New Hardware

I’m pretty excited. For many, many years I always had a few generations of PCs kicking about. Which was just great for playing with new operating system releases and goofing around. But at some point we got fed up with the mess of parts and the fan noise, and got rid of all the extra computers. I picked up a wee little Soltek Qbic 3401M small form factor (SFF) box and it’s been a good setup for us. Except that it’s hard to explain to my wife “sorry, but you can’t use the computer right now - I’m installing the latest Solaris Express release!”. I also need that box running in case I need to actually do some work that requires Windows, like, say, running Visio or testing a VPN install. So the end result is that I just haven’t been doing much OS toying lately. And I miss it.

So it was time to get another box. I was going to pick up a cheap PC tower and stick it in the garage, but realised that’s not a very convenient setup. The SFF route has been great so far, so I decided I’d get another. Now, the Soltek has been a great little machine. Although adding the 6600GT video card did increase its operating noise level, without the big XFX inside it’s been nice and quiet, attractive, and was a great value. So I could have just picked up another one. Right?

I am a geek afterall, which means I was seduced by the power of newer, faster, better, shinnier hardware.

The end result is that a spiffy new Shuttle SD31P is now sitting here in front of me. It uses the brand new Intel 945G chipset, so it takes the newer LGA775 socket CPUs like the 600 series or the dual core Pentium D, and uses DDR2 RAM. You get a lot of cool stuff compared to the Soltek like a builtin Creative 7.1 audio chip, a Broadcom PCIe-connected gigabit port, 3 internal SATA ports, and an external hot-plug SATA on the back! Wow! You also get a much more sophisticated cooling system that uses heat pipes, cooling zones, and air ducts. The overall engineering of the Shuttle is definitely a step above my Soltek. It’s a pretty smokin’ little box. I would have preferred the AMD version, the SN26P since I think AMD has the best CPUs out there right now, but I got this particular Shuttle from a friend who reviews PC hardware. So I got it for a great price. I’ll probably shop around for a CPU, HD, and RAM this weekend and hopefully get it up and running soon.

The plan is that I’ll transition the Qbic into my test box and build the new Shuttle up as the main PC.

Ahhh. New hardware. Nothin’ quite like it.