Wanna go to a computer show?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

> > I'm curious as to what is a hellafastmegasystem these days.  
> 
> I was just joking.  I'm not looking to melt a hole in the floor

Topoftheline is, as always, expensive, but dollars spent on new
hardware today can be very impressive.

A coworker just put together a personal reasonablyfastsystem (a cheap
MSI everything board, 512MB PC133 RAM, dual 60 GB RAID 1ed Maxtor
drives, Athlon XP 1800+ CPU) and a big cross development tool chain
build goes twice as fast as his Athlon 1.1 GHz work machine.  And now
that I think about it, it probably the fastest computer I have ever
used.  (I have used far more expensive computers in the past but they
were all far enough in the past to be slower than this one.)

Though he is having some unfortunate install problems that I think are
a faulty disk, he can still get it in a working state.  It isn't
particularly noisy, and it doesn't get hot.

OK, if he put a honkin' fast video board in there it would get hotter.
If he were running an expensive quad SMP machine it would get hotter.
But this sweet-spot system, with a nice LCD display, was under $1,000
delivered (though in pieces).  

I have built the same with less RAM and slower CPU (and not fancy
display).  Works well.  A lot of computrons for the buck.


-kb