Darn it! A 10 year – 13000 cellphone, study to find the correlation between cellphone usage and brain tumor is inconclusive! Can you imagine how tough this might be for the researchers? I’m going to point to this article every time someone says — “more cell phones => more brain tumors”. The link again: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE64F0J420100516

Scribd adopting HTML5 surely means further trouble for Flash! After Steve Jobs’ rationale (read rant) about Flash, and a genuine wide-spread enthusiasm/ adoption for HTML5 (like YouTube) and it’s potential ubiquity; the odds seem to be stacked up against Flash. HTML5 seamlessly integrates into the browser as it is a part of the browser functionality and hence feels much more light-weight than a browser-supplement like Flash.

I guess, it’s time to change the hack that improved our browser experience to a full-fledged solution. I hope, among other things, that HTML5 removes Flash related inconsistencies while watching videos within a browser in Linux.

Back to Jobs and Flash. Anyone remember the Reality Distortion Field?  The stuff he tries to make us believe! :)

The Whats:

I decided to buy a computer. That lead to a lot of research. What’s the point of research if you can’t show off some. Hence follows the post which chronicle the process. I hope its useful…

The Whys:

A five year Thinkpad and a work laptop that doesn’t grant me administrator privileges provides appropriate recipe for a recurring nightmare. My Thinkpad is loaded with state-of-the-art Ubuntu that decides to crash in a state-of-the-art way every time I update to the state-of-the-art version. It also carries Windows XP, which on the other hand gives me no such problem, as it never lets me do anything. My work laptop however is capable of a thing or two, but since it treats me as a lowly user, it constantly acts a HAL.

Also, five years is a long time for an upgrade. Good thing to invest one’s money in.

Requirements:

I wouldn’t call myself a desktop enthusiast and put that category to shame, though I love the new stuff that keeps coming out like the Nehalam processors, too-fast-to-care graphics cards, and the latest rage: SSDs. And of course, like everyone, I appreciate rational response times, the lack of which is the easiest route to insanity.

I was a gamer once. You get the title by wasting inane amounts of time in front of games. Consequently, I realize what difference an upgrade can make. Even though I don’t play games anymore, a moderate gaming-rig is an appealing concept. However, I won’t over-indulge.

Why build yourself?

Apart from the narcissistic,”I just want to have fun”, truth of the matter is, a pre-configured or semi-configurable desktop from Dell or HP or the others are limited in their options. From a cursory examination, it has always seemed to me that, top of the line stuff, ends up costing much more in a branded desktop than in an assembled one.

Also, you have complete freedom to your desktop components. If you feel that your motherboard needs to support USB 3.0 to be future-proof, or you’re crazy about the operational frequency of your RAM (trust me, you’ll be after enough research), or you feel you want a graphics card that is just right, in terms of performance and noise or if you have component discounts via friends or family. You can’t have such freedom in a pre-configured desktop.

However, it goes without saying that you need to love researching these components and enjoy exercising the power of choosing these components to a precise T. Else, without doubt, it will end up being an exasperating experience.

The determining factors in my case, in addition to all of the above, was that I had pre-ordered Windows 7 (no pre-configured desktops, at least the ones I cared about, came without an OS). Talk about being penny-wise pound-foolish.

Research:

Loads and loads. Even though you enter announcing yourself to be a sub-enthusiast, it turns out that there are components catering to all kinds of users. This means that no matter how un-demanding a user you think you are, you’ll eventually have to do a comparable amount of research as the neighborhood enthusiast. Of course, you would not have to deal with water cooling, and other fun stuff that they deal with, but you’ll have to be aware of them so that you know what not to get.

AnandTech and TomsHardware are all you need for authentic reviews of the latest components.In addition to these, user-reviews from NewEgg should complete your search triad. To supplement this, if you are plagued with pesky curiosity, you might frequent Wikipedia as well.

Where to buy from?

