Black Box
2006-04-05 10:23 CET
A new machine is up running! It's black, it's beautiful and fairly powerful. Certainly a lot more powerful than I've been used to lately. I'll just do away with the specs right away:
- Asus A8N-SLI SE motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64bit x2 3800+
- 1GB DDR RAM
- Asus GeForce EN7600GT dual DVI
- WD 250GB 16MB cache SATA2 HD
- Some black DVD thingie
- ThermalTake Soprano Case
It's been up and running for a few days now, and I'm a little surprised at my experience thus far. I'm not so much awed by the speed and efficiency of this new box that I'm annoyed by how slow my other boxes have become! Yes, the oxes I've been rather happy with up until now. OK, I'll admit I did notice the diference the first couple of days. It was rather like switching from a glider plane to a fighter jet. But as the hours have passed I'm now expecting this kind of power from my poor spare-parts box ...
Speaking of fighter jets I guess I might mention what little troubles are still present. With it's three case fans, two PSU fans, the graphics card fan, chipset fan and CPU fan, it will make it's presence heard. This will of course get a lot better once I'v engaged some form of fan control but as of yet, it's pretty noisy.
Another problem is that nVidia have yet to release Linux drivers for the graphics card. Thus I still don't have 3D acceleration. After a couple of days of both my nephew, Yrjan, and myself looking, he stumbled across a driver that at least allowed me to change the refresh rate. Thank you, Yrjan! I just hope nVidia will be releasing something soon.
Oh, there was just one other thing ... Could someone please, please fix it so that the headset and microphone inputs on the top of the case has one plug, just one, not seven or nine, but one plug that fits neatly onto the 9 pin connector on the motherboard?! I've already gotten it wrong two times now, and the good people at Asus must have a great time thinking about the placement of the connector. I'd like to shake the hand of the evil genius who came up with that.
As I'm now blessed with a 64bit CPU it's only natural that I'm running a 64bit OS. I suppose that what on the installation disc was called Ubuntu 64bit Breezy Badger has now magically been transformed into Kubunu 64bit Dapper Drake BETA. I've come to prefer KDE over Gnome although I'm not entirely sure just why. Probably just that KDE seems the best choice for making laser fitted sharks. The 64 bit architecture could potentially pose a few problems though. Although I got Opera to work withouth problems, Flash is a different matter. It doesn't wish to run in a 64bit enviroment. So far I've found the Flash-less experience quite comfortable but I suppose there could come a day when I wish to view some silly flash movie or whatever. Other than that I have yet to encounter any serious problems so far. I guess I'm about to be hit by some majorly important 32bit app that has escaped my mind, and will get it revenge through refusing to work.
All in all it's a wonderful machine running a wonderful OS,and it will only get better as drivers and plugs fall into place.
I'll add a few pics to this article when I remember to get them off my camera. Seems I've been a little preoccupied lately ... :)
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