing a trail toward better online retailing. Their search features are stellar. Once I’d decided to buy an Athlon 64, I could easily perform a search for “socket 939 motherboards < $100″. Most popular items are absolutely stuffed full of customer reviews. For some reason, unlike the uniform “this product is great!” reviews on Amazon, people will actually give a product zero stars if it doesn’t work for them or if they’re unhappy with the service.

I buy a new PC every few years. Whenever I start shopping I obsessively try to get educated about the latest and greatest, but inevitably I don’t have quite enough time or energy to learn everything. I’m somewhat conservative and the products I buy were bleeding edge a year or two earlier. Sometimes it’s hard for me to make an informed decision.

It may sound strange, but at least THREE of the items on my list were picked out almost solely based on newegg customer reviews. I don’t consider myself a sophisticated PC buyer and it’s a relief to know that my G.SKILL ram gets an average of 5 stars across 150 reviews. If you’ve ever had an encounter with cheap ram before you’ll understand why this is important. There’s definitely a cult of newegg out there, and I remember how amazed I was when Joe, one of my Jobster co-workers, showed up to work in a newegg t-shirt.

Those of you who always buy Dell – please stop and go to newegg instead. Putting a PC together is (usually) fun, easy, and educational. That is, unless you have to setup SATA RAID drivers under XP, which can be a complete nightmare. I’ll tell you all about it in my next post.

Updated: added product links for Patrick

My old shoebox Windows PC was emitting a strange whining sound. I cracked open the case and discovered that the cheapo fan on my cheapo video card was dying. Tending toward lazy, I tried buying a new fan. I carefully measured the dimensions and ordered a similar model from newegg. Total cost : $10. I guess in this case I was a little too lazy because when I tried to install my gleaming new fan I discovered that the old fan was mounted directly on the heat sink. There was no way the new fan would fit without major surgery.

Maybe I should bite the bullet and buy a new video card? I could probably get an equivalent model on ebay for around $75. Though my shoebox was only two years old, it’s AGP slot made it a relic from another era. If I bought a new AGP video card, I would probably end up throwing it out along with the shoebox PC.
I decided to “save” the $75 and buy a new PC instead.

Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the wheezing fan was a catalyst for massive change in my life. A new question arose. Was it time to Switch?

Flashback to 1997, the last time I owned a Mac. Back in college I was like a mini John Sculley. I pushed Monaco and BBEdit on all my disinterested friends. I released amateurish Macintosh freeware. I hacked AfterDark and learned how to crack with MacsBug. But even good things must come to an end. Upon graduation I put away my childish things and moved entirely to the lucrative, disorganized world of Windows and POSIX variants.

Several years passed. Exciting, productive, disorganized years on XP and Linux boxes. Recently, I’ve jealously watched while one friend after another loudly switched to MacOS, with their shiny screens and bizarre motion sensor hacks. They flaunt their beautiful machines at every opportunity. It’s very tempting, especially for an old school Mac fiend like your’s truly.

So why won’t I switch? Let me enumerate a few good reasons:

Half-Life 2 (and Episode 1-N)
Oblivion
Chronicles of Riddick
etc.

Future posts will detail my new rig and provide helpful hints to make Windows development bearable.

My name is Adam Doppelt. I am a software developer by trade, but I think of myself as a serial entrepreneur. This blog is a repository for random thoughts bouncing around my brain. Areas of interest include software development, startups and games.

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amd@gurge.com