there's a new beast in town

It's a bit after one in the morning as I write this. Since yesterday evening I've been setting up my new computer.

The result: It all works so far.

I was happiest when I first saw the coolant fan spin up on the Intel Core 2 Duo. I knew then that both the processor and the motherboard were in good shape and not fried. 🙂

Okay, now I have to explain that.

Years ago when I built my first PC, I fried the motherboard and the processor on first boot. Yes, me, the guy who's supposed to be a mental giant on computers. How could I tell it was fried? From the stench of failure, i.e. a burnt processor. If you've never smelled the odor of a burnt proc, I don't recommend that you do. It's fairly nasty.

So anyway, the whole thing is working. I have the majority of my apps installed in this thing, but I'm not done just yet because there are still several to go.

However, as far as the hardware goes, here's what I'm now enjoying:

Accurate color.

For some reason, the Albatron vid card, while good, never displayed color correctly. I would have to set my DVD player to "bright" mode just to show movies correctly. With the EVGA I have now I can properly set it to "theater" and it looks near-perfect. Star Wars Episode III (a great test for any video card) looks awesome.

Super-silent hard drive.

This is the first hard drive I've ever used where I literally cannot hear it. This is a good thing, and no, I'm not going deaf. The Western Digital SATA drive is definitely doing the job.

Smooth apps

Okay, here's my initial impression of the Intel Core 2 Duo. It's not that I'm necessarily running apps faster. Granted, they do execute better and a little quicker. The thing I really notice is that I can do more. I have a DVD playing in another window as I write this. Previously, if I was typing anything in a window while a DVD was playing, the video would chop up here and there. Very annoying. Right now I have no chop whatsoever - and that's cool.

Put it this way: I can be doing just about anything (web browsing, blogging, chatting, etc), have a separate DVD playing in a window next to whatever I'm doing and not worry about whether the computer can handle it.

Later on today after some sleep I'm going to put this beast to the test and do some DVD video rendering. That's what I got this whole setup for to begin with.

We'll see if the Duo Core can live up to its name. 🙂