computer

over the past couple of  years I nearly exclusively worked on laptops and I'm quite sure I didn't own a private computer since 2002 or so.

So I thought it was time to build a computer again and let me say a lot of stuff changed. Specially size wise. I used to build my own pc's and learned this when I was around 9 years old. While helping out my dad. Well mostly when I did not accidentally put something together in the wrong way and blew up a motherboard or power supply. I guess it's called learning by doing?

So after I was researching the current pc architectures for a couple of weeks, I came to the conclusion that I need to know what I want todo with it first.

So let's see:

1. fast enough to run virtual machines
2. fast enough to play any game now or in 2-3 years
3. able to support at least 2-3 monitors. After all I want to use it to work from home
4. needs to pay for itself, with something called bit mining. So it needs excellent graphic card(s)
5. lot's of memory, so I can work on it
6. possible to use for photography and to be able to support 20-30MP files, which will come someday.

So after I looked at this, it was obvious it's going to be rather pricey. But thank's to bitcoin mining, I should be able to recover some, if not all of my investment over the next year to two. So far the GPU mining made me a bit over 500$, so both graphic cards are already paid off.

What did I end up with?

• 4x1TB Hard drives as Raid10, I love my data...
• 1x128GB SSD to host virtual machines
• 16 GB Ram
• 1x i5 quad core cpu running at 4.5GHz
• 2x6900 AMD Radeon graphic cards, not necessarily, but I always wanted to have dual graphic cards...
• to many coolers, to keep this system running stable

I am rather happy with the performance it creates and the possibilities it opens up. Now I just need to find the time todo some GPU based calculation's with openCL. It did take 4 month till I finally got all the parts together and everything up and running.

But the size of modern graphic card's is slightly disturbing. As reference there is an iPad in the picture.

yes one graphic card is heavier and longer than an iPad2...