The Next Hope PC

[alexander]

So as some of you may know, for the second time i am involved in running the Radio Statler, an Internet radio station that operates throughout the HOPE conference to bring some HOPE to those who could not attend :) This time around, i'm building the phone system for the radio station.

 

So with that, i decided that i needed a new desktop/server to go to the conference with. I have a few desktops kicking around, maybe 7-8 at home, but i wanted something that would be new, something that will be under warranty (this way, if something breaks, they would be under pressure to fix it, because otherwise, they would get a lot of bad publicity at a pretty big con)

 

And i finally did. Its super overkill for the purpose of the project, but, it will also serve as a desktop platform for me :)

 

There were a few companies to choose from, looked at many systems, but the certified Linux systems piece, warranty, second-hand customer service experience, and reasonable pricing, combined with me raving about the company here, for which we were mentioned in their "About", i decided to go with a ZaReason Limbo 7110

 

Specs are waay overkill for a pbx, but it will do a few more things then just being a PBX, and like i said, it will also serve as personal desktop for the next few years:

i7-920 2.66 GHz

9 GB DDR3-1333

500 GB X2

Nvidia 9800GT

1200 watts PSU

 

Went with a 2 year warranty, all came out just shy of $1900 after S&H, which, you know, its not cheap, but it's also not unreasonably expensive (yes yes i went with i7, even though i tend to stick to AMD, but hey, something to be said about 4 hyper-threaded cores (thats 8 parallel instructions)) Opted out of them installing the OS, because i tend to run Xubuntu on my desktops (i like the cleaner interface look, and stripped down window manager)

 

Oh all that said, if someone needs to borrow some of that boxes' awesome processing power to run a computation, i mean i wont volunteer the box for a month of crunching, but we have had various needs for various computations that take a few hours to maybe a day or two to run, at times, so please, if you need to run something like that, i have, hopefully, always been willing to help out, so don't hesitate to ping me :) (note that if you are writing code for such a thing, please make sure that your code will harness the power of multi-core systems, also remember that this will be running on Linux)

 

Anyways, sharing the news, and letting you guys know that i am still around (just busy) and, hopefully we'll have some sort of a discussion springing from all of the above :)

[geko]

Good time to jump to intel with the i7's i think.

 

What's your opinion on mac osx Alex?

 

... gonna google your radio show...

[geko]

Ooh, hackers on planet earth... fascinating stuff there i bet. Will have more of a long nose around after.

[topfer]

Good one. I like it. I appreciate the information you have laid out here.

Thanks for forwarding this useful information.

 

___________________

 

Download Vlc Player

[alexander]

This thing performed flawlessly at HOPE, irreplaceable, well this and the shuttle pc, which with a solid state disk takes longer to post then it does to boot to a login screen...