Back in the middle of January, early this year, I started talking about how I got to my current situation in building desktops for myself. This started in the relatively ancient time of the 386 and I ended at the original Pentium.
At this point, I was at a crossroads. I had succumbed to the Best Buy glitz and bought a really nice Toshiba Infinia media desktop computer, then proceeded on to it's contemporary IBM Aptiva "Stealth", after learning that buying "new" from the Best Buys of the world is like getting onto the treadmill of losing propositions.
After a pretty fair amount of contemplation, I arrived at my current philosophy. I call it the "generic box", "do-it-yourselfer" computing stage.
This may not have been the exact model, but it's pretty darned close. I decided to find a relatively attractive, but innocuous case that would become home to multiple motherboards over it's lifespan. It became home to the bang vs. buck king of that era; the AMD processors. First there was a K6-II/400, then I moved on to the "Barton" core'd Athlon XP, which is where I stayed for a very long time.
During this time, I used Abit or Tyan boards which were generally slightly less expensive than Asus, but "feature rich" and offered excellent speed for the dollar. This case spent just about as much time with the cover off than on since I was constantly tinkering with it. At this point, I also learned the joys of picking up "surplus'd" monitors, at one point, patching together my very own "Stan-finity" 3 monitor setup long before AMD made it popular. I used a SGI 1600SW LCD (yes the famous one from their graphic workstations) flanked by a pair of Apple Mac CRT Studio Displays. This was around 2000/1, so I was an oddity of that time. This state of affairs when on happily for some time till we moved across the Northern part of Texas from the Panhandle to the Dallas area. However, before we moved, I learned a few things. For one thing, I certainly didn't need to buy new from a retailer ever again. But secondly, and maybe more importantly, there were trends in the market and if you knew what they were.... money could be made from that knowledge.
Around 2000/2001, LCDs were HOT!!! And special high-end ones (even ones that had been save from the dumpster), sometimes sold for something like $700. Yup, I sold that 1600SW and turned it into parts which became our huge media center, which still sits in our living room. So for a while, I limped along with my giant 20" CRT Mac Studio Displays and the old "Barton", happily oblivious of the butt-kicking that Intel was unleashing on AMD which is still going on today. You see, we had been sucked in by the cult of the laptop! So, after the move, that computer sat out in the garage for years till I had a student who wanted it. I took it apart, and over the course of the next month or so; I taught him how to build a computer.
As we move forward (and those who have read this blog from it's beginning will remember this timeframe), I became more and more involved with digital photography. This meant the need for; more storage, more muscle, more devices..... pretty much more everything that normal laptops don't do well. Of course, you can do a "workstation" laptop, but those are big bucks! So, the "need"/desire to build an expandable/rebuildable desktop returned to my life. That year's "generic black box"? The Cooler Master 590. As you can see, it's not something that calls a lot of attention to itself, while at the same time, offered the ability to be almost infinitely configurable. Over the last several years, it has seen 3 motherboards (Gigabyte GA-43, then 45s), 3 processors (Intel E8400, Q6600, and now the Q9550), Several drives ranging from different SSDs to mechanical drives of various size and speed. Anyway, you get the idea. This thing is what every tinker needs. The inconspicuous black box that serves as the computer that does everything and starts every time.
In fact, I was so pleased with it, that there's an older Centurion 5 sitting right next to it which houses my "XP" system that I use to trouble shoot old client machines. It doesn't have a lot in it; just a GA-41M board with a low-end C2D processor, some left over RAM and hard drive. But it does a job and it basically cost nothing being made up of leftover and obsolete parts.
But these cases and the concept is kind of like this old DeLorean.... just the shell that houses the guts of future technology. Part 3: Coming to a desk near you.
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