So I’ve decided to hold off on buying a new PC for the foreseeable future. Have been wanting to put together a new gaming box with a semi-current graphics card so that I could play some games. My old Athlon box, polonius, is a bit long in the tooth, and my notebook, laertes, just doesn’t quite cut it on everything. My Dell box, horatio, is fairly current (P4/2.4GHz) from the clunky video (GeForce 4 MX), but until recently I enjoyed using it exclusively as an always-on Linux box. Since the mini is treating me so well in most of the areas I relied on Linux for, I recently decided to set horatio up as a dual-boot WinXP/Linux box with a decent video card and hold out for buying a new box until I find something that really warrants it.
Picked up an ATI Radeon 9600XT at a price I could live with (quite a bit cheaper than an AGP GeForce 6600GT, and seeing as the box is a few years old anyway I figured it was the better choice). Seems pretty slick so far. Dual-head with one card in WinXP (had been using the GeForce4MX in combination with an old PCI Matrox Millenium in Linux… remains to be seen if I can get dual-head working on the Radeon in Linux), should be peppy enough to game at higher than VGA resolution, and I’m working on shifting some of my other parts to it (250GB HDD, DVD burner, TV tuner). Should make a nice little box when the dust settles. Much quieter than the old Athlon box and should kick out less heat too. Yay for progress (to think I rigged up a RAID of 2 drives to get 40GB back when I set that thing up… now I’ve got more than 5 times that storage in one drive). I’ve got XP installed at this point and am working on setting up Fedora Core 3 (since we’ve moved most of our boxes to that at work… should make working more pleasant since I’m no longer stuck with RedHat 7.3).
