Computer, Part II: Hardware

So, here it is.


Its name is Zaknafein. I have a peculiar habit of naming all my electronic devices. It started because I had so many of them and when talking with other geeky and techie friends, I wanted to be able to distinguish them. So, all my electronic devices are named, and usually (with some exceptions) after various fictional male characters from novels. My external hard drive is Bel, my iPhone is Artemis, my computers (rebuild after rebuild) have gone through Sang-Drax, Miles, Gil-galad, and a few others. My Nook is Marius. I've even started doing it to Ben's devices.

So here is Zaknafein, who was amazing in that he started up perfectly on the first try with no issues. There always seems to be a greater than 50% chance that it won't, but it did, and I love not having to troubleshoot weird hardware-level issues.

The lovely case you see is this Antec Nine Hundred, which I've used on a number of builds to great success. It has amazing air-flow and plenty of space inside. I went a little higher-end on the processor than I was intending, but I ended up with this Intel i7 Quad-Core with hyper-threading, so it pretty much has 8 cores instead of 4. I wanted a motherboard with enough heat-sinks, SATA 6Gb and USB3, so I went with this ASUS P7P55D-E. Since what started this all was my hard drive failing, I went with an Enterprise-Grade Western Digital 7200RPM with a 64MB cache for a little more money to get the speed and stability. I picked up 4GB of G-SKILL RAM, which I like for its heatshields and high timing, and plan on picking up 2GB more when it's in stock. To power it all, I got a pretty standard Antec 550W Power Supply. The optical drive is a pretty cheap and standard LG DVD Burner. The only thing I didn't replace is my video card, which is a Nvidia 9800 GT, only about a year old and similar to this - it's still nice enough that I don't really need to replace it for another 6 months to a year.

And that's that. Hopefully I can go another 4 years with few-to-no issues. Let's just say it plays Portal 2 pretty well. And, on that note, I have to get back to Portal 2. For science.