Home Built Graphics Machine

Published by Nick Ladd | Filed under Computer Workstation

The days that my old Dell Inspiron Laptop (5+ years old) would remain my everyday computer we’re numbered well before I decided to purchase a new Nikon D200. Purchasing the new camera really made this necessity in order to quickly and efficiently be able to work with large amounts of RAW camera data, and do the type of post-processing I plan on. The laptop was originally purchased to take with me while I was studying abroad, but for now the power of a desktop and relatively cheap price makes the most sense.

At the time, the laptop’s specs were impressive, but they’re definitely not up to par with even today’s basic home consumer model desktops.

Existing Laptop Specs:

• Processor: 2.2 GHZ P4-M
• RAM: 256 MB
• Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 (64 MB)
• Hard Drive: 40 GB
• Monitor: 15″ LCD

…really, not a bad computer that still should serve me well while I’m on the road. That being said, my new machine should blow my old laptop out of the water.

New Computer Specs:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz LGA 775
• Motherboard: MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel
• RAM: 3GB DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 (Max under 32 bit XP)
• Graphics: EVGA GeForce 7950GT 512MB GDDR3
• Hard drive: (3) SAMSUNG 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s setup in a RAID 5 array (mobo has a built in Raid 5 controller)
• I/O Devices: Floppy Drive, DVDRW Drive, CompactFlash Card Reader (USB 2.0)
• Monitor: SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22″ 2 ms (GTG) DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor

Really, probably a bit of overkill for what I’m doing, but it should work well for some of the 3D modeling and CAD work I do. All the parts were ordered through newegg.com and should be here today (Friday, May 4). I plan to do the build this weekend and should hopefully (fingers crossed that all goes well) be able to post the results Monday, along with a step-by-step guide to the build.