Weekend Project - Building two quad-core PCs
Instead of a Friday Rant today I thought I'd kick off what will pan out into a short series of articles.
Tomorrow, If all goes well, I should be taking delivery of all the parts necessary to build two quad-core systems. These systems will be based on the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. These CPUs will have the latest G0 stepping (or SLACR S-Spec code) cores. What this means is that they are the 95W TDP version of the Q6600 as opposed to the earlier steppings which were 105W TDP. What this means is lower power consumption and a greater overclocking potential (not that they really need overclocking).
The Q6600 will be paired with an ASUS motherboard and 4GB or Corsair RAM. On the graphics side I'll be fitting these systems with ATI Radeon HD 2600XT 256MB GGR4 cards. I nearly went for HD2900 cards but just couldn't justify it.
Oh, and to top off the systems, I'm fitting each system with a 150GB, 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor X drives. This drive will hold the OS. Why did I go for it? I just wanna see the platters spinning and the heads moving!
So, what are you doing this weekend?