Oh Brave New World that has such...

Computers!! My new Velocity Micro PC came the other day, and WOW. Let's just say that when you go from a 1.2 Gh P4 to a 3000+ AMD 64, you, uh, notice the difference. I think I'll just indulge myself tonight and talk about this beauty.

First of all, I'm calling it "Honey Bun". You know, a hundred and one, pounds of fun, that's my little honey bun, get a load of honey bun tonight. Actually, she only weighs 30 pounds, tops, but with the monitor and printer it could come to a hundred and one.

The buying process couldn't have been better. Faster, certainly, but not better. It took about 3+ weeks for Velocity Micro to take my money, order the parts, build it, test it, and ship it. What's nice is that all along the way they send you emails updating the status. They let you know when the parts have been ordered, when they arrive, when they've been sent to "staging", etc..., and it's really kind of exciting. Every few days you get this little progress report which, of course, builds the anticipation. I thought it would have been kind of cool if they could have attached little sonograms to the emails so that you could see the thing sort of growing and taking shape. You know, there's the hard drive, there's the mobo, oh and look, you can see it's little led's wiggle.

Anyways, I picked it up at the UPS office, unpacked it, plugged it in, and darned if the thing didn't fire right up. It even included everything they said it would with no substitutions. As an added bonus (I guess) they put red glow lights in the case, although I don't remember those being quoted in the original spec. It's ok, though, they're kinda cool, and they make it look fancy and modern. And if I can give myself a little pat on the back, it only took me 30 minutes, at most, from the time I fired it up to the the time I had her on the network, with internet access and email, with the printer printing and the pda syncing, and with all of my old email and financial data transferred over. The last time I got a new computer it took me all night to figure out how to do all that. Damn, I must be a geek.

And did I say this thing was fast. Well it is, very fast. Being the miserly bastard that I am, I always try to buy about 2 or 3 notches below the bleeding edge, and this machine fits the bill perfectly. It's not high-end, but it's not mid-range either. Sort of high mid-range or low high-end, with lot's of room to expand in the future. The day after I bought the machine AMD announced that the 3700+ Athlon 64 would be the last in the line and then they would be phasing out socket 754. I don't have a problem with that at all. I think an upgrade from a 3000+ to a 3700+ would be a pretty significant boost in processing power, and if the prices on the 3700+ ever come down (which they should eventually) then I'll be sitting pretty. Meanwhile, I've got a pretty good little system to play with.

It's also got a 200 gig hardrive, which I'll be augmenting sometime down the road. I'd like to add another 400 gigs or so, but I can wait for the prices to come down on those. The graphics card is a GeForce 5700LE, certainly not the fastest card out there, but suprisingly capable. The system shipped with a game called Far Cry, and the graphics are just stunning. To tell the truth I wasn't expecting to get performance this good from the card, and I think I should be able to hold off until Xmas time before I think about upgrading. By then, there's a good chance that the ATI 9800XT's will be under $200, or under $150 maybe. On the other hand, I might just stick with this card if it continues to impress the way it has so far. We'll see. I only ordered 512 MB of ram and I'm sure I'll be upgrading that too.

I haven't really had a chance to figure out the rest of the system yet. I took a look at the BIOS and damn near had a nervous breakdown. Page after page after page - I didn't know there were that many settings you could make on a computer! Well, I suppose I'll have to read the manual (man, I hate having to read the manual). It's also got some kind of Microsft keyboard with all kinds of buttons and doohickies, and I doubt I'll ever use half of them. Still kind of cool though. And of course, there's also a bunch of pre-installed video editing software which seems to be all the rage these days. I'm not really into video editing, but it'll be fun to play with. So much to learn and so little time...

So here we are, me and my little Honey Bun. One thing I thought I would like but I'm not so sure about now is the temperature readouts and speed-adjustable fans. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it makes me nervous watching the temperatures go up and down. I keep getting this feeling that I'm gonna fry the thing any second, although it runs well within the spec. In fact, it's never gotten any hotter than 37 degrees celsius, but I wonder if I wouldn't be better if I just didn't know. It just makes me nervous.