I’ve finally scraped together the moolah for a new, modern computer. Gabriel, my current machine, has served me well for entirely too many years. He’s an Intel Celeron 300, overclocked to 450 MHz. A stellar machine for his time (more than five years ago, if I remember correctly), he’s fallen a bit behind the curve. The most modern piece of Gabriel is the 512 MB of RAM he uses, and even that seems inadequate when combined with the slow processor and NVIDIA Riva TNT2. I played Max Payne three times on Gabriel, but it was a progressively more painful experience each time, and not because I cranked up the difficulty level each time through.
Gabriel II, currently on order from Newegg.com, will be a sleek little machine, with emphasis on little. I’ve chosen to build him in a Shuttle SS51G SFF case, so he’ll be roughly a fifth the size of Gabriel, who occupies an ATX mid-tower case. I don’t need space for a half dozen PCI peripherals when I’ve got built-in USB 2.0, and a single 80 GB hard drive is perfectly fine for a general use machine that will see use in equal parts as a gaming platform, software development environment, artist’s paintbox, and ridiculously over-powered Web browser. 2.53 GHz isn’t the actual top end of PC processing power right now, but it’s going to seem infinitely faster than my current machine, particularly when coupled with an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro.
This Newegg wishlist contains a complete rundown of what will go into Gabriel II, sans the legacy internal Zip 100 drive that I’ll steal from Gabriel. I’m frankly amazed that I can put together a machine of this magnitude (including a 19-inch monitor and 4” × 5” Wacom art tablet) for under US$1500. When I started seriously looking for parts for Gabriel II back in December 2002, this machine was more in the neighborhood of US$2500. I’ll try my best not to think about how much more machine I could get for this money in another five months; that way lies madness. Moore’s Law is not kind to sanity.
The tough part now is waiting for all the parts to arrive. I want to fast-forward a week so I can start using my new machine now. I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas to come.