Most people seem to buy from NewEgg as opposed to Amazon. Not only do they have a better catalogue of products, but their website is much more catered towards computer products, which is evident from their detailed navigation structure.

However, I am a big fan of Amazon, and they have free shipping with most products, hence turning out to be more cost effective option. An exception however is that sometimes manufacturers have mail-in rebates with specific vendors. For example, a 6GB Corsair RAM had a $20 rebate scheme with NewEgg buys. These are more of the exception though.

A nearby Frys is a great place to check out products, especially if they cost the same as online or if the looks of the part are important, as in the case of a computer case. If the prices are the same, you can save on the turn around time involved in shipping, especially if a product is DOA (Dead On Arrival, in case you’re wondering). The problem however is that their in-store desktop parts catalogue is puny in front of an online vendor.

Please…:

…make a list. Use your hidden table-building skills and create a table somewhere and log your choices down. Its very possible that for some reason your process might be interrupted, as was mine, and that you lose track of all your choices. This is not that bad a problem because the next time you come back to the search, new components might have arrived in the market, but logging the process as to how you arrived at a conclusion might be very useful.

This is especially useful as you’re (most probably) on a budget. If for some reason, you forget why you decided to invest $300 on a graphics card, you might have some explaining to do, to your 4-day later self.

My configuration:

Hardware	Component	Current Price
Processor	i7 930	294
Motherboard	ASUS P6X58D	300
Cooling	Noctua NH-U12	65
Video	ATI 5850	305
Memory	Corsair XMS3	190
Hard Drive / SSD	Intel X-25M 80GB	220
Optical Drive	ASUS DVD Burner	26
Case	CoolerMaster CM 690 II Advanced	100
Power Supply	Corsair 750W	110

The processor:

Really fun to research. Especially because of some hard core competition between Intel and AMD. Unfortunately, the time I began this research, around November of last year, the core I7 chips were out, and the AMD chips were pretty much out of the picture. Regardless of whether you need the power of the i7 at the prices at which Intel sells them, a new desktop buyer is more likely to invest in the most powerful machine his money can buy, to the extent of skewing his budget towards the processor. Also, Intel seems to have delivered a great blow with these chips. Even the cheapest of the I7 900x chips, the i7 930 is very fast compared to older Core 2 Duo chips, and come at a reasonable price.

However,  a catch here is that the i7 900x series are compliant only with a new motherboard that uses a different kind of CPU socket (the LGA 1366). What this means is that your prices shoot up by around 2x, from around $100 to around $200.

I decided to go with the core i7 930 (the successor of the soon-to-be-phased-out i7 920)  because that’s the cheapest of the lot, and performs adequately well in benchmarks I care about and ’seems’ reasonably fast. Also, the motherboard I chose was the LGA 1136 motherboard, ASUS P6X58D, which also supports USB 3.0 and a higher-speed SATA interconnect, just in case.

I didn’t pursue the AMD chips too much, because I don’t have any experience using them. Conveniently enough, as I mentioned before, according to most reviews, the i7 chips prove to be faster than the AMD ones.

However, AMD did come out with a 6-core sub $300 chip, which sounds too good to be true, and reviewed by Anand here. Like most people, I am skeptical of which applications will leverage the 6 cores. But if you’re into obsessing about more cores, this sounds like a great deal.

Motherboard:

As mentioned before, you need the LGA 1366 CPU socket based motherboard. You can get an Intel-manufactured baseline motherboard, or from others like Asus, Gigabyte, etc. I chose the ASUS P6X58D,  the first motherboard to support USB 3.0 and 6Gbps SATA. Its only slightly more expensive than the other 1366 motherboards, and the future-proof technologies sound appealing to me. Currently however, drives aren’t faster than 300 MBps and USB 3.0 devices aren’t out yet (although there are performance improvements with older USB devices as well).

