"It what Elf's tribe does..."

A few days ago, I was having lunch with my boss and the graphic artist over at IndieFlix, and I mentioned that I had bought a new computer. The last one I bought was in 2003, an Ars Technica Hot Rod with extra IDE drives. This one is the same, only, well, the 2010 edition: The four-core i5-768 2.8GHz, 4GB of DDR3-133 RAM, an Nvidia GTX 460. Instead of the Antec Solo, I went with the Antec Dark Fleet, which is kinda sexy and very glowly blue.

My boss said she'd never heard of the brand "Ars Technica." I explained that it wasn't a brand, but a geek website (now, very sadly owned by Conde Nast), and they regularly posted the specifications for three computers: A $600 "budget box," a $1200 standard high-performance "Hot Rod" (mine came in less than that because I already had a very nice screen and mouse. Need a wireless keyboard, tho...), and the $10,000+ "God Box".

She said, "You mean it comes in parts? You have to put it together yourself? For that much money, I could buy a machine almost as good and I wouldn't have to put it together afterward."

The graphic artist came to my defense. "No, no, you have it wrong. This is what Elf's tribe does. Every few years they have to build their own machine. That way, they know everything about it."

That's about right.

Building the Perfect Beast

So, I put the Dark Fleet Hot Rod together. It took a blood sacrifice, and some moments of stupidity, as well as panic. The stupidity came when I realized that I'd put the cooling block on without taking off the plastic protector on the copper heat transfer; the panic came when I had trouble getting one of the cooling block's mount keys to turn back into place. But eventually I got it all back together and it seems to be working just fine. The blood sacrifice was my scratching myself on the edge of the case.

It's a very nice case. It has a wiring closet, a channel with clips along one side that lets your cables run from the power supply to the motherboard, and from the various front panel assets to the mother board, without having to have the cables wander back and forth over the motherboard. (You had to see the inside of my last one. It was a rat's nest of cables, mostly due to the eight IDE drives.)

Omaha was upset. "You turned our office into a... a... a man cave! Complete with smell!" Apparently my laboring over a desktop computer for hours on end had made me sweat a lot. I took a shower while the format ran.

But it's running now. It posted the first time without a problem. Except I couldn't install anything-- I'd forgotten to run a power cable to the DVD drive. That was a quick fix, and off we go.

I'm installing Windoze (yes, that OS) on the smaller of the two SATA drives I got for it. I wanted a gaming machine as well as a work station, and Windoze is de riguer for that. After this, I turn on the other drive and install Linux. (Yes, Gentoo. Pbbbpptptptp.) That's why I got the Nvidia card, not the Radeon. Nvidia's drivers are known to work.