For the past 7 years or so, I've been chugging along with a Pentium II machine cruising at a "speedy" 266Mhz. Yeah.....right. ;-) Seriously, it's not really that slow. It just proves having a good memory, storage and video subsystem can help boost overall system performance. With 320MB SDRAM on board, a good Leadtek AGP video card, a 7200RPM Seagate drive, it "feels" just as fast as some of the newer generation machines with under-equipped subsystems.
Today, I took delivery of my first AMD desktop machine (after having owned 4 Intel desktops) The one I got is an Athlon 64 3000+. Not really the high-end one, but just enough to get me into 64-bit computing. The motherboard hosts the aging but proven 754-socket and is AGP only i.e. it doesn't come with PCI Express. I'm not a gamer, or rather, I'm just a casual gamer; so, I don't really care much about frame rates. 8X AGP does fine for me.
For the video card, I chose an ATI Radeon 9550-based card -- pretty much an entry-level DirectX9 card with cool multi-monitor support. For the hard drive, I've decided to break away from the tradition of using Seagate drives and move on to something fresh. Guess what? It's a Samsung SATA drive! Err...I gave a blank look at the sales person who recommended me this drive. What? Samsung makes hard drives too? Ah...now I remember. They have been in this business for quite a while but have kept a low profile. Samsung is not the fastest performing drives but is one of the coolest and quietest around. To be continued...
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