You can read about why you should care about these technologies in a TomsHardware article here. There are many issues worth reading there, and I haven’t understood them completely either, but the upgrade for the price seems worth it from cursory examination.

Graphics Card:

Another popular category to research for. The nVidia – ATI rivalry seems to be working great for the customers. I am as concerned about power consumption and noise as the chip’s performance. It helps however that the because of better and shrinking architectures, they become more palatable to the silence loving kind.

nVidia recently came out with their Fermi chips, the GTX 470 and the GTX 480. These make them the fastest in the market, but are expensive and sparsely available today. I decided to stick instead with one of the ATI Evergreen series, mainly between the 5770 and the 5850. The 5770 is around half the cost of the 5850 (which is around $300), but is 2 inches longer, noisier, and is much less powerful.

I decided to go with the 5850 because it fits within my budget, and has good performance-noise statistics.

Great review of the 5850 here and the 5770 here.

Hard Drive:

I assume you have heard about the faster, non-mechanical, physically smaller, robust Solid State Drives (SSD). It has a few disadvantages, which will fade over time. I urge you to read this technically in-depth article here. They’re promised to be the only update your computer needs if there’s only one you can afford. However, it is a hefty one at that.

As of today, the Intel SSDs are reviewed to be the best in the market, and the 160GB SSD costs around $550. This compared to the Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB, which costs around $80. Shocking…

Typically, people seem to buy the 80GB SSDs for their OS and programs with a supplementary mechanical hard drive. I feel that unless you have a discount, or are rich, or are willing to forgo other upgrades, an SSD is a very heavy buy today. Hopefully, the prices of these beauties will go down in the recent future

Case:

Going by the most popular computer cases in NewEgg, especially the ones considered suitable for gaming rigs, one can conclude that gamers and overclockers have loud choices. Thankfully there are options.

The CoolerMaster CM II Advanced is large enough for this system, has a good air cooling mechanism, has a tool-less setup, and looks good. Simple.

Power Supply:

Boring. You need more than 600W for your PSU. The i7 chips drive a lot of power. So do the graphics cards. I chose the Corsair 750W. Good reviews. Best selling. Doesn’t deserve too much thought.

Memory:

Turned out to be a surprisingly bigger pain than I thought would be. Complicated by the strangely escalating prices of the RAMs. Considering the 64-bit norm nowadays, 4GB is a bare-minimum and 6GB the most affordable within reasonable budgets. Also, the i7 core means that you’ll get a DDR3 RAM.

I decided to buy the Corsair Dominator 1600 MHz 6GB for around $230. However, it seems that it doesn’t really make a darned difference for non-synthetic workloads whether your RAM runs at 1066 MHz or 1600 MHz. So, money saved there.

Cooling:

The biggest pain of them all. I imagined the stock CPU cooler would suffice, but it seems that the i7 chips shoot up temperatures by much.

The choice of a cooling solution is unnecessarily hard. Too many manufacturers in the market, too many variables, scary sizes.

Most of the (air) cooling solutions out there cater to overclockers, but you still need a reasonably good cooling solution for your CPU. The Noctua NH-U12 offers the most silent operation and caters to the normal user. Hence the choice.

Finally:

I added all the items to my Amazon cart. Slept over it. And ended up buying a MacBook Pro.

What?

I realized that the first thing I need is a laptop. One that’s reasonably fast, and allows me to do all the stuff I want it to do. On account of utter hatred towards all PC laptops, except possibly for the Thinkpad, I seemed to have forgotten this. A desktop can wait…

So I decided to give the Macbook Pro a shot, despite all the inertia against Apple. And it does feel pretty darn good, sans PC-to-mac migration woes and sharp edges resulting to cut wrists (only slightly exaggerated). The thing however is an absolute piece of art. Let’s see how it goes…

Moral of the story. Don’t sleep over it. The research was well worth it though :)

As to my pre-ordered Windows 7 CD, it stays unopened. Waiting for it’s time in the future as a collectors item.