No I am not having a child!!! I am talking about my "digital" family.

I recently put together a new system for home development and gaming use. here's the quick spec:

• Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz Q6600 Processor
• 4GB Corsair PC6400 RAM (4-4-4-12)
• EVGA NVIDIA 680i SLI Motherboard
• 2x Western Digital 320GB SATA/3GBs Hard Drives w/16MB Cache
• XFX NVIDIA 8600GT 512MB DDR3 RAM Video Card
• SAMSUNG 16X SATA DVD+/-R/W CD-R/W Drive w/LightScribe
• ANTEC Sonata III case w/500W power supply

All of this from newegg.com for just about a $1000 after mail in rebates and I am pretty happy with what I ended up with.

The CPU is very impressive. It sports 4 cores with 32KB+32KB L1 Cache and 2 x 2MB L2 Cache on an 1066MHz FSB. The amount of cache is very impressive especially when compared to some of the older Extreme edition processors that still cost more than this CPU. I am running Vista Ultimate x64 and the CPU usage is typically under 15%. The great thing abut this processor is that even if one core spikes up, it only amounts to 25% of the total processing power. I have tried a few games on it so far and even those have not utilized the multiple cores. I can't wait to try something that really pushes the multiple cores on it. I did apparently end up with the older B3 stepping that runs a bit hotter and is harder to overclock, but the newer G0's provide only slight advantage.

My dev box at work has 4GB of RAM and I've always been happy with the speed, so it was a no-brainer for me to go with 4 at home. It's almost strange, however, to have a machine with no server components (no IIS yet, no SQL Server, etc) running on it. It almost feels too fast!!! (ALMOST since there is actually no such thing)

The XFX 8600GT video card was a good balance between price and performance. It sports 512MB of DDR3 RAM and has fulls support for DirectX10 all for a $130. And it came with a copy of Company of Heroes which is a great RTS game.

I am also finally running in RAID. I went with mirroring of the two 320GB drives into a single 320GB partition. Seeing how this purchase was prompted by the recent near-failure of an HD in my laptop (it still doesn't boot, and it's not dead and a whole another story) I got so fed up with loosing data, RAID was an absolute requirement. It's also quite speedy. I guess this is in a way a hybrid raid implementation, but it's not software and is implemented by the motherboard. The SAMSUNG drive adds all the CD/DVD burning capabilities i could ever desire (no thanks to the HD format wars for now...). Note: 100% SATA system here; no IDE!!

All of this is plugged into the EVGA motherboard running the NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset with lots of nice features. My only complaint is lack of one extra set of USB ports. The case has 2 in the front, and the motherboard only has one more plug-in left for the rear expansion slot panel. I guess it was designed for a case with no USB plugs, which I would think leaves out majority of the cases today. It does have 4 more USB ports on the rear panel of the motherboard itself, so I've got plenty, but I ended up with 2 cold ports on the rear expansion slot.

ANTEC is known for having some of the quietest cases around and Sonata III proves to be no exception. The loudest fan in the system is a small fan on the motherboard cooling the NVIDIA chip. The case is very light and had plenty of room for all of the components.

Final Performance Scores:

So Vista seems pretty happy. As am I!!! I can now work, develop and play at full speed at home. Once I get to overclocking I'll post the new scores.

Now I just have to figure out how I'm going to solve the problem of running a home server seeing how my server laptop no longer boots.

I run Vista Ultimate on a Dimension XPS at home. As good as the machine was 3 years ago when I got it, 1 Gig of RAM is just not cutting it anymore. With another Gig still costing over a $100, I decided to try the poor man's solution. I went out and got a $20 1Gig USB memory stick and plugged it into the PC.

Vista includes a feature called ReadyBoost. There have been plenty of posts about it, but I wanted to point out that it really does work. I was doing some tinkering with the XNA Framework (more on that later) and having a couple of Visual Studio Express instances running along with 3D Studio MAX instance and an IE window or 2 (or 5) was taking its tall on the system.

With the memory stick in and configured to be used for ReadyBoost, the system is SIGNIFICANTLY more responsive. Switching between windows is now practically instantaneous and launching a new IE window doesn't take a good portion of 30 seconds anymore. Another noticable thing is the responsiveness of the system when I sit back down in front of it after not suing it for a day. It's common for the computer to "wake up" for a few minutes when this happens, but ReadyBoost (which is essentially a cache for the swap file) makes that a non-issue.

Eventually I will add another Gig of RAM to that box which will probably reduce the effectiveness of the ReadyBoost cache. It would be interesting to see how much the extra RAM will help vs. ReadyBoost...

Couple of notes about ReadyBoost:

• External Memory readers are not supported, so you can't plug an SD card into your printer. But a built-in SD reader (as some laptops have now-a-days) can work. The tell tale sign is if your reader comes up as an empty drive in the OS when there is no card in it, it will not work.
• The memory has to be fast enough. This is arbitrary and most new USB sticks should work, but I have had an older 256MB stick fail to pass the speed test. Here are some more facts...

Overall: ReadyBoost rocks and, unless you have 2+ Gigs of RAM, it is totally worth it.