*Warning: nerdy post ahead*
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a big fan of change. I am constantly changing everything from my Starbucks drink to my personalized license plate, from my room setup to my computer configuration. When it comes to my computer setup, I'm pretty picky. I never close a window, and I like to have a lot of screen real estate. However, this can choke the average computer. For the past year, I've been working on a Dell Inspiron desktop with 6 gigs of RAM. Those 6 gigs worked for a while, and then I started having to close programs and restart every week or so (a hassle). I started out with two screens and eventually worked my way up to four with a special 4-head card. After I got tired of sluggish performance by running four screens off of a single card, I went down to three screens and then eventually back to two with a different, more powerful video card.Because I didn't want to spend $1200 on a high performance 4-head card and because my stock Dell machine was limited by the amount of physical space in my box and on my motherboard - one PCI-E slot, yesterday I spontaneously decided that I should assemble a computer from scratch. This is despite the fact that I've been out of the PC-building arena since 2002.
My two requirements were: multiple PCI-E slots for multiple video cards and more than 8 gigs of RAM. So yesterday afternoon, I walked into Fry's and started shopping. And a few hours later with a giant hole in my wallet...
I am now content, thanks to an Intel i7 processor, 12 freaking gigs of RAM, and two high performance video cards, each capable of running 3 screens.
